That Old Familiar Feeling

Burnout is the curse of every DM, especially a nutty one that puts as much work into his world as I do. Lately I have been feeling that sensation of weariness with my campaign a lot. About the time my ex-wife asked for a divorce I started to really feel the crunch of it. I don't know if it was depression or apathy or what, but I just began to feel tired of Hekinoe, or at least this campaign. 

As I said in a previous post, this campaign was helped along a lot by talking to my ex-wife about it, and I am sure that that alone has a lot to do with my weariness regarding the game. Another aspect of it is that this is the longest campaign I think this group has ever had, I mean the first part was the first campaign this group has ever actually finished, even if it was only fourteen or fifteen scenarios long, and then we kind of over zealously moved into this second part of it.  Which I blame entirely on myself. I was really psyched about it and wanted to get started with it and never once paused my work on it to kind of recoup. 

On top of that, Eric guessed pretty much immediately that the group was a collection of clones or had been cloned or something along those lines and everyone spent a lot of time telling him how stupid that was or that I was a better GM than one that would use a plot like that. In the most recent scenario, the group found out they were in fact clones of The Robust Five, which is awkward. It is awkward because I have been listening to them inadvertently tell me how stupid my plot was for a while, heh. I'm not the type of GM to try pretending I made something different than I did halfway through though, so I ignored the unknowing mockery and continued with the clone plot, because I like it. Also, I may or may not have based some aspects of this campaign on the six Star Wars films. Hehe. What can I say? I'm a hack.

I just feel run down and exhausted about this campaign. I'm tired, and my heart is only half in it and I don't know what to do. We've come so far that I feel like ending things would be a slap in the face to the guys that have persevered and I feel like just suddenly ending a campaign would leave a sour taste in the mouths of Lance and Laura, and Laura is really still kind of a first time gamer and it would be the second campaign she has participated in with this group that has fallen apart. It would also be the second time I've gamed with Lance and the campaign fell apart. 

Logically, I know I will have to give up GMing in the nearish future. The next paramedic program starts in March and I am seriously considering signing up, not that I have five grand laying around to pay for it. Being a paramedic is something I definitely want to do. Normally I tack on an eventually to that sentence, but I'm almost thirty and it might be time to admit that eventually should have come around a few years ago. Running and creating games is way too mentally labor intensive for me to go to school and work fifty hours a week and still be a responsible student. I did it while I was training for being an EMT, but that is a four month class and most of the learning is common sense applied in an emergency situation. With the paramedic program I'd have to turn the blade of my intellect to learning shit like drugs and dosages and metric conversions and analyzing cardiac rhythms and that sort of thing. A little more involved than CPR, blood pressures, and putting in a King airway. 

So what do I do? I feel like if I abstain from GMing, our DnD dies. Fred has already refused to invite me to his campaign, and Eric can only really run his intermittently, if at all due to school and work. On top of that, with the talk of the Conteog and Vacusu in the last scenario, we are starting to get into some really cool ass stuff in the Psychogenic Fugue arc. There is a three scenario arc planned for The Bottom of the World and while the second chunk is going to be more or less a dungeon crawl, the third chunk is going to be fucking nuts and resolve a big point of pain from the last campaign in a big way. 

And if I do put a pin in DnD, or outright quit, what then? Will everyone be left wondering what happened and what was going to happen? Will the blog die? No. I have promised a few individuals that if the campaign dies, full disclosure will occur. I'll lay out the whole plot for them and what led to the campaign and all that stuff. The blog would probably drop to a once a week post and become more focused on the "fiction" or whatever you want to call it of Hekinoe. I do love this world, it has been a labor of love in one form or another for many many years and I never want it to die. Plus, when I don't play DnD, I write like crazy and when I don't write, I DnD like crazy. I need that creative outlet for the stories and thoughts in my head. So I would likely continue some more focused work on The Robust Five story I am half-heartedly working on and continue posting that here, along with other random DnD thoughts and nonsense.

I am kind of the alpha male of DnD for the group, and I kind of drag everyone along into DnD with varying degrees of willingness and interest. If I stop GMing, will the group follow suit? I've said before that I would love Eric or Fred or Jeremy or someone to run something in Hekinoe that I could possibly participate in as a player and advisor to the GM, but Eric says he would never do that and Fred has his own thing going on and I think Jeremy has only vague interest in the idea of running games. I think it would just make me sad if DnD ended with a yawn, rather than a bang, for the group. 

I don't know, anyone have any thoughts on the whole topic?