Exchange of Realities

One of my topics this week was on burnout and coping strategies for such. This is for a rather simple reason: I’ve been suffering from burnout for the last few weeks. The group’s just added two people who need to get settled in, it’s hard to get any three of the five PCs to agree on a specific course of action long enough for me to plan, and I’m starting to run toward the end of my last major inspiration. The fact that I’ve had a lot of IRL concerns, and that I’ve got a dead week coming up—family vacation out of state and all—only makes it harder to come up with things to run for the nice people.

The facts: I’m getting tired of coming up with new things. But I still enjoy the characters enough that I’m not sure I could handle a full hiatus, and I want to see if I can get some leftover exposition out of the way and some plans made.

My decision: I’m taking a working vacation! I left a note to my group on the campaign wiki explaining that I was going to leave a certain number of NPCs open to them, but that I wanted them to spend the next few meetings focusing on planning, getting the new people caught up, and otherwise making sure everyone (including me!) gets onto the same page. With any luck, by the start of the new year they’ll have a plan, I’ll have had a break, and I can come back refreshed and rested with some nice shiny new plot twists and the information they need to get their grandiose plans functional.

So starting this last game session, I put them in one location, told them to stay there and that I would be playing my NPCs rather than running the game wholescale, and started cycling NPCs through. It seems to be working so far; they’re planning, sharing information, and aside from a couple fluff-clashes with one of the newer players, the coordination is going pretty well.

Of course, the catch is that I’m still doing as much exposition-work as I do on the average day (somebody missed a couple parts of the memo), but hey, at least it’s a sort-of-vacation, right?