3 Hints You May Have Been GMing Too Long

This is the end. All is dust. A couple of weekend’s ago my Mutants and Masterminds campaign came to an end. While no one was injured as a result of the campaign I still feel the empty hole next to my hearts that it masterfully filled every second Sunday from 2 till 6ish. I’ll miss it. I’ll miss the simplicity of the streets of Emerald City and the intrepid hero’s that defended its peoples. I won’t miss flipping through the massive binder to look up rules but it wasn’t as bad as Shadowrun. Actually, as a DM nothing has been as bad as Shadowrun. I remember when I started out playing I had no intention of ever DMing a game, and I played for years without ever having to. Then it just sort of happened, one campaign finished and an opportunity arose, and I had a chance to let someone else play so I just went with it. It’s been a few years now and I’ve GMed consecutive campaigns since then, and towards the end not because I wanted to but because I felt I had to. But that’s over now, back to the factory floor I go… but willingly. My time was over and here are a few reasons I knew it was time to hang it up.
 
1) COLOUR INSIDE THE LINES, DAMMIT
I started losing interest in my player creativity with their characters. I just wanted them to follow the script and quit trying to have fun. This was a rule-based game dammit, and there is no room in role-playing for developing story and characters beyond what the module defines… anyways that’s how I felt at least. I ran our Mutants and Mastermind campaign from the Emerald City Knights modules from Green Ronin. They were orderly, easy to read through, and developed the scene and scenarios well. Things were good and game-play flowed but nobody sticks to the script all the time. When my players started exercising their agency and it annoyed me I knew that maybe I needed a break.
 
2) HOW LONG IS THIS GONNA TAKE, DAMMIT
As easy as the modules were to read through, I started to hate setting things up before we played. I would leave things until an hour before I knew people would be arriving and then pull out the module and notebooks and start jotting stuff down.  To be honest I already knew that this was a problem coming out of my GMing a Shadowrun campaign, right before we started in on Mutant’s and Masterminds but I figured it would go away with a new game. It didn’t, and it was a really great sign that I was sitting in the wrong chair.
 
3) DAMMIT, I GOT THIS
I don’t know how it got into my head but somehow I thought that no one else would want a chance to run the show. Maybe I had gotten so used to running campaigns that I started to believe that this would be my eternal role. Forever, until the end of days I would run module after module from system after system, until all my players got put into differing retirement homes by their spiteful and ungrateful children. Anyways, this wasn’t the case. Turns out there were more than one person who wanted a crack at GMing, and it was the perfect time to bow out gracefully.
 
So that’s how it all ended. I’m just a lowly player now but for a while there I was a god. Sure I couldn’t influence how the dice fell, but besides the legions of rulebooks and stat tables my word was law. Actually looking back even half-assing it was a ridiculous amount of work. Maybe someday I’ll want to go back and give it another shot but for now thank God that $%*# is over. No more whiny players, no more stupid rule challenges. I don’t care how many attacks you think you should have based on your speed the book says you only have one!

​Sorry, bit of a flash back there.

Ryan tells it like it is, unless he doesn't, like that time he forgot to append a bio to his article submission and so VP Quinn decided to just make some stuff up. Ryan is is stunted and pig-snouted orc-like creature that lives alone in a basement far to the north. he has friends, but primarily out of the pity that those friends have for him. 
  

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