Image by Ben Kerckx from Pixabay, cropped by Mike

Most people – and I include many players and GMs in that grouping – have no idea how tiring it can be to run a game, and try to do it well.

For many years, I didn’t notice it, either; my reserves of stamina were sufficient that I could happily GM for 5 hrs, take a break, GM for another 4 1/2 hours, take another break, and be good to go for 5 hours more.

I can’t do that any more, and I recently realized that there was a point somewhere in between having that capacity and now when I might have been semi-capable of such longevity but should not try to exercise it.

There is also likely to be some truth in the statement that doing that sort of thing regularly helps you do that sort of thing regularly. It’s like any other form of exercise, right?

The GMing Crash

These days, in theory, we start play at around 1PM and wrap up at about 4:45, giving players time to pack and catch the 5:04 Bus. In practice, it’s often about 1:30, and the last minutes are a mad scramble with play overlapping with packing up until around 4:55. And there’s usually a five- or ten-minute break somewhere in the middle, sometimes two.

GMIng is an incredible adrenaline rush; you’re operating at the highest level you can manage, especially if you have a significant group of players.

• You’re keeping track of multiple conversational threads (including a couple only in your head),
• multiple story lines (at least one for each character),
• employing a laser-like focus on the immediate situation….
• ….in a fantastic and utterly non-existent reality that only fully exists in your mind,
• deciding how best to manifest that reality in the minds of your players (frequently using nothing but your voice and descriptive prowess)
• …and never losing sight of the big picture and the broader narrative.
• In complex campaign structures, you may be keeping track of half-a-dozen intertwining plot threads at the same time.
• You’re also keeping the identities, motivations, intentions, actions, and capabilities of as many as a dozen individuals in your head at the same time,
• ….and remaining aware of how those personalities interact with those plot lines, reacting to developments and pivoting the course of any or all of them on a dime.

Sounds impossible, right? It’s easier than it sounds, but that doesn’t make it easy. It’s like a sporting achievement for all that it’s intellectual in nature.

Good prep makes it easier. What ‘good prep’ means varies from campaign to campaign, and one of the things that we get better at with experience is intentionally designing that definition into the campaign so that it better fits our circumstances – initially, as those circumstances are, and later, as we expect them to be going forward.

“Sustainability” has a double-meaning when it comes to GMing.

As soon as play stops and the goodbye-see-you-next-time-hope-you-had-fun-today’s begin, the adrenaline begins to wear off. About half and hour after it’s all said and done, I absolutely crash; I feel like I’ve run a marathon, at least mentally. Those few hours feel like a full day’s work at the highest intensity possible, and they leave me utterly exhausted.

Collaboration

For the Adventurer’s Club campaign, I collaborate with the original creator of the campaign. We get together once or twice a week for about 10 hours in total; half that time is spent socializing, and about half is devoted to writing the next, or a future, adventure.

Currently, we are playing the 32nd adventure in the campaign (not counting a couple of last-minute off-the-cuff fill-ins), “The Hidden City”; Number 33. “Lucifer Rising” is almost in the can and ready to go (I have one illustration to finish); and Number 34, “The Kindness Of Strangers” is coming along nicely. Work on numbers 35 through 38 is at an early stage, and we have outlines for at least ten more beyond that.

Those collaborative sessions are as intense and busy with problem-solving (sometimes through a haze of mental myopia) as running a game.

Which only makes sense, when you think about it a bit – when planning and writing an adventure, you have almost all the things in your head that actually go into the running of that adventure, and all the alternative ways that things could go – and you are constantly trying to winnow things down to the best choices, even if the differences that result won’t be noticed until game sessions later.

Always, we try to be guided by five questions (in sequence of priority high to low):

1. What is best for the campaign?
2. What is best for the adventure?
3. What will be the most fun for the players?
4. What is the most campaign-appropriate?
5. What is the most genre-appropriate?

As a result, about an hour after he goes for the day, I experience a GMing Crash that is usually only a little less severe than the one caused by actually GMing for a like period of time.

Solo Prep

Solo prep, where you are doing it all on your own, is usually a lot less stressful and intense. You can stop whenever you want to, take breaks as necessary, and – if you’ve followed the advice offered in other articles here at Campaign Mastery- in particular,
 

• To Every Creator, An Optimum Budget?,
• Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced) Pt 3: Preparations,
• Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced) Pt 7: Adventures, and, most important of all,
• Game Prep and the +N to Game Longevity (which lays out a process for prioritization)

– even if you only follow the advice in principle – then you know that you’ve hit the most important parts of the game prep and are going to be as ready as you can be.

Sustained effort is still exhausting, of course, but it takes a solid 10-14 hours of game prep to achieve the same levels of fatigue. You can get an awful lot done in that sort of time-frame!

In fact, my guideline for solo prep is 1 1/2 to 2 times the playing time usually produces a playable outcome if the work is prioritized correctly. Anything that can contribute to future adventures as well as the immediate one can either be counted on top of that basic game prep requirement, or can be amortized over the entire spread of adventures to which it is going to be relevant.

