Over the years, it feels like I have cancelled more games than any other GM on the planet. What stops me from running the game on anything like a consistent basis?

It was something I first spoke about back at the dawn of the podcast, in Episode 8, but it still plagues me to this day: The Curse of the Flaky GM.

The curse is entirely rooted in myself, of course. I am the source of the dark magic; the curse is based on learned habits that have – for many years now – stopped me from moving forward.

I know that after a tough week at work, I can be left drained and exhausted. Sometimes life gets in the way – a family emergency arises or someone in my life needs me to do something at short notice. Other times, I am feeling very low or actually ill. Most of the time, though, the feeling of being drained and exhausted seems compelling.

At the point of decision – when I need to decide whether to push on through and deliver a gaming session that night, or whether to have another quiet night with the wife in front of the TV, or just go to bed early and sleep, the tendency is to do the easy thing.

The reality is that when I sit down and think about this problem, when I reflect on the decisions that I make, the real reason why I cancel the majority of gaming sessions is that I feel unprepared. Or I feel like an imposter. Who am I to be running games for my friends?

When I have the feeling of “not being ready”, it’s easy to rationalise pretty much any barrier as an excuse to get out of doing the hard thing – prepare a session and deliver on it.

The Angry GM wrote some very interesting comments on this problem – and he refers to it as GM Burnout:

“Here’s the reality: if you’re feeling tired or run down and you cancel a game because of it, that’s fine. It’s only fair. But it makes it easier to cancel the next game. And the next one. And eventually, you tell yourself you must be suffering GM Burnout. So, you put your game on hold. And you figure you’ll come back to it in a month or three or six. And nine months later, you’re wondering what happened to your games.

GM Burnout is caused by not running games. It’s caused by cancelling games. See, games feed themselves. Running games is hard. It does take effort. But the more you do it, the more you enjoy it.”

“You Say You Want a Resolution“, Angry GM, January 1st 2019

I’d go further than that: every time you cancel the game, you also raise the chance that another player will jack it in and go do something else. In my experience, those players don’t just stop attending your gaming table: many of them will stop enjoying roleplaying games altogether.

I have lost count of how many players I have driven away from the table over the years due to my own fundamental flakiness. That adds to my sense of guilt and unworthiness.

And that’s not even mentioning the “butterfly head”.

“Butterfly Head” is the phrase my wife coined to describe the creative me. In my job, I am very focused and organised. Colleagues comment on how amazingly organised I can be. It’s a source of professional respect that I get things done. I can even be pretty creative as a teacher. This contrasts heavily with myself as a gamer.

Like a butterfly, I drift from gaming project to gaming project. From idea to idea. Oh, that’s a cool notion – let’s get excited about it and put in a day or two of serious, hard effort to make that work.

I’ll even go as far as sharing my exciting idea with my group and try to persuade them to give it a go. If I’m lucky, I make it to the first session with the cool shiny idea ready to go. It’s a fun session. And then I feel like, “Oh, cool, that worked well.”

But then I notice something else that’s new and shiny. And I go around the loop again.

One of the side-effects of this butterfly thing is that I stop prepping the new and shiny game sessions because my time gets eaten up with a new idea. Correction: I divert my attention to a new and exciting idea and fail to follow-through on the cool game I have already set up.

It takes a particularly dedicated player to stick around my gaming table. My players sigh and smile politely as I try to move the game to the next shiny idea. But here’s the worst part of it: I still haven’t managed to overcome these habits. In all the years since I first spoke about the Curse of The Flaky GM, well, I’m still doing it.

The only difference is that I know enough to realise that the way to break the Curse – to begin to break down those unproductive habits – is to make the things I start smaller so that I can more easily move towards finishing them. The secret to becoming more consistent is to play more often and with smaller goals.

As with all change, this will not be easy. The Resistance will be trying to stop me. But in the end, if I am ever to step off this hamster wheel I’m on, something needs to shift.

Game on!