Weekly Update - 109 (Patreon)

This week I want to feature a section of the cover art I'm working on for Volume 1!

Comic this week?  No.  The Next Page simply isn't ready.  It's barely a sketch right now.  I've been busy with stuff and my motivation has been diminished and I spent a good portion of my drawing time last week working on the cover art featured above.  I also want to finish Lethe's character sheet by Wednesday.  I'll post that, or a sketch, or both, on Wednesday.

Drawing: Lots of stuff. The Next Page. Lethe's character sheet.

Playing: Idk.  Rimworld, maybe other stuff. I'm curious about Baulder's Gate 3 -- does anyone have any opinions about its Early Access?  Is it worth?

Ramble:

I GM'd a Cyberpunk Red session yesterday.  It... was hopefully fun for someone. About halfway through the big combat encounter I designed for the session, I realized that -I- was not having any fun any more.

The moment of realization occurred after one of my players started to show some attitude because certain things weren't going their way during combat.  I had designed a high-speed vehicle combat encounter, where the players needed to chase a heavily armored APC to get the juicy treasure inside.  This person wanted their character to just dive in through an armored window, wrest control of the corporate funded self-driving APC and bring it screeching to a halt.  The person became discouraged, however, when they realized their character had zero skill in the operation of such a vehicle (or ANY vehicle for that matter - like, their skill was so low they would have struggled to drive a regular car) and started to pout about how I wouldn't let them just slam on the brakes.  I tried to improvise a little bit to make their situation more palatable, so I likened the interior of the cockpit to that of a commercial airline, with buttons and switches galore, probably being controlled by a simple AI but with a completely enigmatic control system, I tried to give a reason for why it wasn't going to be as simple as just hitting the brakes.

This was apparently unacceptable, though, and despite my efforts to give them plenty of other things to do on each of their turns, (like, for example, clearing out the remaining hostiles that were still shooting at their allies, options which myself and another player had to mention REPEATEDLY, because this person just didn't want to listen to us any more) their attitude worsened and they started to nitpick over every little part of the encounter until I just got fed up with the person and I snapped at them.  I simply raised my voice and said "we can stop [playing] at any time."  And that was that. They got the message, they stopped the abrasive behaviors, we continued, combat resolved, session resolved.  Though, throughout the rest of the session, I felt as though the mood around the table had certainly shifted, following my outburst.  The rest of the session went fine, but I was done after that.
While the players were resolving the encounter and wrapping things up back at the bar and dividing up the loot, I was already completely checked out.  I'd closed all the tabs on all my documents and notes, I was ready to be done with the game. I was ready to go home.

The thing is, this is the second session in a row where I haven't had much fun running the game, and it has nothing to do with the game itself.  It's the second session in a row where a player, (and not the same player) has gotten uppity about things not going quite the way they expected them to go.  Last time, it was because I wouldn't let a player throw around all the clout they didn't have to convince a sleazy gang boss to be their best friend (to the exclusion of his lieutenants and bodyguards, who were standing literally right there as he pitched this proposal -- honestly I felt the fact that the player walked away from the meeting alive at all was generous on my part.)  I really don't think it's unreasonable to say that a big mean gang boss won't just roll over and let you rub his belly because you helped his gangers repel an attack from a rival gang... once.

I've never GMed a campaign, and, come to think of it, I've never played in a campaign where there weren't at least a few such moments of players getting uppity about something.  It happens, I know... but when I'm GMing, when players get this way, I wonder, did -I- fuck up somehow?  Was my encounter or my session so poorly thought out or so poorly designed that it somehow triggered this response from my players? Did I ruin the immersion by poor-quality improvising when my players tried to pull off something I didn't originally plan for?  My brain always wants me to ask the question, "how am -I- to blame?" because the chances are pretty good that, yes, it was me, somehow, that fucked it all up. If I had, perhaps, sacrificed yet more of my time to make sure my setting and my NPCs and my enemy encounters and my notes and plans were all completely air-tight, maybe this sort of stuff wouldn't ever happen?  Counter-point: if I HAD committed yet more of my time to making sure that every contingency and every potential outcome had been accounted for, is it even worth it?

Like, I get it, when I'm a player, I can sometimes get salty too when things don't go my way.  I'll build up a story in my head, I'll see it playing out as I imagine my character doing something awesome and super clever that I thought up, and then the GM will tell me that, no, the game doesn't really work that way, and sure, it's a bit of a letdown being told all my careful planning was for naught. While I know better than to ever argue with a GM, I can't help but get a little cranky at such times. Emotions are a part of being alive, and I am the sort of person that tends to vent my emotions through complaining. I try really hard not to be toxic about it though, I might be feeling salty but I don't want my negativity to affect the group or drag down anyone else, so I find other things to try and take it out on.  When I'm playing the squishy glass-cannon wizard and I get one-shot by an AoE because I happened to be positioned just near the very edge of it (true story), it SUCKS!  It sucks a lot because I'm spending a lot of thought during other people's turns trying to plan out my next turn only to realize I don't even get one because the dragon went before me. But if someone around the table is kind enough to pop over and revive me, I will lash out, in character, at the first thing I see on my next turn with the most potent spell I have, even if it's a waste of a spell slot.  I've learned to vent the frustrations I have as a player with the game through my in-game character's actions, and honestly, it is a strategy that works for me. It helps me to keep my emotions in check while still contributing to the game as a player.