That means that if you are creating an NPC who will appear in four adventures, only 1/4 of the prep time involved should apply to this particular adventure. And if said NPC is not going to appear in this adventure at all, but is going to influence it, that counts, too.

But it’s usually too much work splitting hairs that way, taking time that can be put to better use – so I simply tack it on as extra to the normal and move on.

Game prep can be pleasurable, but it’s not often fun – and that encapsulates the intensity concerned, which in turn indexes the scale of the GM crash that follows.

Image by mohamed_hassan from Pixabay, cropped by Mike

Excessive Prep Needs

There are times when the time available is simply not enough, or – worse still – you underestimate the prep required (or lose yourself down one of the many creative rabbit-holes that can eat time faster than a black hole consumes a light lunch).

When this happens, you have only three options:

1. Work like a dog trying to achieve an acceptable prep standard in the time remaining, even if it costs you sleep or interferes with other activities;
2. Inform the players that prep is taking longer than expected, and the next game has to be deferred/canceled as a result;
3. Create or unpack a fill-in adventure that is deliberately designed to be low-prep (even if it means interrupting an ongoing adventure) to buy yourself more prep time. If you choose this option, turn your attention to the fill-in adventure immediately.

Options 1 and 2 are clearly extremes, Option 3 is a somewhere in-between.

Which one you choose depends on two factors: How often you play, and How late in the process you realize the situation you’re in.

How Often You Play

The more frequently you get together, the less important it is if – on rare occasions – you have to miss a session. Option 1 beckons, with Option 3 as a backup.

In fact, it’s possible to have a second campaign (even if it’s run under another GM) established as an on-going backup solution. This isn’t the sort of thing that happens by accident, but it is the sort of idea that good planning can produce – because you will probably need it at some point!

How Late In The Process

The closer you are to game day, the closer you are to the prep finish line – and that makes Option 2 more attractive, again with option 3 as a backup.

Confronted by these circumstances, you then have to make a second, harder, choice: you can either set the main adventure aside long enough to prep the fill-in to an absolute minimum standard, with the intent to run a lot of it ad-hoc (see the many articles listed under “GM Improv” on the Game Mastering page of the Blogdex and the section on Ad-hoc adventures on the Adventures page of the same resource – in both cases, it’s the last section of the page, so scroll to the bottom and work up).

Again, there are those who advocate having a fill-in adventure prepped and on standby; I have done so, myself. The problem is that it’s entirely too easy to go overboard when you do this, and before you know it, you have something that’s just as rich and complex as your regular adventures – and takes just as much time and effort to prep.

You can get around that by not developing more than a singe-paragraph outline of the fill-in adventure, leaving all other prep work for when you actually need the fill-in. This is a compromise, but it’s not a bad one. Equally, you can draw any other line in the creative and metaphoric sand that you want to use, the principle remains the same.

Enough Sleep?

I mentioned, in the context of option 2 of the ‘too much prep to do’ solutions, a key term: Sleep. I’ll have more to say about it in relation to avoiding the GMing Crash, but first I want to look at the question of how much a lack of sleep impacts on the GM Crash itself.

At an absolute minimum, I need about 5 1/2 hours sleep before I can GM. If I’m half-an-hour short of that, it brings the Crash forward about 15 minutes, and starts a “droop phase” about 15 minutes before that.

A “Droop Phase” is when you are starting to struggle with fatigue, impairing your decision-making, concentration, and reaction time. Just as the adventure is coming to a climax for the day is possibly the worst time for this to happen, exceeded only by the climax of the whole adventure, or the climax of the whole campaign.

A second half-hour short brings forward the Crash by 5-10 minutes and begins the Droop Phase 15 minutes earlier again.

It’s when sleep drops below that four-and-a-half hours that things really take a turn for the severe. In fact, in my experience, if you are going to get less than that, you are better off not going to bed at all – but I’m a night owl most of the time.

Every half-hour below 4½ hours sleep brings forward the GM Crash by about 15 minutes and the Droop phase by about 25 minutes.

Let’s count those up:

• 5½ hrs Sleep = Crash 30-60 mins after the game
• 5 hrs Sleep = Crash 15-45 mins after the game, droop for 15 mins before that
• 4½ hrs Sleep = Crash 5-35 mins after the game, droop for 30 mins before that
  — Note the risk of droop commencing during play
• 4 hrs Sleep = Crash between 10 mins before game end and 20 mins after, droop for 55 mins before that
• 3½ hrs Sleep = Crash between 25 mins before game end and 5 mins after, droop for 80 mins before that
• 3 hrs Sleep = Crash between 40 mins and 10 mins before game end, droop for 105 mins before that (1 hr 45 min).
  — Compromised performance for up to 1/2 the game session.
• 2½ hrs Sleep = Crash between 55 mins and 25 mins before game end, droop for 130 mins before that.
  — Compromised performance for more than 1/2 the game session.
• 2 hrs Sleep = Crash between 70 mins and 40 mins before game end, droop for 155 mins before that (2 hrs 35 min)
• 1½ hrs Sleep = Crash between 85 mins and 55 mins before game ends, droop for 180 mins before that.
  — Compromised performance for almost the entire game session.
• 1 hr Sleep = Crash between 100 mins and 70 mins before game ends, droop for 205 mins before that.
  — High probability of Compromised performance for the whole game session.
• ½ hr Sleep = Crash between 115 mins and 85 mins before game ends; droop for 230 mins before that.
  — Virtual certainty of Compromised performance for the whole game session.

