Astro ArtificerQuitting Dungeons and Dragons
It was 1 a.m. on a Friday night. An empty take-out box of Cane’s sat on my left, and I could feel the headset digging into my head. Worse yet was the subtly human-sounding static in my ears. “The villain does 12 damage to you. It’s now your turn. What do you do?” Like code words, I was activated like a sleeper agent shaken out of their comfortable stupor. “I roll to attack!”
The virtual D20 meandered across the screen. A 20 briefly flashed like a faraway star, but the twinkle was only for a moment. The 8 reared its ugly head. The virtual tabletop processed it faster than my brain could.
“You Missed”
A wave of emotions rushed into my brain. The strings that seemed to keep me up were suddenly cut, and I slumped back into my seat.
“Well, I’ll guess I’ll wait another hour for my turn”. That sentence reverberated in my head.
A chilling revelation crawled along my mind. I wasn’t frustrated by the roll. I was frustrated by how little it mattered, to the story, to the table, to anyone but the turn order.
This is the pattern I kept running into. I wasn’t playing the DnD I thought I was.The table I was at had forgotten what D&D actually is: a ritual where everyone shapes the story together
This essay is my attempt to understand why some D&D tables feel alive, and why others quietly fall apart.
A Ritual as Old as Time
A fire crackles. The night sky begins to envelop the heavens above. As you sit down next to the warm fire near the lip of the cave, you watch as your brother picks up a bowl filled with a dark red paste. He begins painting the events of today’s hunt, recounting how you almost got eaten by a bear, but managed to fell the ferocious beast with the help of the tribe. As the gentle visage of the animal appears, the events of the day race through your head. Exhausted, but more importantly, content, your eyelids begin to slowly drift into nothingness.
Story-telling is one of the timeless arts of humanity. It’s how we preserve emotions through time, and brings the storyteller and the listener closer together as both viscerally experience the story together. That aspect has never changed, but rather, only grown stronger over the years.
DnD is based on this eternal human ritual .
And that ritual breaks when people stop shaping the story together.
This is the core failure mode I kept seeing at the table.
TTRPGs are at their best when everyone at the table not only shares a resounding emotional experience, but is also the willful author in that story.
Meaning emerges when people share emotional stakes and real agency.
Most tables quietly fail, not because anyone is bad at the game, but because the system surrounding the game is brittle. Expectations stay implicit, and the DM is responsible for carrying all of the emotional burden on their back.
Burnout isn’t a character flaw.
It’s a bug in the system.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
A good table is not a happy accident.
It is a well-oiled social machine.
A machine, sure, but one made of humans. And humans run on meaning, safety, and belonging.
Lost in Translation
Pretend that you’re an alien with a universal translator for a second.
If somebody were to say that you were “pulling their leg” you would be quite confused as your hands were idle.
If they told you to watch out because “it’s raining cats and dogs”, you could glance at the sky and get a face full of raindrops, and not animals.
If they told you it was a “small world”, that actually might make some sense, as Earth is by no means a super giant.
The point being that even if you could understand English perfectly, a lot of meaning would be “lost in translation.”
That’s what happens when a table says “we’re playing D&D,” but everyone means something different. Fun is not guaranteed by the epic villains created, the maps drawn, or even the depth of the lore you created. It exists when:
- Players know what game they’re actually playing
- Their agency matters in the game
- Emotional signals are shared across the group.
The reason to drag five busy adults out of their already fully booked lives gets lost when we try to translate that meaning through the decorum of a tabletop RPG. Yes, life will pull people away. Work, kids, moves, promotions. Tables with real belonging make players fight to protect that time. When that belonging isn't there, when the translation fails, people don't argue. They just quietly disengage.
And disengagement is how good tables die quietly.
Misalignment kills meaning faster than lack of creativity ever could.
If a bucket is leaky, pouring more water isn’t going to fix the problem. Fixing the leak actually is.
Disengagement is the natural outcome when people feel like they don’t belong.
All Alone in a Crowded Room
When I moved to a new state for my job, I desperately wanted new friends. I saw a flood of apps promising connection, which was always some flavor of “hang out with strangers in a random setting”.
I quickly learned that spending your Saturday evening with a bunch of desperate singles, playing board games with expensive drinks didn’t really make me feel any less lonely. It just made the feeling worse.
That night I went to play DnD with my friends online. The jokes flowed like honey, I was watching with bated breath as my friends lived and died with their characters. It was exhilarating. Despite being thousands of miles apart, I felt like I belonged to something.
Loneliness doesn’t disappear because of proximity. It’s defeated by belonging to a community where your presence matters and your absence would be noticed.
That same principle is what makes or breaks a D&D table.
Tables survive when they create belonging, not just proximity.
TTRPGs matter because they are one of the last remaining rituals where adults:
- Gather intentionally
- Share emotional stakes
- Build identity through repeated shared experience
But rituals collapse without stability.
And stability requires design.
Money is the Root of All Meaning
When I say money is the root of all meaning, I don’t mean money creates meaning.
I mean money protects the conditions meaning needs: time, energy, continuity.
For professional DMs, that means having enough income to invest in your craft instead of burning out from unsustainable workloads.
Without it, even the most meaningful table eventually collapses.
