<span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: arial;"><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 30pt;">GM ANNOUNCEMENT<br/></span><br/><strong>Short Version:</strong><br/>I am exhausted, and I do not want to GM. I think I should stop the game, and revisit in two months.<br/><br/><strong>Long Version:</strong> <br/>I am exhausted. I have a cross-country move planned in two weeks. My flight was just cancelled. Moving boxes are delayed. COVID-19 still persists. I don't know what the next two months of my life will look like.<br/><br/>Due to my move, if I continue this game, my posting rate will decrease to <em>once a week</em>. That <strong>cannot</strong> happen, as I am writing <strong>eight</strong> different scenes with Marley. My character's input is required for the plot to move forward, in many cases. Let me be clear: this is not the character I wanted to play. This is not how I wrote Marley. <strong>I am not having fun anymore.</strong><br/><br/><strong>I do not want to GM.</strong> This game, for some reason, takes a ton of mental effort to run. I takes the same - if not more - of my mental effort than my Dungeons and Dragons homebrew. <strong>This makes zero sense to me</strong>, as my Dungeons and Dragons game took five months of planning and is a 60+ page document, where I built an entire continent, with multiple cities, many establishments, characters and Gods. My Dungeons and Dragons game <em>should</em> take a considerable amount mental effort to run. This game, alternatively, should <em>not</em>. This game was supposed to be contained to one house, where I played one character, in a very loosely designed world. It is not that. Maybe it is because all the characters have complex abilities, but this is not an easy game to run.<br/><br/>The amount of effort it takes me to run this game, <em>even when everyone is playing nicely with each other</em>, is not worth it to me. It is not worth my mental effort. My mental effort should be focused on games that I enjoy writing, on characters that I enjoy building. This is not the only game I am writing for on E, or even off of E. The difference is, in all of those other games, I am a <em>player</em>. Not both a player and a GM. <strong>I am unhappy, and things need to change.</strong><br/><br/><strong>There are a few solutions here.</strong><br/><br/><strong>One.</strong> I open recruitment again. I recruit more people to play supervisor roles, so less focus is on the Founders. I recruit more players, so scenes move along without my/Marley's input. But this sounds like more work to me. Right now we have ~6 active players, and I originally wanted more like 10-12. I cannot run a game with 10-12 players with how my life is right now. I cannot. It will break me.<br/><br/><strong>Two.</strong> I make this a sandbox game and step down as GM. My heart isn't here. I like having ownership over games that I started. I'm also afraid that a sandbox superhero game will get OP and out of hand very quickly. Doing this also requires work. It requires rewrites. It requires players to step up and world build with each other, and between the ~6 of us, I think that would be difficult without recruiting more people (see solution one).<br/><br/><strong>Three.</strong> I shut the game down. I put it away, I move, I reassemble my life. In two months, once I'm settled, I <em>may</em> open it again. If you guys are interested in continuing, then we continue in two months. This is my first choice. Not only is it the least amount of work, and mental effort, but it allows me to rewrite the game and Marley in ways that I want to. It allows me to make the fun, weird game I wanted to make originally. It allows me to walk away, and maybe return when I am at a better place to GM like I want to GM.<br/><br/>That is how I am feeling. I have been feeling this way for three weeks, since I submitted my notice to move. I am, in full transparency, <em>over</em> this game.</span>