This week has been a doozy. I mean, it started off nice and slow. Sunday and Monday were almost dead at work, the fine students of my University seemingly understanding all technical woes before them. Even then we knew Tuesday would be rough, and it was - but not as bad as previous years. In fact, I'd actually venture that by sheer numbers of people, this has been the easiest opening week my school has had in years. Except for one thing, everyone at work looks a lot more fatigued and strung out than they normally would if that were true.
I have a lot of theories for this. The issues we're facing, while less in number, are more taxing and thus more than make up for quantity with quality. The thing is, that is neither here nor there for this blog, but my fatigue is.
Fortunately, I'm not GMing tomorrow. My game is on hiatus and a new GM is taking over as we return to our Halo Game. Still, I have to wonder what would I do if I was GMing? I'm mentally wiped, and have had no time for prep, so what kind of game would I run?
More interesting: in that situation, what tricks and shortcuts do you fall back on?
Do you throw some combats in to eat up time? Give your players free reign and be more reactionary? Do you keep a "rainy day" fund of adventures and encounters in the back cover of your GM notes? What tricks get you through the game when you're tired or just don't have prep?
For my part, I'm actually unsure. I do like to use combats to pad out a session if I need to, but I'm also lucky enough to have players that will cause their own mayhem if I'm not able to bring my A, B, or even C game with me to the session. I also find that sometimes those are the best nights to focus on one single idea or theme for the game. Something easy and simple. It lets my brain go more scattershot with ideas, but keeps everything grounded and useful.
How about you? What tricks do you have up your sleeve? What do you do when you are, as they say, le tired?
Too tired to GM but not tired enough to cancel sounds really familiar to me. I've had some problems with being overly tired for several years (it took that long to find out what the reason was and a solution was found). So yeah, I've ran a lot of sessions without being able to prep as much as I want. Or even caring enough. But my players really pulled me through here, helping me by creating more than just their own backstory, creating NPC's or part the area's they wanted to visit. In those areas, the players have a sort of semi-GM status so I can share the load with them, let them describe some things. It took a while, but we found a sandbox-style of play where this works quite well. And whenever I felt up to the task, not just at game-time, I created backstory / areas / events / etc. So long story short, we did a LOT of prep beforehand, and we're still reaping the benefits by having a pre-existing world where minimal prep time is needed. Possibly not what you had in mind concerning preptime, but maybe the teamwork-aspect is what may be beneficial over a shorter period of time.
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