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First, some context.  I've been playing D&D since AD&D 2nd edition.  I've been DMing on and off since that time and almost always create my own campaign world or towns in existing worlds (Forgotten Realms or other).  I've always tried to make my games 75% roleplay and 25% combat mix, roughly...

I've always had a wax and wane of interest and creativity with tabletop gaming and have played a few regular groups over the years.  Everyone is very mature and we typically don't have drama issues.

All that said, I'm finding myself exhausted mentally with the game.  I enjoy the time with friends drinking beers and goofing off, but the desire to inspire players with fear, heroism, peril, etc has steadily fallen off over the last year or two.  It's gotten to the point where I've handed over the DMing reigns to friends as I just don't have the interest in maintaining my campaigns.

When I think about it, I think the real reason behind it is that I don't find much novelty or excitement in the usual fantasy tropes any longer.  There aren't many scenarios that I find exciting to dream up and flesh out for players.  After 20 years, I get the feeling that I've told all the stories I wanted to tell and had adventures in all the situations I wanted to test them with...(defend the castle, lone winter cabin hunted, countless dungeon crawls, rescue the person, return the item, destroy the bandit leader, attacks on caravans, secret trade power struggles, cross-plane nefarious alliances, alamo-style defense against countless horde, etc etc etc).  It all feels somewhat tired.

Anyone else gone through this kind of dry spell?  What did you do to invigorate yourself as DM?  

I'd hate to think it was time to hang up the dice bag...

Oct 10, 2012 -- 1:34PM, Llathos wrote:

First, some context.  I've been playing D&D since AD&D 2nd edition.  I've been DMing on and off since that time and almost always create my own campaign world or towns in existing worlds (Forgotten Realms or other).  I've always tried to make my games 75% roleplay and 25% combat mix, roughly...

Combat is not the opposite of roleplaying.

Oct 10, 2012 -- 1:34PM, Llathos wrote:

Anyone else gone through this kind of dry spell?  What did you do to invigorate yourself as DM?  

I'd hate to think it was time to hang up the dice bag...

I've often felt disillusioned about D&D. I once sold all my D&D & 2nd Edition stuff, and didn't play any D&D for 6 or 7 years, until coming back to 3.5. If 4th Edition hadn't come along, I probably would have quit that before too long too.

What has helped keep the game fresh for me has been to break out of some of the traditional methods of playing the game. For instance, I don't make games for my players any more. They and I work together to figure out the game that would be interesting for them. I am no longer stressed out trying to get everything right for a game that I'm not even sure they'll enjoy, or trying to deflect their ideas and plans that would dismantle my careful arrangements.

In parallel with this, I've been trying lots of other roleplaying games. These are often fun in their own right, but either I find they lack something about D&D, or my usual players aren't interested in trying them. So, I pull the interesting concepts and approaches that I can from those games and try to utilize them in my D&D game.

Oct 10, 2012 -- 2:22PM, Llathos wrote:

Combat is not the opposite of roleplaying.

Never said they were opposite.

Never said you said they were. Whee, this is fun!

Oct 10, 2012 -- 2:22PM, Llathos wrote:

I just have seen a big difference between negotiating with a merchant, arguing with a royal, snooping around town for info, infiltrating a guild, and manipulating a guard and the events that follow "roll initiative".  You knew what I meant.

I do know what you meant, and this is a major problem with the game and with keeping a general interest in it. Once the line blurs between those activities (which some games already do better than D&D probably ever will) a lot of the routine we think of in D&D drops away and things are new again.

Oct 10, 2012 -- 2:22PM, Llathos wrote:

Centauri, I am curious though about your comments on working with your players to develop the world/campaign.  How can that work?  If the players know the people, their relationships, the organizations, the plots, the twists, etc....what do they discover?  Where is the fun for them exploring?

I don't know. I never found exploration that fun, nor did I ever have much luck getting players to explore the things I had worked so hard to create for them. I'd prefer they just know about the cool stuff, and let their characters do the exploration. And since they know about it, they can help me come up with it, along the lines of what really interests them. Because if it doesn't interest them, then there would have been no point in them exploring for it if they didn't know about it (and lots of disappointment once they did) and little incentive for their characters to bother discovering it.

But, back to the first part of your question: basically they don't know everything. It's not all upfront creation. I worked with my players to create a drow city, and we all discovered, as players, things we didn't know about before. Not everyone discovered every detail, but everyone discovered something that their character could see just by looking, and we are all now very invested in this city. There are still plenty of secrets about the city, but very few of them have actually been established. We'll create them as a group as we go along.

Basically, it's improv. It's entirely possible that a connection will come to light at some point that no one had considered up to that point and which didn't actually "exist" until someone (maybe I) said it. It could be a world-shaking twist. Believe it or not, something like that can be as shocking to the person who just declared it as it is to everyone else around the table.

Oct 10, 2012 -- 2:22PM, Llathos wrote:

Do you have any recommendations on these other games?

Wow, so many.

Spirit of the Century, Dungeon World and Fiasco are ones I've played that put much or all of the narrative power in the hands of the players. Spirit of the Century is meant as a pick-up game, run with little or no prep. Character creation is involved, but highly collaborative, and once you have the characters you can bring them out for quick episodes whenever there's a bit of time. The game is basically run on the premise that players can declare benificial details in exchange for points, and declare inconvenient details to get those points back.

Dungeon World is like a modern D&D D&D but with modern design. As such, there's meant to be more prep for the DM, but it can be run pretty much on the fly by anyone familiar with the tropes. Where the player collaboration and control comes in is in how some of the "moves" work. For instance, the Bard (at least in early testing) has the ability to declare the existence of a contact. Other characters give options for declaring what success, and even failure, look like.

Fiasco is meant to be run as a one-shot, to simulate movies like Fargo, A Simple Plan, and Brick: a web of relationships and demented plans that collapses in on itself magnificently. Very quick and easy to run, highly narrative.

Lady Blackbird I have yet to try, but it exhorts the GM to ask leading questions of the characters, to shape what comes next.

By and large what I think you'll find is that the hobby is moving away from the idea of one player creating a fiction that the other players just plug into. As the player without a personal character, the DM still has an important role, but that role is less about writing a story and more about hooking everyone's brain in parallel and managing the output from that. It gets pretty amazing, and it might spark some new interest in you either for those games or for new ways to run D&D.

Oct 10, 2012 -- 1:34PM, Llathos wrote:

Anyone else gone through this kind of dry spell?  What did you do to invigorate yourself as DM?

Definitely been there. Centauri perfectly outlined how I got out of it with Dungeon World being the major influence on my revamped DMing style. (See my sig for a couple interesting links and the GM's agenda in Dungeon World.) When I came back after a short break from 4e, my approach was completely transformed and my excitement for the game carries on.

I'd also throw a plug in for Marvel RPG. I've never read a comic book outside of possibly something that may have come with a Happy Meal when I was 6. But I had a chance to read the rules and play recently and it is very fun. The way The Watcher (the GM) sets up the game also closely mirrors how I do things in my D&D game, as it turns out.

Just looking at some of the stuff you're tired about, those two articles in my sig might be enough to get you started thinking a little differently.