But from the other side of the table, I'm not really very good at handling other people's salt.  While I understand it, while I've been there myself, I'm just not sure what I can do, as a GM, to help my players keep their emotions in check. Or specifically to help them not be toxic at the table.  I only play tabletop games with my absolute closest and best friends.  These are people I've known for a huge portion of my life, people I love and for whom I would do anything for. These are people who I am close enough to that I know their personalities intimately, and 99% of the time I know exactly how to talk to them. You would think that, after all these years, any little hitches like this would have been smoothed over by now, but relationships are complicated and life just doesn't work that way.  I feel really bad about snapping at my friend. It really sucks. I'm not even really sure where it came from. I said it in the heat of the moment, because I was just done hearing all the complaining, and I regretted it immediately (despite it having the immediate desired effect).  I'm not normally very easily upset, I guard myself with a thick armor and any time that armor cracks I always fall into a sort of self-reflective depression while I try to evaluate WHY I got upset.

The conclusion I keep coming to is just this: I put a lot of work into GMing.  And it is work, absolutely.  Sure, designing encounters is fun sometimes, worldbuilding is always a joy, and I enjoy playing with the mechanics of enemies and bosses and I enjoy telling stories, but I do a lot of work so that my players can have a story to PLAY through, not just one to listen to.  I do a lot of research to make sure I'm adhering to the rules, balancing the encounters properly, not going too far out of bounds with any homebrewed enemies or items, and knowing what page to turn to so I can answer any questions that might get asked... it's a lot of work. And running a session is also stressful.  It's a lot of math, (which I SUCK at and is probably the worst part about it for me), it's a lot of keeping track of things, it's a lot of talking (I literally have a sore throat at the end of every session, and not even from talking very loudly), and it's a lot of mental strain to make sure the game progresses smoothly and in a way that makes sense while balancing the narrative to make sure every player gets their time to shine nearly every session (or on followup sessions if they didn't get to do much last time).  And when I have a player making all of this YET HARDER on me for some reason, a petty reason, for the second session in a row, how could I not get at least a little upset?

So what do I do when GMing stops being fun for me? Do I call it off?  Do I tell all the players I'm done being their GM and appoint an heir GM to run the next game?  I dunno.  I don't think so.  That doesn't really seem fair to everyone at the table.  I remember hearing some advice at some point that GMing isn't about me.  It's not about what I want to do or what I want to play.  It's about running a game for my friends so that THEY can have fun.  It's a sacrifice that I must make because without a GM, a tabletop game cannot occur.  Of course being a player is the most fun way to play a tabletop game. You get to be the hero of your own story, you get to do whatever you want (within reasonable rule-enforced limits), and you only have to worry about your character and what you want your character to do while the GM crafts an entire world for you to play in.  Being the GM sounds like you would have more freedom -- you get to create the world, you get to play god (or all the gods if you want to), you get to control every aspect of every NPC and every villain and summon literal meteors from the sky on a whim -- but I think it's disingenuous to talk about GMing that way.  The GM exists to create fun for the players. If the players aren't having fun, I'm not doing my job correctly and all of my awesome power counts for nothing if my players don't want to play.  Being the GM has a fair few perks, but it also has a lot of responsibility.  Honestly this is starting to sound like a metaphor for a great many things... I digress.

I agree, to some extent, with this advice: that the GM does need to sacrifice a lot of their own fun to facilitate the fun of others.  But the fact remains that if it gets to the point where all the fun of GMing is being sucked out of me, there is no purpose in continuing to stress myself out over it.  I'm not prepared to give up on GMing yet, but if this "I'm not having any fun" becomes a consistent pattern, I'm not sure I have the willpower or the motivation to continue running the campaign. There needs to be a line, and honestly if my players are making me miserable week after week, I can't imagine any encounters or sessions I design in such a state will be any fun for them to play anyway.

Fortunately, like I said, I GM for my closest friends. With the absolute worst case scenario, I can just sit down with them and have a conversation about what's bothering me and why GMing isn't fun for me any more.  I can trust them to understand, and I can trust them to work with me to come up with a plan to move forward, if that involves rotating out to a different GM or if it involves continuing this campaign in a slightly different way or if it involves moving over to a new campaign entirely.  In any case, getting all these thoughts out of my brain and onto the internet has been just super helpful for me right now.

If any of you reads this ramble and knows anything about tabletops or GMing, I'd be happy to hear your thoughts or advice.  I'm a novice at it, for sure.