Many game masters provide dozens of hours of entertainment a year and are bound to have an off-night every now and again where the material prepared may not connect with or be received well by players. While I had such a session lately, I’ve realized that right now I don’t care to proscribe blame on myself or my players or fixate on what I could have done differently.
Instead, the experience had me wondering how other GMs mentally frame and recover from subpar gaming sessions. Do you journal? Listen to music? Take a shower? Dive into prep for next session? Engage with a different hobby you enjoy?
For myself, I think the next time I have one of those nights I will make a cup of herbal tea and do a crossword puzzle.
Sorry to hear you had a tough one! Sometimes I’m in a diagnostic mode where I try to work out what exactly went wrong, and work out how to do at least that one thing much better next time.
Sometimes I just want to play some video games, or watch a cozy show.
Possibly even better, sometimes I’ll just straight up say to my players “hm, I’m not sure that one went so well huh? I struggled with X/ you guys seemed to be finding Y frustrating.” My friends are pretty honest, so as well as giving some validating reassurance that theyre loving the game, I’ll also get some real feedback about how they saw any problem elements.
Something I tend to do today is to break the session if I notice that it doesn’t go well, and go into discussion mode with my players. The session can’t be saved because of the negative energy but it’s possible to get something good out of it for future sessions.
Herbal tea for me too! I take a bit of time and then look at what happened with a clear head. If I can unpick what made it subpar, I can learn a lesson then I usually feel better
I talk with my players about things that didn’t go as planned and they bring me up while confirming some of the things that failed. I make sure we at least had fun. That tends to sooth me a little bit. Also while I DM I do my best to enjoy and have a laugh even though since are not going well or as well as I wanted.
The way I disconnect is by doing something with my wife. However, she will ask how did it go? Jaja, she does not roleplay but she knows I take the hobby seriously and she is king enough to ask. My take is do something mundane that gets you grounded and takes you out your head.
In my case, stress doesn’t go away if I ignore it or try to focus on relaxing activities to dismiss it. Before anything else, I have to vent my feelings and concerns—multiple times.
I talk about what happened during the session—trying to focus equally on the good and the bad parts—with different people; often my little brother, my significant other, and even some of my players, if the chance arises. I want their impressions too.
Once the bad feelings and the frustrations are outside me, I can begin to feel better doing something else. It is not a quick process, but it’s what works for me.
Depends on the cause. With my large group of teens it’s usually obnoxious behavior. Which is exhausting. So I take a nap. LOL
Then I try to think of either a better way to respond to the trigger and/or prevent it. That’s my teacher reflex, to work out what’s in my control that I can change. I do that over a period of time since it can take some self reflection. By the next session (two weeks) I’ve usually got something in mind.
If it’s a session that fell flat, I ask them what they wanted, take a nap and go from there.