Image by Amr from Pixabay

No sleep at all is about as bad as getting that full 4½ hours sleep, but it makes the eventual Crash more severe, and typically requires an early night afterwards.

To some extent, a lack of sleep the night before can be ameliorated by getting ample sleep in the nights before that – typically, 3-4 nights worth, running. I haven’t factored this in because it can be quite variable. The other crash mitigation techniques offered below can also assist to at least some extent (but there are limits).

Sleep quality is another ignored factor here – suffice it to say that if your sleep quality is poor, for whatever reason, you need more of it to reach the same levels of restedness!

Note that this is all in terms of my personal experience, it may be better or worse for you, just as it used to be much better for me – before my sleep started to be compromised by bodily aches and pains, for example!
.

Why do I call it a Crash? What Happens?

When you Crash, your thinking becomes woolly (you might prefer the term fuzzy) in the extreme, your judgment is largely irrelevant because it’s hard to concentrate enough to actually make a decision, and if you relax for more than a moment, you are likely to drop off – it might be for minutes or for an hour or more. You will remain prone to nodding off for the rest of the evening.

None of this sleep can be considered quality sleep; you will awaken eventually, but will not experience much in the way of recuperation from your fatigue. It takes 1½-3 hrs of such dozing to recover – and that’s enough that it can disturb your usual sleep patterns. But a protracted doze will bring you back to the level of exhaustion that you should feel after being awake for as long as you were at the time you dropped off, or thereabouts.

Which means that you are then good for another 5 hours or more of activity, and will find it hard to actually go to sleep for a like time-span..

Playing through a Crash

Droop happens in spite of the stimulation provided by play, and so does a crash – to at least some extent. If you can actually restart play, or employ any of the amelioration processes below, you can usually reboot yourself enough to return to the GMing chair.

That does not mean that it won’t affect your GMing – it will. Your decision making will be poor, and if the action level ever pauses, even for a little while, you can still Crash to the point of dozing off, mid-game.

It’s a far from ideal situation.

Partial Solutions

There are no magic bullets. You’ve been working hard, and grow fatigued as a result, and that’s only natural.

But there are a few things that can lesson a crash in severity and even combat droop for hours – enough to present a facade of normality, even at the game table. These have been proven to work, at least in my case, even though some of them are a little counter-intuitive.

Exercise

Mild exercise – walking or jogging for a few minutes – can be enough to make the Crash a soft landing. One of the other reasons I call it a crash is because of the suddenness with which the fatigue strikes, and at least part of that is the adrenaline rush wearing off. This stimulates a more gentle downslope, such that your energy levels might be a little low for the rest of the evening, but you are otherwise fit to engage in other activities.

Stimulation

It’s not enough to turn on music or call up a movie or TV show that you want to watch; you need something dynamic which prompts an actual response from you. The music only works if you get up and dance.

Computer games are a better choice, because they are interactive. Conversation is a good choice for the same reason. In both cases, though, beware lulls in the action – the Crash is lurking and can strike given the least opportunity.

Napping

You can take the edge off a Crash with a 15-30 minute nap. This requires someplace totally devoid of stimulation (no conversations audible) and as comfortable as possible – and an alarm. Set it for 20 or 30 minutes. When you awaken, splash some cold water into your eyes and proceed with the measure below.

(Legal) Stimulants

Drink a cup of hot tea or coffee. Cold drinks don’t work as well. Make it black if you can, as milk becomes a soporific when heated.

If you must have milk, energy drinks like Red Bull and V are probably a slightly better option unless you can drink the resulting hot beverage very quickly.

The idea here is to create a quick rush of energy to cause a softer landing – just as with exercise.

Fatigue-minimization techniques

There are a number of other fatigue-minimization techniques listed as part of my article, Tourism in Sleepland: Sleep management for GMs & other creative people (be warned, it’s a long one). You may not be able to use some of them, but others can be of value in this situation – a hot/cold/hot shower, for example, need only take five or ten minutes. If you are going to play again, tell your players that you need to take a few minutes to perk yourself up.

To that general advice, I can add one thing more: discomfort is the enemy of fatigue, especially being cold. Being comfortable or warm is the enemy of alertness when you are fatigued. The trick is to ensure that any cooling or heating goes far enough.

Using these techniques, a GM Crash can be minimized or even seem to be avoided (I’m not confident that the avoidance is complete). They can be enough to enable you to carry on GMing – maybe not at your sparkling best, but close enough for everyone to be entertained. Or, they can be enough that you can carry on working for the rest of your normal day, or to permit you to relax and watch something of interest without falling asleep in the middle of it.

In other words, they can bring you back to something approaching a normal condition. I never thought that I’d need them for that, but if – like me – you do, you now have the tools to defeat the dreadful GMing Crash.