 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappie. You know, I have set that opening, I want to say, 130 times over almost three years. I have made a video every week for almost three years. For over two of those years, I've been running paid games off of my Patreon, and for the majority of that time, I was running an average of five games a week. I've made my entire life revolve around D&D, and oh boy, am I happy. For the majority of that time, I couldn't see any signs of stopping. I was enjoying every bit of setting up sessions and writing a paper on a tabletop RPG, just like the one I'm reading from now. But about half a year ago, a tiny, dangerous thought creeped into my brain, and it was all over. Not all at once, but as soon as you let this question in, it's only a matter of time. What if I didn't run a session today? It's a pretty basic thought, and you can ignore it pretty easily, but as soon as you start to question whether or not you want to go through the effort of being the one behind the screen, you'll start to ask yourself that question once a week until the idea stops becoming so unreasonable, and then one day, you'll take the plunge, you'll stop, and your work ethic will disconnect from its rails, and then you've hit it. DM burnout. And that's a dangerous situation to be in. You have to tell your players, or you can just say nothing, and keep cancelling your games until they get tired and leave. The latter option happens more often than the former, but it doesn't change the end result. One way or another, you are off of the DM bench, and you're not sure when you're getting back on it. I've recently paused my games and told my players that I don't know when the campaigns will be starting back up. It was hard because these are people that have been relying on me to not be another fizzled campaign that doesn't have the performance power to finish. And it's either left me feeling empty, or maybe that empty feeling is why I stopped. In either case, if you're watching this video, I can imagine that the same thing has happened to you. Or maybe you're just a loyal Davy Chappy fan who will watch anything I put out. Except vlogs. I love you guys. But if you are a worried DM, you're probably wondering what to do to turn this mood around and get back on your book throne. And you can't. Oops, sorry, I tricked you. The answer is simple. You can't fix your problem, just like you can't help getting bored by Fall Guys one week after you play it. You've done the same thing over and over, and the crown hangs heavy on your head. The only thing that you can do is do something else so that you forget the sensation of sleepless nights writing plot hooks for people who will do everything in their power to avoid them. And eventually, the feeling will be gone for a long enough time that you'll forget about the bad parts too, and then you're ready to go again, like a goddamn bookkeeping Streisand effect. But in the meantime, you have some time to reflect on your dour state and try to understand what brought you to this point. Think of the good and bad parts of DMing, and try to figure out what you want out of the game. For me, the downside was running five games at once on a consistent schedule, never having my weeknights free and always having to cancel dates with my hypothetical love interests because my players had a date with Destiny, which was coincidentally my DM stripper name. The upsides were hanging out with my friends, entertaining them and feeling like I had a place where I belong, a place where I knew my friends would never leave me because they kept giving me money every month, and eventually the sunk cost fallacy has gotta kick in somewhere. So I definitely liked DMing, it made me happy, and I guess after two straight years I can probably say that it wasn't a passing thing, which means that taking a long rest is a good idea. I've had burnout periods before, I've been running D&D for five years, and playing it for longer. And the thing that I've found is that for every week that you push yourself further into the burnout pit, that's another two weeks on top of your normal burnout period that it's gonna take for you to get out. Unless your campaign is about to end in like three more sessions maximum, then you shouldn't keep yourself going. Any more than that, and you're dooming yourself to a constant personal peer pressure of, well maybe one more week won't hurt, because one of the things nobody really talks about is that DM burnout is mostly felt in between sessions. I've kept myself going in my campaigns for so long by just thinking, well yeah, I'm feeling awful every day leading up to the session, but for the three hours that I'm in the chair, I'm having a blast. That should definitely make the other six days of on we worth it, right? Right? You're smart, you know the answer to this. Don't convince yourself otherwise just because you feel lazy or guilty or whatever psychology you're imposing on yourself to keep you going. Let your time to go be your time to go, and maybe if you're like me in trying to re-find your love for D&D, you should take one of your friends and put them on the hot seat and take some time to be a player for a while. In the week that it took me to drop off of DMing, I joined two homebrew campaigns, a Reimatfrost maiden campaign, a Westmarch server, a changeling the lost game, and a Game of Roon quest. This could be seen by some concerned viewers as excessive, but I like to think of it as playing the odds, because we all know how fragile D&D games are, and even then, the fact that I'm not the DM means that I can drop out at any point if the scheduling becomes too much of a hassle, or I can miss a game without feeling the guilt of cancelling the whole session on account of me. Better yet, the games that I'm playing are all in different styles of RPGs. Two of them aren't even D&D, and one of them is a Westmarch server, which, well, we will talk about those one day. The point is that it'll be harder to burn out when everything is a different experience, and when I'm finally ready to run a game again, I'll have all of that experience learning and remembering what it is to be a player that should give me new insights on how to torture their characters. I'd like to end this video on a note that at the end of the day, you don't even have to keep playing D&D. We get burned out on a lot of things in life, and a lot of those things we just really don't come back to, and that's fine. You aren't obligated to play the game, and if you're hitting a wall with your friends where D&D is all they ever talk about, either suggest something else for everybody to do, or meet some other people for a while who maybe don't have an addiction to dice cereal. No matter what, you should do what makes you happy, and if role-playing games aren't doing that, remember that you always have the choice not to roll. But not for me! Thank you for watching this video. Be sure to do all those things that I always say at the end of these videos, and if you want to keep me in this perpetual spiral of making videos and forgetting about them the next week, head over to my Patreon to find new ways of burning your money away. But yeah, Dabby out.