I’m scrolling through my socials, flipping through old campaign notes, doing the kind of idle Sunday-night review I’ve done a hundred times before and then it hits me.
I haven’t DM’d regularly in months.
Not “haven’t DM’d as much as I’d like.” Not “took a short break.” I went from running games four-plus times a week to barely managing one session a week. That’s not a dip. That’s a collapse, and I only just noticed it happened.
The reason is life, obviously… it’s always life. But if I’m honest with myself, the biggest single reason is my job. At the library.
The Job I Love, and the Struggle
I want to be upfront: I love this job. I love the people I work with. I love the mission. None of what follows is me quitting in spirit, it’s me trying to figure out why something I care about has started to feel like a slog, and why that slog followed me home and sat down at my gaming table.
Here’s the thing we struggle with: consistency. Not effort, not intent… consistency. The follow-through that turns a good idea into a working system.
I’ve seen resources go toward things that look impressive on paper, while smaller, more frequently-used needs, the headsets people actually rely on, parking support for programs people actually show up to, sit further down the list. I don’t think that’s malicious or even unusual. It’s a familiar shape for how funding decisions tend to work at scale, and it’s one of the first cracks that made me start looking at the bigger picture instead of just my own corner of it.
I want to be clear that most of what I’m describing here isn’t a five-alarm fire, plenty of it is minor, the kind of friction any workplace has. But it’s the accumulation of small things, and what they added up to for me personally, that I want to talk through.
I used to think my own campaign prep was disorganized. Loose threads, half-finished notes, sessions I winged more than I’d like to admit. Then I spent a few years watching how actual institutions I’ve worked with in the past handle planning and follow-through, and… yeah.
My “disorganized” looks like a military operation by comparison. That realization was oddly clarifying. It’s also exactly the kind of realization that makes you start canceling your own game night, because if consistency doesn’t matter here, why am I killing myself to be consistent anywhere else?
Suffering from Success
For years, I ran a weekly TTRPG program at the library. It wasn’t a side project, it was the anchor of my week, both professionally and personally. Five-plus years running, with attendance numbers better than most other programming in the building. It was proof, if anyone needed it, that “nerdy” programming isn’t a niche curiosity. It’s a draw.
Then it got cancelled and almost immediately, there is a need to do programming. A mad dash if you will to get something down.
That’s the part that still gets me. Not that priorities shift… priorities always shift… It’s that the shift came with zero acknowledgment that the thing being cut was the thing that was actually working.
The Bilingual Connection
On top of that, there’s my bilingual title. I speak Spanish, I do translation on-site, and I run classroom programs with the option to teach them in Spanish. It’s a skill I’m proud of and genuinely happy to use.
The problem is how it is brought up, almost like leverage. I often read between the lines and feel compelled to do things due to the lingering feeling of it being held against me. I know it may just as well be my own head thinking these things.
My title leaves me in a position where I feel stuck sometimes. My TTRPG program wasn’t run in Spanish, and around the same time, there was a real push toward outreach programming instead. I don’t know that those two things were actually connected… it might just be my own head drawing a line between them where there isn’t one.
Still, the feeling of that connection was enough to make me second-guess whether the thing I’d spent five years building was actually valued, or just tolerated because it worked.
I want to sit with that for a second, because it’s almost funny in a bleak way. I’m the person who built numbers here. I’m also the person who spent years pushing management to fix the parking situation.
We’re attached to a city parking lot, and the single most common complaint from patrons is that they don’t want to pay ten dollars to park for a two-to-three-hour class. It’s a small, solvable-feeling problem, and I’ve spent years pushing for it to get more attention than it has. I don’t think it’s unique to us, a lot of institutions carry a handful of small frictions like this that never quite rise to the top of the priority list, even when the people closest to the ground keep flagging them.
Where the Fun Went
I’m aware this has turned into a rant. Let me name what it’s actually about: my job has quietly drained the fun out of a thing I used to build my whole week around being open, curious, and a little experimental with TTRPG programming.
It’s not that leadership is hostile to the idea. It’s that they don’t see it as worth understanding… and somewhere in that gap between “not understanding” and “not caring to,” the fun started leaking out of my own DMing too.
I respect my managers. I want to say that clearly, because this isn’t about any one person. But I find the lack of vision genuinely discouraging. There’s a real crackdown on creativity and self-directed expression, paired with a push to do everything off-site, and the combined effect is that prepping and planning… the parts of this job I used to love… Now it feels like a chore.
The Corporate Machine and the Block
Here’s the part that stings most: the place that used to feel like a genuine home for exploration and learning has, in moments, started to feel more like a system focused on ideas and policy than on the day-to-day experience of the people actually doing the work. I don’t think that’s unique to us either, it’s a pattern I’ve noticed in a lot of larger institutions, mine included, where good intentions can get lost somewhere between the meeting room and the front desk.
I’m writing this to parse my own thoughts, honestly, because I do love this job. I love the people I work with. I love what we’re building, even when the “we” doesn’t always include the people making the decisions. I’m just discouraged, and a little depressed, that something I used to find energizing has become a slog.
And that feeling didn’t stay contained at work. It followed me to the table.
Call it a DM block if you want, but it’s not the block people usually mean. I’m not out of story, as I’ve had years to write, plan, and stockpile ideas I haven’t even touched yet. This isn’t a creative well running dry.
It’s a Motivation Block. A depletion of the specific kind of energy it takes to push back, to advocate for the thing you love, to make DMing feel fresh and rewarding again instead of one more obligation competing for the same tired hours.
I don’t have a clean ending for this one. I’m still in it. But naming it is the first step toward getting back to the table and maybe, if you’re reading this and nodding along, it’s worth naming for yourself to.
– Reign
PS: Lots of love to my library staff and any librarians out there. You guys are champions and I know we’re working hard to make things work.