I am roughly a week out from kicking off a new campaign, which means it’s time to face my perennial GMing bugbear: the enthusiasm gap. Fact is, especially before the game has started, no one is as excited about the game you’re about to run as you are, and no one is going to display as much enthusiasm about your game as you are feeling. As well as it will all come together when it gets started, the last bits of prep before starting a game are almost always a bit of an exercise in isolation.

I will start out by saying that intellectually I’m aware this isn’t actually a problem. None of my players know what the game is yet, or what it can be. To be honest I don’t know what the game is going to be quite yet either, but reading and prepping and aligning gets you excited for a game, and I’ve already once pivoted in order to point myself in the direction I was most excited about. I am fucking brimming with ideas about this game, and every time one of my players posts something on our Discord it makes me a bit giddy. When I see that some people don’t even bother to RSVP to the event, though, it sets me on edge, even if that’s neither abnormal nor does it translate to enthusiasm or lack thereof. The start of the game is when I’m most feeling ‘everybody come with me!’ but that’s not really how things work.

First off, we’re a remote group. During the week everyone is in a different place with work and family responsibilities, and that means some are just going to go quiet. It is what it is. Second, this is one of the tradeoffs with consistently running different games in different genres and playstyles: Most of the time the next game will be someone’s first time playing, and when it’s not it’s usually because the whole group already played. In this particular case, I’m running a game that I’ve run before which this group has never played (at least not this edition). I’ve set myself up for an enthusiasm mismatch to a particularly acute level, and especially before the game has even started I need to remind myself that this makes sense.

GMing any game is work, and one reason the work is still fun is that you get to invest in your world and your storytelling. Before anyone else, you’re developing an image in your head and ideas about how everything’s going to go. In any game, but especially in a PbtA game where you’re turning over some of the world and some of the storytelling to your players, it’s natural that the enthusiasm gap makes you nervous. Even so, it is asymmetrical. I need to keep telling myself that. I’m setting up the little arena, and my players are bringing in the ideas. And the ideas I’ve so far heard from my players are very good.

It is also to be expected that this is a tough time to start a game, namely right after ending another one. We’re coming off of an over three year run, and we have just completely wiped the slate clean. With two new games, one of them is coming off of a one-shot run last year at our in-person gaming weekend, a solid one-shot that not only was enjoyed but also set up reasonable expectations for what that game would look like in a long-running campaign. Meanwhile, I’ve decided to run a game in a genre that, for all intents and purposes, is completely new to this group.

Is this pre-campaign self-soothing? Probably. I’ve gotten very invested. I’ve been watching YouTube documentaries on the city where the game will be set, writing and rewriting character keepers with autofilling segments and little scripts, and reading and rereading all the playbooks to get ready for a game that I inevitably have no idea what it’ll actually look like. I’m very excited about this game, but I don’t know how far my excitement is going to pull things on its own. I want this to be a game that really takes on a life of its own, but of course I can’t know if everything is going to come together in that way when we haven’t created characters and we haven’t gone through any of the initial prep at all.

Every time I plan a new game, it’s an explosion of possibility where anything can happen. When the players come in, it begins to collapse into a more distinct shape, one we’re all molding as we go. But when I’m sitting alone, getting everything ready and waiting for everyone to come to the table, is the exact moment I’m most afraid that all we’ll have is a wet lump of clay.