I've been running and playing TTRPGs for twenty years now. Long enough that I've started noticing patterns — things DMs say to each other in Discord channels, in subreddit threads, after sessions when the players have gone home. They come up regardless of system, experience level, or campaign style. Most DMs eventually say all of these. I've said all of these. Some of them I'm still saying.
1. "I prepped way too much. I won't do that again."
Then we do it again. Every DM I know, including the ones who teach prep methodology for a living, falls into this loop. We over-prep on Sunday because the session is Tuesday. We don't trust ourselves to improvise, and the act of preparing soothes the anxiety even when it doesn't make the session better. Then mid-session something comes up that we couldn't have prepped for, the players love that moment, and we promise ourselves next week we'll trust the table more. Next week, we over-prep again.
I don't think this loop ever fully ends. It just gets less acute over time, and the prep gets more efficient.
2. "I had this whole thing planned and they ignored it."
You know what they did instead? Whatever they actually wanted to do. Which is the entire point of running a tabletop game.
The thing is, most of us know this in principle. We have the old DM-advice line memorized — "plan situations, not stories" — and we still walk into Tuesday night with three pages of plot beats. The hardest skill in DMing isn't writing more interesting NPCs or balancing combat encounters. It's letting go of the version of the session that lived in your head before the session started.
3. "What did the high priest tell them three sessions ago?"
Asked at 9:47 PM on a Tuesday, with a table full of expectant faces looking at you, and your notes from session 4 are in a Word document somewhere on a hard drive you haven't opened in two months.
There's no DM workflow that actually solves this. There are workflows that make it less catastrophic. The DMs I respect most are the ones who've made peace with the fact that some contradiction is inevitable, and learned to spin a contradiction into a plot hook in real time. Players will notice. Good players will help.
4. "I should run a published module next time."
We say this when our homebrew worlds collapse under their own weight. We say it after the third session in a row where we couldn't summon the energy to write more lore. We mean it sincerely in that moment.
Then we don't run a published module next time. The pull of your own setting, your own characters, your own myth is too strong. We grind back to homebrew. We say it again at the end of that campaign. The cycle continues.
I think this is fine. The reason published modules feel insufficient to many of us isn't because the modules are bad — they're often great. It's because, at some point, we learned that the act of inventing is a thing we get something out of, and we miss it when it's gone.
5. "I love DMing. I'm exhausted."
This is the one that worries me when I hear it. Not because it's pathological — every creative practice has fatigue cycles built in — but because the TTRPG community has, in the last few years, started talking about DM burnout the way we used to talk about creative block: as something inevitable, almost mystical, that just happens.
It isn't mystical. It's a function of doing unpaid creative labor on a recurring deadline. Anyone in any creative discipline who works that way runs into the same wall. The DM-specific version is that the deadline is your friends' Tuesday, which is uniquely hard to push back on without disappointing people you love.
The DMs who last decades aren't the ones with stamina. They're the ones who figured out which parts of prep they could let go of without the session getting worse. Some stopped over-prepping (see #1). Some switched to a different system. Some rotated who runs the campaign. Most of them, in some way, gave themselves permission to do less.
There are more of these. There are always more of these. "My monsters are too easy" / "My monsters are too hard" / "I can't tell when my players are bored" — twenty years and DMs are still saying all of them.
But the five above are the ones I think about when I'm building things for DMs to use. They're the ground truth of the role. Anything you build for DMs that doesn't acknowledge them is building for a fantasy version of the role, not the actual one.
Anyway. More from this side soon.
— Malkav