Taking a hiatus from RPGs

I'm going to take a hiatus from the weekend roleplay gatherings for at least a couple months, because one of them got canceled, and I haven't really been enjoying the other these last three or four months. (I should note that I was only out of availability for about a month and a half to two months.)

There are a few reasons I've been losing interest. (In no particular order of significance)

* As a DM, I enjoy story more than mechanics. As a player, I enjoy roleplaying more than combat and treasure hunting. The nature of the current group invariably tends towards combat and treasure hunting. If the group spends most of a session around roleplaying, most of the players get itchy and want to skip forward to the combat. (Heck, many of the character concepts revolve around pushing plot forward by applying force to a contact.)

I can't fault one player for looking for experience and increasing his characters power, and I can't fault another for being bored with mechanically mundane characters. That's their style, and that's what they enjoy. The one would say "That's *adventuring*", and the other would offer to play toned down characters (if I were DM), but he can't help but take even a tame character and find ways to tweak them. And, yes, adventurers and heroes aren't *normal* characters; They're adventuring and/or heroic. But character stat engineering has to be done in moderation, or it creates a character with too significantly more power and presence than the rest of the party, which leads to a monopolization of accomplishment and other players' sense of participation.

* I like to think and solve problems with at-hand tools in a rapid-fire fashion, and combat doesn't present any kind of problem that operates at sufficient speed. It doesn't seem to matter what the makeup of the group is, or what the skill levels of the players are, six rounds of combat always equals at least forty minutes of real world gameplay. As a player, that's a decision every six minutes and forty seconds at its most frequent, unless I get involved in the metacombat strategy discussion, which is usually dominated by one or two other players. I get *bored*.

As a DM, I don't get bored, but I don't have the time to invest in developing encounters in advance to be able to *challenge* you people without adding arbitrary numbers of bad guys or monsters 2 or more CR higher than the party is supposed to handle. Yes, I know I'm supposed to present five or so smaller combats per D&D "day", but that's like walking from point A to point B in a console RPG. Walk-walk-RANDOM ENCOUNTER-walk-walk-RANDOM ENCOUNTER-walk-walk...Where's the freakin' story? No, the party isn't necessarily going to be Big Enough Named for someone plot-oriented to supply the means for even half of those required encounters over a given period of time.

* Players don't want to be challenged.

Even sadder? Most players don't even *like* to be challenged on a regular basis. They get too invested in their characters, and if a character dies, they get pissed. If they see the death coming, and ultimately can't avoid it (can't heal in time, got hit by a lucky critical, etc.), they retroactively critique every action by the DM in a "My character wouldn't have died if you hadn't made *this* mistake, or if we'd remembered *that* rule, so he really shouldn't be dead." I don't care about this so much myself, because I see my job as to focus on the players, and not so much take advantage of the Guardian Of Dungeon acronym. But it pisses me off to watch those same tactics get used against DMs who are trying to take their equal share of play enjoyment.

So how is all that related to "Players don't want to be challenged"? In order for a player to be challenged, there has to be a risk of *character death*. If the players are going to fight tooth and nail after the dice have already been rolled, then they obviously didn't accept that risk to their character. I also wish players would stop sulking after rules lawyering arguments don't pan out to their character's benefit. Socially, sulking is even louder than the shouting that went on a few minutes earlier, and it *completely* kills the mood and enthusiasm of everyone in the room.


No "*I* wasn't doing X" comments are necessary or should even be made; I'm announcing hiatus and venting. If it wasn't you doing *X*, either I wasn't talking about you, or you're quibbling with my interpretation of events. And quibbling about such things won't solve anything right now; It's a emotional/social problem, not a linguistic or technical one.