Hi there! This is an open discussion/story-telling/support thread for any fellow ttrpg enthusiasts, DM's or PC's who have or have played with others who suffer under mental illness! Please, keep all comments, replies or stories in good heart towards those who suffer from mental illnesses, I'd rather hope that this post, if it becomes any popular, is used as support for those who need it or want to know about it :)!
I've been in the know about D&D ever since I was in middle school years ago, but I really finally got into it roughly 12-13 months ago. In this time, I've gladly taken to DM'ing; world building, roleplaying, monster-making?! It's a passion of love and pain of mine. Over the last year, I've learned how deeply important it is on knowing how to communicate well with your players, keep an open and compassionate understanding about availability, and most importantly figuring out how to build the game according to what your players seek out of it.
My first and last group consisted of a random assortment of players; at first, I had 12 interested members last summer whom never made it to any of our games. One day, back in a fateful July day at my local TTRPG themed coffee house, a couple close friends of mine showed up with different purposes and after being consulted, showed great interest in playing; thus began my party!
As fun as the last year has been, game wise, (but that'd probably only consist of about 20 or so sessions considering player availability was incredibly low throughout multiple 3-4 month periods,) It nearly ended horribly back in late December/early January, and finally came to a screeching halt just about five weeks back. I've figured out why I've faced so many problems in attempting to DM for my friends throughout the last year; I have ADD, and as a DM, mental illness is one tough cookie to chew through.
Earlier, last summer in my bright-eyed ignorance as to what D&D actually played like, I only had a couple productions to go off of; Critical Role, The Adventure Zone, and a couple random podcasts and streamed games. I faced the ordeal of obtaining players who could play reasonably consistently, and this is because I didn't know how to ask for availability; I saw myself as the player and my players as the game-runners, that I simply prepared stories for them and they'd work them out. I misunderstood communication tactics, DM productivity and held worries on whether or not anybody actually liked me after only having one to two people show up per session, never the same people as the week before.
Later, when I had finally found a group large enough to run, I remember something key and vital to that session; it worked as both session 0 and 1. We talked about characters, I spewed a little bit about the setting to them, and spent half an hour bumbling my way through trying to tell them how they found their ways to this small fishing hamlet. After a fire began to erupt out of the windows and roof of the Noble's castle, only a half a mile away, I spent ten minutes discussing what it was like running to the castle, the specific details about the marsh they were in, etc. When they finally got there, I had an elven knight pull them aside, rather than running in and rescuing the Nobles, I spent five minutes trying to find a voice for the elves; a sort of mix between surfer dude and uptight british man. I slapped them away, sent them up into the castle, and spent a solid minute describing how shiny the tiles of the castle were; are you beginning to see a consistent problem with how I ran the game? All of this could have taken no more than ten minutes if I was prepared fully, if I hadn't ADD'ed about every little detail in my setting, it would have gone better.
Only two players showed up after that week.
Two weeks later is when two friends randomly appeared in the same TTRPG themed coffee shop as I was in, and that was the beginning of my consistent group that lasted up until the first week of April.
During this time, in September, the players found themselves on the Arcane plain, wandering about gargantuan rocks heading towards a massive stone ship. Once there, I presented a city with plenty to explore and many items and encounters to uncover; all of this went to waste as my party's paladin drove the party straight towards the center goal, a homebrewed fight heavily based off of the "Last Wish" raid from Destiny 2: Forsaken. A mage DMPC, an "arcane cleric" who did what clerics could but just with arcane magic, became a thrall to the boss of the city, a powerful White boned Gold scaled and purple skinned dragon named Rhyvon. This Dragon was particularly fond to me, and I still have the Ancient White dragon model that I had painted to look like her standing up on a shelf next to my bed :^). What happaned was she could grant any wish, and her whole mechanic was tempting the players by getting in their heads and offering what they most desired throughout the fight; one player actually said yes, which I applaud most definitely to; the balls she had to do that out loud rather than over text, it brings a tear to my eye thinking about how great of a character moment that was :,). Before the party began to even fight the shadowy figure of their once friendly DMPC arcane cleric, our bard yelled out "Rhyvon! I wish that you let all of us out of here without harm!"
