RPGs are weird in the ways they call upon you to use your brain, and certain ways are more tiring or harder for some people or with certain systems. Most folks are familiar with games that have too many rules to remember, or lots of math to do as being fatiguing. There’s also the common but rarely recognized issue of creative fatigue of having to come up with stuff where a system is not giving enough support to meet the demands of play.
However, there’s also facilitation fatigue, which typically falls on GMs in traditional rpg structures, but to some level in any RPG with a GM, and includes things like:
- Coordinating scheduling / wrangling player confirmations, etc.
- Taking & updating campaign notes
- Teaching rules/mechanics
- Handling group dynamics when things are going off track
Ideally in this structure, as the group becomes more fluent in communication, process, and the game system in play, these burdens lessen for a GM. You can read a lot of frustrated threads or posts online of GMs where this isn’t happening and usually that’s a sign of dysfunction happening in play.
Even when things are going right, some games just have higher demands in this regard than others. For example, if you’re playing the classic dungeoncrawl game where the GM has a map, but the players have to draw their own map, there’s going to be a lot of situations where the GM has to explain things when the players’ maps do not match the situation. (And, for me, this is the #1 reason I don’t care to play that way, it’s a lot of time spent not actually dealing with the part of play I’m interested in).
You can also see in some cases where game groups lock into a place of being insular socially and unwilling to try new games because sanding the edges of the facilitation work took them months or years to do and they’re afraid it will be just as difficult for every other game. Socially this can be where there are long standing communication issues among the group, mentally if the hurdles to learning the rules was high to begin with, etc.
There’s a lot of ways designers can reduce the workload here: write your games to help the teaching and absorption of rules, reducing the play footprint (how long you have to play in a session, making the game more resilient to missing players), reduce/spread out work of tracking things, best practices for groups in terms of things that might become communication sticking points in play. You can see a lot of these issues disappear for many indie games, though the ones that hew closer to the standard GM/player model tend to suffer similar problems, and I think it’s become one of the larger areas design should address given how much we’ve learned over the decades.
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