A common saying is that you should “never make your passion your job”. It's well meaning, but it’s missing half the point. It’s because people connect the validity of one’s passions with outcomes that are out of their control. Suddenly, it becomes an emotional burden. “Nobody cares about what I care about”, and unsurprisingly they begin living the anti-vision of that quote. Make what you hate your job, because they’ll at least pay.
In the age of the internet, it’s never been easier to find your “ikigai”, or a reason to wake up in the morning. The reality is that somebody who can articulate why what they love should be important to others, is more valuable now than ever before, not because everyone will care, but because the right people will.
Beauty exists in the eye of the beholder, so it’s up to you to explain why it’s so breathtaking.
I used to think that it was impossible to make a living with DnD. I can clearly picture myself a decade ago, sitting with my friends inside some musky school hall, rolling dice, and embarking on epic adventures. Imagination was free after all, and we were all broke. But nowadays, with the advent of extremely successful DnD media, merchandise, and even professional DMs, I realized that TTRPGs were valuable.
If you’re a professional DM, you have a responsibility to give your players the best time they could possibly have. You also shouldn’t feel bad for charging more, but only if you are reasonably giving a much better experience. The alternative is this: you can continue on sharing your passion for the same amount, but you never go anywhere financially. Your life starts charging you rent for things out of your control, and the bill always comes due. You pay for it by spending less time on your campaign, shortcutting next week’s session, and at some point, you lose your table’s trust.
Burnout happens when DMs can't sustain the work financially or emotionally.
You burn out because you couldn’t put enough fuel in your tank.
Gold isn’t the point of the adventure.
But players still pick it up, because it’s proof.
Proof they survived. Proof their choices mattered. Proof the world responded.
In the real world, money can play the same role for a DM: proof your work creates a table people want to return to.
AI Makes the Human Stand Out
This isn’t an argument for AI, it’s an argument for protecting what only humans can do.
I don’t think AI is the end of human creativity.
If anything, it will make the truly exceptional stand out.
AI should absorb the mechanical load so humans can spend their attention where meaning is actually made.
With AI, and specifically Large Language Models, the barrier to entry for what was previously mechanical cognition has practically vanished. Tasks that once required time, stamina, or rote effort can now be handled instantly.
That doesn’t mean ideas matter less.
It means that the floor has risen, but the ceiling hasn’t moved.
The difference between average and great is taste. — Dan Koe
In a world where anyone can generate passable campaigns, outlines, or prep, what remains scarce is context. Judgment. Lived experience. The ability to know what matters and why.
Let me illustrate.
Your town suddenly becomes the hot new place to live. Construction signs appear everywhere. Traffic piles up. Then the chains arrive, McDonald’s, KFC, Starbucks. Familiar. Predictable. Efficient.
And then one day you notice a small local restaurant you’ve never heard of.
They sit you down and place a dish in front of you that stops you mid-bite. The kind of meal you don’t just eat, you remember. You know you’ll be back tomorrow. And the night after that.
AI enables the chains.
Taste builds the restaurant you return to.
Creativity dies under cognitive load. Your work doesn’t become better because you spent more time on it, especially when most people will never see that effort. What they remember instead are the moments when you are truly present.
Some cognitive work is mechanical:
rules tracking, admin, scheduling, summaries, damage calculations.
And for the first time, we have tools that can handle mechanical thinking extremely well.
That frees humans to do what machines cannot:
interpret meaning, hold emotional context, make value judgments, and show up fully.
In an age of artificiality, we are finally forced to confront what is actually human:
self-development, taste, and free will.
All art is an expression of lived experience.
Creativity is the remixing of everything you’ve been through.
LLMs should never replace your thinking.
They should protect it.
AI handles mechanical work so DMs can focus on the human work that creates meaning at the table.
Now, more than ever, it matters that you understand what makes you, you.
Escape Velocity
With a nervous gulp, the astronaut gently, yet firmly grasps the lever. Through the window, the jettisoned second stage disappears into the dark fabric of space behind him. The weight in their hands begins to shift forward, and their stomach suddenly drops like it’s trying to leave their body. The cockpit gradually begins to disappear, becoming a tunnel that seems to stretch on and on into nothing. Then it all returns to normal. The blue planet gradually morphs into a marble. The only thing left for the astronaut is the adventure set before him.
Escape velocity is defined as the amount of energy needed to overcome the gravitational well of the planet. Burnout, misalignment, and fragility are the gravity wells most tables never escape.
The Saturn V rocket used millions of pounds of liquid oxygen and hydrogen to reach the moon. Similarly in your own life, if you want to reach a new orbit, you will have to burn an impossibly large amount of fuel.
Designing better tables requires the same thing: enough fuel to escape the gravity of burnout, misalignment, and fragility. Come join me on this cosmic journey, as I design systems that keep tables together, because community is the true magic in DnD.
This is for DMs whose tables fell apart and don't know why. For professional DMs stuck at $20/seat watching players drift away. For working adults who love D&D but can't make it stick.The answer isn't working harder. It's designing better systems. Systems that create alignment, protect belonging, and let you build something sustainable.
If you're tired of watching good tables quietly fall apart, let's figure it out together.
Shoot for the moon. Not to get away from people, but to build something worth coming back to.
Until Next Time,
— Astro Artificer —