I genuinely was baffled, stood up, turned my back to the table and just held my chin, thinking about what the hell I was supposed to do after that.
So, I sent them on their ways, forced cursed items on them that took up attunement slots up and couldn't be taken off until either fully realized in power or deconstructed through a long and egregious ritual. Anyways, after this, I had plans for special Halloween themed monsters, but that never happened because in the first week of October, my party's bard picked everything up and ran from the group in the middle of the night whilst pretending to watch out for the group. This was probably the best time my players had, because my Bard was found unconscious being put onto a cart in the nearest town by a couple of thugs. My party genuinely got pissed, and it was found out that the same thieves guild that two of my players were from from a separate city was operating in this city too, but with much more heavily violent tactics being lead by tremendously corrupt individuals. My party ate this plot up, but... The city got attacked by occultists after I forced an in-game month to pass between two sessions :^) what a dumb heckin' idea on my part. Anyways, I pushed past this and gave my party a couple new problems to deal with; the Sea-elf monk, a team badass, got "killed" and turned into a "Feral sea-elf" who essentially just looks like Sylvanas from WoW but w/full yellow eyes and blue skin... BTW when I say she got "killed" it was after she used missile grab on a magic necrotic arrow which zapped her life forces instantly after combat, downing her w/only a con save to possibly save her. I'm glad this player took this dumbass idea of a mechanic and turned it into character growth about her monk's wisdom and capability to trust others and herself. Anyways, on top of this, one week whilst a player was gone during this city attack, her PC got snatched by the occultist BBEG and was given a spirit scar on her right hand;
To explain, her character was a Kalishtari Wild magic Sorcerer, so this spirit scar was the result of a botched ritual attempting to remove her spirit and resurrect her original spirit she was born with, her human spirit...
Anyways, these ideas are dumb, and the amount of quests I loaded up onto my PC's plates was abysmal to them because the more it went, the more my monk told me that she felt like "I was punishing them for not having killed Rhyvon and going with my Halloween quest." In a sort of sense, I was, and I hadn't even fully realized it yet. This, is what bad communication can do to a party when a DM loses what it means to run a game; it's not about telling my story as a DM, it's about telling a story to the party, and letting them run with it and figure it out through their own means. This lack of investment in the campaign lead the party to a three month hiatus from January to March, but then we only got in about three or so more sessions after March before we all finally realized that it was time to call it quits.
Being a DM with ADD has affected me in many ways, leaving me with countless days of just downness, emotional deprivation induced by social anxiety that I lead myself to believe after causing mistakes in my party... I've learned it's OK to mess up, and it's OK for PC's to derail your plans!! Over-ambition as a DM can lead to helicopter DM'ing of your players, or even absolute disappointment in the fact that the 30 hours you spent building that one encounter, or the 10 you spent constructing stats for a BBEG and obtaining the model and the 10 more hours you spent painting are all now at waste-side because of a change in the player's actions. I've learned that DM'ing can take up most of my time if I let it, but that it's better to jot down bullet points of a quest and let your players figure things out respectably on their own. ADD's caused plenty of disruptions in gameplay; sometimes, one friend who's not even playing makes a snarky remark about something and pulls my attention from running the game, or that my decision to go all out with descriptions of the player's surroundings leads to an abundance of problems gameplay wise in that I never give players the opportunity to interact with their surroundings; because of my ADD, there have been plenty of times that I've forgotten whilst planning my games that D&D is a multi-player TTRPG, not a Bioware-made video game, or Tolkien lead masterpiece; party's are going to be rough with each other, they'll disrupt the flow of the game too, and it's important to understand how to either focus on that or flow past it.
So, that's my shpeel on DM'ing and ADD! I'd like to ask to any readers if they've encountered problems like this themselves, or to those who have played with or been DM'ed by somebody with a mental illness how this can affect gameplay and how you as a DM, or a PC can help these problems and move along with the game!
Have you considered running a dungeon crawl? It might help with narrowing down varied storylines, and there is a lot of stuff out there to help make them quickly, so preparing a dungeon crawl isn't too hard, even if it's purely improvised you could use a random encounter generator
You could also try using pre-made modules (to keep you focused on a central storyline) or doing one-shots for other variant storylines you come up with so that you dont have to keep track of multiple if you make one up
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Hi there! This is an open discussion/story-telling/support thread for any fellow ttrpg enthusiasts, DM's or PC's who have or have played with others who suffer under mental illness! Please, keep all comments, replies or stories in good heart towards those who suffer from mental illnesses, I'd rather hope that this post, if it becomes any popular, is used as support for those who need it or want to know about it :)!
