Why have I authored and then set fire to two previous RPG blogs out of boredom, dissatisfaction or a need to make a clean and meaningful break from too much time spent online, only to begin another one? Why would I spend innumerable hours of effort over many years revising and tweaking a personal version of D&D only to shove it all into the back of my closet and bottom of my hard drive in favor of a nouveau gaming system promising to deliver Fast! Furious! Fun! game-play? Why would anybody care? I dunno.
I'm frustrating the hell out of my players, who also happen to be most of my friends. At a recent, intimate gathering with one of them, where we played the excellent 2-person Starship Catan, instead of an RPG, this became apparent.
"So, this cycle of starting up and ditching campaigns after only a few sessions... what's up with that?"
"I don't know. It's not that I mind the work, I love the work. I wish I knew. Is it frustrating for you?"
The look said it all. Yes. Don't get angry or defensive, but yes.
I get it, too. I do. When you begin running an RPG and characterize the running as the beginning of a new campaign, you're asking people to invest. When you bring with you a new set of rules or ask your players to set aside certain expectations in favor of others, more to your own current tastes, you're asking them to invest in you. When you stop it after a few positively received sessions with little explanation as to why, they're probably not getting the return on their investment that they had hoped.
There's a lot of good and bad advice out there for running games. In the aggregate, none of it has provided the balm for my recent practice of setting fire to my fledgling campaigns. I've tried to reason it out on my own, but come up empty. I need to run games, tweak rules, create worlds... but I don't stick with any one iteration. Is it all part of the same, ongoing process that's ultimately leading to somewhere, or am I just a flighty DM who is put up with out of friendship? I dunno.
Here's what I do know. I've got a new-ish set of simple, engaging rules that can scratch my current itch that seem flexible enough to scratch future itches too. I'm here. I need to run games. I currently feel the need to write. I may end up saying something new or worthwhile. Here we go.
