Bad. Session.

I want to talk about my flair tonight¹: I had a bad session.

I consider myself a journeyman Game Master, one with a lot left to learn about our craft. I have run two longish campaigns so far, and many one shots in a few different dungeon crawly RPGs. My first effort was a 24 session online 5e campaign that crashed and burned when a couple players got bored--totally fair, I was beyond stressed at work and thought DMing required writing half a novel for backstory. My second long 5e campaign, in its 25th month now and 68th session, has gone much better (a backstory of <2 pages)

But tonight? Tonight it was boring. All the excitement and tension wasn't there, the beats were off. There were good moments--a teleport trap, the death of a ghost shark, a good trick by an enemy. But the dungeon I ran was very linear in design², in a way I missed, so searching became, for half an hour, "figure out what the DM is thinking".³ They were never scared, only frustrated when their superhero powers didn't immediately kill the baddies.

So yeah, flat. Hard to feel great about--I just didn't feel the magic tonight, in prep or at the table. I felt...in a rut. Attacking in similar ways, using the same tactics and tricks, not exciting my players. I wanted to resolve odd situations using the fiction; 5e has a rule for nearly everything. Is it this sclerotic 5e system that's the problem? Is it me, being too nice a DM and not being focused enough on the details of combat?

Why did this happen? How can I fix it? Will the next session also suck? I circle my wagons around these questions, firing bullets inwards. I worry about losing my touch, about losing my players again. I thought I had this stuff figured out.

My wife tells me, cheer up, your friends look like they had fun, and, not every night has to be perfect. You are going to have bad nights and good ones. And then my darn fortune cookie weighs in, telling me bad games are the tuition we pay for good games.⁴

So I take a breath.

I pause and think about what this group enjoys, listening again to what they said and did in the game. They love OSRing puzzles and traps, overcoming obstacles and enemies through cleverness. I start planning the next session, thinking about how to turn the big fight they just started into a puzzle to solve, like a 1-HP Dragon.

But stop, not yet. First I need to rest, and recharge, I haven’t been sleeping great—allergies. Enthusiasm is a weight to carry to the table, heavy as an AD&D 2e sourcebook. So if I am going to run a good game next time, the first thing I need to do is…stop thinking about running games for a bit.

So I…decide to redesign 5e completely, finish a draft of my Shadowfight system, volunteer at our local block party, go to Renn Fair, create a new elfgame magic system, and play with the kids all weekend while my partner rested. And I tried to sleep 8 hours a night.

It wasn’t restful, but it was balancing, and I am recharged in the way that matters: I haven’t thought about the game in days. I am looking forward to playing with my friends again.

So I had a bad game. Happens. Will again. And honestly, I am good with that, because this past week? Pretty darn fun.

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1 And by flair, I mean a part of a job that I don't really like (this is an Office Space reference--if you have not seen it, it's deeply funny and set in Austin). The job here is the GM job. ^↩ 

2 It was the castle dungeon from the main Pirate Borg book--it needed more spooky traps, more interconnectivity, more surprise. As it is, the underground portion is more or less linear. I tend to run dungeons from prepped modules, because I don't always have time to prep my own, but I try to pick good ones.^↩ 

3 2-Is that Type 4 railroading, or Type 3? ^↩ 

4 Well, honestly, it said failure is the tuition we pay for success. Which is BS: sometimes failure is just failure. It only stays a failure if you give up, but sometimes that is the right call. But that's hard to jam inside a fortune cookie, innit? ^↩