I've been in the know about D&D ever since I was in middle school years ago, but I really finally got into it roughly 12-13 months ago. In this time, I've gladly taken to DM'ing; world building, roleplaying, monster-making?! It's a passion of love and pain of mine. Over the last year, I've learned how deeply important it is on knowing how to communicate well with your players, keep an open and compassionate understanding about availability, and most importantly figuring out how to build the game according to what your players seek out of it.
My first and last group consisted of a random assortment of players; at first, I had 12 interested members last summer whom never made it to any of our games. One day, back in a fateful July day at my local TTRPG themed coffee house, a couple close friends of mine showed up with different purposes and after being consulted, showed great interest in playing; thus began my party!
As fun as the last year has been, game wise, (but that'd probably only consist of about 20 or so sessions considering player availability was incredibly low throughout multiple 3-4 month periods,) It nearly ended horribly back in late December/early January, and finally came to a screeching halt just about five weeks back. I've figured out why I've faced so many problems in attempting to DM for my friends throughout the last year; I have ADD, and as a DM, mental illness is one tough cookie to chew through.
Earlier, last summer in my bright-eyed ignorance as to what D&D actually played like, I only had a couple productions to go off of; Critical Role, The Adventure Zone, and a couple random podcasts and streamed games. I faced the ordeal of obtaining players who could play reasonably consistently, and this is because I didn't know how to ask for availability; I saw myself as the player and my players as the game-runners, that I simply prepared stories for them and they'd work them out. I misunderstood communication tactics, DM productivity and held worries on whether or not anybody actually liked me after only having one to two people show up per session, never the same people as the week before.
Later, when I had finally found a group large enough to run, I remember something key and vital to that session; it worked as both session 0 and 1. We talked about characters, I spewed a little bit about the setting to them, and spent half an hour bumbling my way through trying to tell them how they found their ways to this small fishing hamlet. After a fire began to erupt out of the windows and roof of the Noble's castle, only a half a mile away, I spent ten minutes discussing what it was like running to the castle, the specific details about the marsh they were in, etc. When they finally got there, I had an elven knight pull them aside, rather than running in and rescuing the Nobles, I spent five minutes trying to find a voice for the elves; a sort of mix between surfer dude and uptight british man. I slapped them away, sent them up into the castle, and spent a solid minute describing how shiny the tiles of the castle were; are you beginning to see a consistent problem with how I ran the game? All of this could have taken no more than ten minutes if I was prepared fully, if I hadn't ADD'ed about every little detail in my setting, it would have gone better.
Only two players showed up after that week.
Two weeks later is when two friends randomly appeared in the same TTRPG themed coffee shop as I was in, and that was the beginning of my consistent group that lasted up until the first week of April.
During this time, in September, the players found themselves on the Arcane plain, wandering about gargantuan rocks heading towards a massive stone ship. Once there, I presented a city with plenty to explore and many items and encounters to uncover; all of this went to waste as my party's paladin drove the party straight towards the center goal, a homebrewed fight heavily based off of the "Last Wish" raid from Destiny 2: Forsaken. A mage DMPC, an "arcane cleric" who did what clerics could but just with arcane magic, became a thrall to the boss of the city, a powerful White boned Gold scaled and purple skinned dragon named Rhyvon. This Dragon was particularly fond to me, and I still have the Ancient White dragon model that I had painted to look like her standing up on a shelf next to my bed :^). What happaned was she could grant any wish, and her whole mechanic was tempting the players by getting in their heads and offering what they most desired throughout the fight; one player actually said yes, which I applaud most definitely to; the balls she had to do that out loud rather than over text, it brings a tear to my eye thinking about how great of a character moment that was :,). Before the party began to even fight the shadowy figure of their once friendly DMPC arcane cleric, our bard yelled out "Rhyvon! I wish that you let all of us out of here without harm!"
