I’m curious : have any D&D players suffered burnout from the game (and are willing to share)? We talk about DM burn out a lot but I’ve never heard of a player being so overwhelmed and exhausted by the game that they are unable to continue playing in a home game. - ThreadSky

annethegnome.bsky.social • 175 days ago

I’m curious : have any D&D players suffered burnout from the game (and are willing to share)?
We talk about DM burn out a lot but I’ve never heard of a player being so overwhelmed and exhausted by the game that they are unable to continue playing in a home game.

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onlyplaywizards.com•175 days ago

Yes, as a player.

jnlangston.bsky.social•175 days ago

DMd for a party of 6 for 2 campaigns of lvl 1-20. Took years. 3rd campaign promised to be even better but scheduling and eventual main character ideology of one player made it a toxic environment. I ended it and started from scratch

vesperthelope.bsky.social•175 days ago

A bad dm will kill the game fast

annethegnome.bsky.social•175 days ago

Yup, but I don’t think that’s the same as burn out. Usually people just want a different table (as opposed to stepping away entirely)

leafiedraws.bsky.social•175 days ago

I've dropped out of campaigns before due to other players being too exhausting/stressful to be around. my character literally packed her bags and left lmao

alexkarne.com•175 days ago

Yep. Ask away.

annethegnome.bsky.social•175 days ago

What happened?

alexkarne.com•175 days ago

I love RP and exploration. Players in our monthly game are all very good DMs, and our DM is a professional. That's literally their day job.

We serve as beta testers for any modules or settings they might want to run. But, it's very combat focused.

Now, I'm good at combat. 1/?

alexkarne.com•175 days ago

But I found myself in kind of a pickle, because I was running into limitations not of what the character could do, but what the DM would let me do.

Not in a rules sense, but in a pulling stuff out of their ass sense. Do too much damage? The baddies suddenly have way too much health.

2/

alexkarne.com•175 days ago

Throw the lieutenant through a prismatic wall, fine. Throw the lieutenant and the boss through the same wall, now one of them has a contingency that somehow negates it.

I found myself switching to a control/healer/counterspell main focus because otherwise the overall meta game nullified me. 3/

alexkarne.com•175 days ago

So, I was playing suboptimally, and I wasn't having fun. I felt like nothing I did really mattered. And that's exhausting.

So now I'm kind of the "break glass in case of emergency" player that can avoid a TPK. Which feels a lot like a job.

And yeah, I got pretty burned out.

lacafedora.bsky.social•175 days ago

I played D&D and other games with the same group of people for over ten years. (The non-D&D games were still D&D model, with a GM overseeing players.) We mostly had a forever GM, but there were some exceptions. Regardless, every single game had one or more evil PCs. I was young and naive. (1)

lacafedora.bsky.social•175 days ago

My characters were never evil, & I was often abused & exploited by the evil characters. I mostly received this as a social commentary on the nature of good & evil, & told myself that it is only a game, but I see now that these were my friends that I spent much time with, & they abused me. (2)

lacafedora.bsky.social•175 days ago

Yet I continue to play with them, because I am AuDHD (didn't know it then) & was bad at meeting people & making friends. (I still am.) It informed the way I preceive friendship & socialization, & normalized some very bad human behavior. What finally made me quit was a particular game I joined. (3)

lacafedora.bsky.social•175 days ago

It was a big game that everyone else was already playing but I had declined; I had reservations about the players. (I was starting to have an awareness of my toxic situation, but didn't know how to escape.) I made a fresh new character, showed up, & waited to be addressed by the GM to say Hi. (4)

lacafedora.bsky.social•175 days ago

It was the middle of a combat. Action was adjudicated by whoever bothered to speak and interject taking action, but I was waiting for my turn. I never got a turn, but the GM said "You were there." So after the action, another angry character said, "Hey, yeah, I saw you standing there waiting and (5)

lacafedora.bsky.social•175 days ago

doing nothing, being sneaky!" They decided I was deceitful, took me prisoner, put a Helm of Alignment Change on my head, and turned me into someone's slave. I tored up my character sheet and said Fuck You, and left. I finally escaped; I just needed to be angry about being abused. (6)

orichalcumgolem.bsky.social•175 days ago

Yes. More than one story. Many of them due to one player or another, not a DM, who were deliberately being difficult and making me, who regularly built "okay, what do we need" characters, play things less fun for me.

One of them also deliberately took actions to make life worse for one of my PCs.

orichalcumgolem.bsky.social•175 days ago

Our DM tried, in every campaign, to give an adventure that was centered around a backstory or plot point for each character. He also used the published timeline of the Forgotten Realms, including novels.

So as we approached a moment in the timeline mentioned in one of the novels, this player...

orichalcumgolem.bsky.social•175 days ago

...proceeded to throw a tantrum in character, ran away and dragged all of us to follow the character, and did so at a time that would have been important and meaningful to my character (as per the GM later). Instead, we got that character's arc, part 2, and none for me.

orichalcumgolem.bsky.social•175 days ago

I was so angry and upset I basically coasted the entire rest of the campaign and stopped playing for six months. This player decided they didn't like me, and did this to me twice more, and then finally had their character try to outright kill mine, and I said "no more, them or me".

orichalcumgolem.bsky.social•175 days ago

Reader, it was not me who left the games.

kbtibbs.bsky.social•175 days ago

I am very close to taking a D&D vacation. I feel stuck in a friend game that is mostly amazing, but there's one player i do not like and they are bored with the more political/court intrigue roleplay section and they are... Acting out to force combat.

I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for.

ta1ntedm34t.bsky.social•175 days ago

Yes. After constant rescheduling time and time again, it seemed almost pointless to continue my CoS campaign. By the end, I just wanted to end it badly. No more “exploring” or “talking”. Just fight Strahd and end it. If we win/lose, I would be happy that it would be done.

timlwhite.bsky.social•175 days ago

While most of my player burnout was because of other players being annoying; I will say after a two year semi-monthly 5e game, I was burned out on the system itself…mostly because even after leveling, the logical action choices were unchanged and boring.

annethegnome.bsky.social•175 days ago

Like, it’s obviously less common but surely it happens sometimes, right?

msmissymae.bsky.social•174 days ago

It's happened a few times for me.

The common thread has been a lack of understanding with the DM about goals or expectations.

tleil.bsky.social•175 days ago

Had a new player join my table, and my best friend was DMing. I had to quit because the rules were consistently being bent in favor of the new player and it kind of made my character feel worthless, wasn't great for my mental health. Haven't played in like, two months now. Kinda miss it.

wordsofgarett.bsky.social•175 days ago

I am getting very close to that in one of my current games. I love playing and the group is great, but I find myself almost dreading sessions and feeling relieved when scheduling conflicts come up. But it's hard to differentiate burnout from simple frustration with some player decisions.

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