Friday, June 4, 2010

Scheduling,planning and the stressed DM

My group has had to cancel three of the last gaming session due to massive inability to arrive and minor (but game ruining) illness. It's a pain and as the groups GM you'd think I'd take advantage of the time offered right? Of course not, I was ill or the parent of the ill child so that means lots of "wasted" time.
I've been working on a campaign which I wanted to have ready to launch by June (it isn't). We've been nailing down and playtesting some house rules, I don't' think we're there yet with the rules tweaks either. Missing 3 sessions hasn't helped of course.
So i'm in a quandary, scale back my campaign intro plans? Stick with the rules where we were in the last play test ? Drop the rules back to a printed rule set and have fun from there as the campaign develops?
Of course these are mostly DM/GM problems the players in the main have no clue how much time goes into some of this stuff so I'm worried about letting them down. I don't want to let myself down either, in my experience the first few sessions in a campaign really set the tone for how it develops and I've got a group of players that really enjoy multi-year campaigns and I want to deliver.
How do you tell players "I'm not ready yet" let's o something else for fun? Do I want to hear the moans and groans, do I want to start of a game doomed to fail or sticking myself with the wrong tone becasue of underplanning? my Mutant Future Mutantbox suffered because I failed to get the right tone accross and nail-down just who the heck the PCs were supposed to be. My last mix and match D&Desque campaign was ended because I got tired of the power-curve and the pointless nature of the campaign (too much loot and scoot and yet I still like a sandbox).

So Why is it DM's/GM's put themselves through this sort of self inflicted stress in the name of fun?

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