Babble: D&D and a reflection on the year without (too much) burnout

 In October, I wrote a blog post about my tracking of hours I spend preparing for DM-ing D&D. I'd like to share the final tally in this post and babble a bit about 2023.

In many ways, 2023 was a shit show. So many things went wrong in life at and away from the D&D table. But there has been some highlights too: The successful conclusion of my longest-running Dragon Heist campaign, 43 sessions in my South African TNO campaign, and the fact that I may have skirted burnout but didn't actually hit it.

I think what helped was that I was more cognisant of the time I'm actually spending preparing, playing and running games. I logged as much as I thought was sensible, so not everything, but mostly everything. It showed me when I naturally slumped and shouldn't be hard on myself for not doing more. It showed me the times I have energy and made me excited to capitalise on it.

So while the year was awful, my experiment in being mindful about how much time I'm dedicating to this game I like was a success.

Of 142 hours spent prepping/working on D&D-related things, I spent a total of 123 hours prepping my homebrew in 2023. Adding my time DM-ing to that 142 and I spent 228 hours prepping and running D&D games. This is not all the time I've spent on the game - I've played in other people's games too (and yes, I logged that as well) - but this is the time where I was basically being creative. It tallies up to about 10 full days, though I don't find that final stat particularly interesting.