I genuinely was baffled, stood up, turned my back to the table and just held my chin, thinking about what the hell I was supposed to do after that.
So, I sent them on their ways, forced cursed items on them that took up attunement slots up and couldn't be taken off until either fully realized in power or deconstructed through a long and egregious ritual. Anyways, after this, I had plans for special Halloween themed monsters, but that never happened because in the first week of October, my party's bard picked everything up and ran from the group in the middle of the night whilst pretending to watch out for the group. This was probably the best time my players had, because my Bard was found unconscious being put onto a cart in the nearest town by a couple of thugs. My party genuinely got pissed, and it was found out that the same thieves guild that two of my players were from from a separate city was operating in this city too, but with much more heavily violent tactics being lead by tremendously corrupt individuals. My party ate this plot up, but... The city got attacked by occultists after I forced an in-game month to pass between two sessions :^) what a dumb heckin' idea on my part. Anyways, I pushed past this and gave my party a couple new problems to deal with; the Sea-elf monk, a team badass, got "killed" and turned into a "Feral sea-elf" who essentially just looks like Sylvanas from WoW but w/full yellow eyes and blue skin... BTW when I say she got "killed" it was after she used missile grab on a magic necrotic arrow which zapped her life forces instantly after combat, downing her w/only a con save to possibly save her. I'm glad this player took this dumbass idea of a mechanic and turned it into character growth about her monk's wisdom and capability to trust others and herself. Anyways, on top of this, one week whilst a player was gone during this city attack, her PC got snatched by the occultist BBEG and was given a spirit scar on her right hand;
To explain, her character was a Kalishtari Wild magic Sorcerer, so this spirit scar was the result of a botched ritual attempting to remove her spirit and resurrect her original spirit she was born with, her human spirit...
Anyways, these ideas are dumb, and the amount of quests I loaded up onto my PC's plates was abysmal to them because the more it went, the more my monk told me that she felt like "I was punishing them for not having killed Rhyvon and going with my Halloween quest." In a sort of sense, I was, and I hadn't even fully realized it yet. This, is what bad communication can do to a party when a DM loses what it means to run a game; it's not about telling my story as a DM, it's about telling a story to the party, and letting them run with it and figure it out through their own means. This lack of investment in the campaign lead the party to a three month hiatus from January to March, but then we only got in about three or so more sessions after March before we all finally realized that it was time to call it quits.
Being a DM with ADD has affected me in many ways, leaving me with countless days of just downness, emotional deprivation induced by social anxiety that I lead myself to believe after causing mistakes in my party... I've learned it's OK to mess up, and it's OK for PC's to derail your plans!! Over-ambition as a DM can lead to helicopter DM'ing of your players, or even absolute disappointment in the fact that the 30 hours you spent building that one encounter, or the 10 you spent constructing stats for a BBEG and obtaining the model and the 10 more hours you spent painting are all now at waste-side because of a change in the player's actions. I've learned that DM'ing can take up most of my time if I let it, but that it's better to jot down bullet points of a quest and let your players figure things out respectably on their own. ADD's caused plenty of disruptions in gameplay; sometimes, one friend who's not even playing makes a snarky remark about something and pulls my attention from running the game, or that my decision to go all out with descriptions of the player's surroundings leads to an abundance of problems gameplay wise in that I never give players the opportunity to interact with their surroundings; because of my ADD, there have been plenty of times that I've forgotten whilst planning my games that D&D is a multi-player TTRPG, not a Bioware-made video game, or Tolkien lead masterpiece; party's are going to be rough with each other, they'll disrupt the flow of the game too, and it's important to understand how to either focus on that or flow past it.
So, that's my shpeel on DM'ing and ADD! I'd like to ask to any readers if they've encountered problems like this themselves, or to those who have played with or been DM'ed by somebody with a mental illness how this can affect gameplay and how you as a DM, or a PC can help these problems and move along with the game!
Have you considered running a dungeon crawl? It might help with narrowing down varied storylines, and there is a lot of stuff out there to help make them quickly, so preparing a dungeon crawl isn't too hard, even if it's purely improvised you could use a random encounter generator
You could also try using pre-made modules (to keep you focused on a central storyline) or doing one-shots for other variant storylines you come up with so that you dont have to keep track of multiple if you make one up