I don’t usually talk about guild stuff OR srs bzns here, but you’re getting both today.  Lucky you.

For various reasons, I recently stepped down as GM.

The first reason was real life pressures. I am going to have considerably less time in the upcoming months, and just can’t be there to do all the things.

But the second reason, and the most important reason, is that I ran out of the will to care or, to put it bluntly, stopped giving a fuck.  Let me explain:

As a GM, I had plenty of help.  I had all the important tasks pretty much farmed out, so I wasn’t exhausted from running the guild on my own.  Some GM’s do that and that’s a recipe for burnout, very very fast.

Still, when you’re GM, random stuff comes up and it falls to you to deal with or guildies bring stuff to your attention.  Unlike in most guilds, the Snarkers don’t bug the GM with stupid shit, because they’re not whiners.  The STUFF that was coming in to me recently, from guildies or otherwise, hadn’t changed, but it hit me that my reaction had changed.  Rather than wanting to put on my fixing pants and get shit done (which could include delegating the crap out of the task), like I would have done a few months ago, I was thinking to myself… “Ugh do I HAVE to?”

It’s not you, it’s me.  For realsies. Thinking something along the lines of “shut up” or “go away” or “do not care” is a completely inappropriate reaction for a GM and a big fucking clue that you need to not be doing this GM job.

Upon this realization, I posted then and there that I needed to hand the keys over to someone else pronto because I was out of energy to care, and that was bad.  And then I set a deadline.  The logic behind the deadline is that we’re a democratic guild and we don’t actually have a procedure for picking a new GM, so the process could last until the end of time while we discuss how to do it, and even longer to actually implement the process and choose someone.  The threat behind the deadline, I said, was that if nobody was chosen by January 1, I was going to hand over the GM-ship to the first guildie I saw online, and run cackling into the night.  Yes, I said “cackling into the night.”

Well it worked.  Someone stepped up, nobody objected, and that was that.  I am pretty relieved.  Snark lives on.  And if/when the new GM runs out of the ability to care, I might have regained mine by then.