When we GM we also have expectations around a game and because we take a good bunch of our time thinking on the table and not the scenes passed around it, we end up feeling frustrated if a game aspect we carefully thought fail to deliver what we expected it to.

In your case your expectations seem to have been frustrated by the cards not enticing the reaction you wanted them too, even though they made a blast of a game for the players.

Don’t hang your gm life on this, consider that a successfully game also requires your own expectations to be met, perhaps the cards system or text size was not enough to entice, but I for one would have a hard time reacting to cards, simply because they are passive, if you described the events I would most surely react. I find my players to be much the same, anything I want them to react to should be described and not simply wrote down and passed around.

We are all 50s wives in a sense but when the game table time comes, we are that 50s husband, forget the process to create the food at the table and eat it to your heart’s content.

I think it has a lot to do with whether the players manage to surpass your own expectations of the game. When this happens to me I ask myself, “Knowing now what happened, what might I have done differently?”

- Sometimes it’s the location and amount of noise / distraction.

- Sometimes it’s acting early to nip a behavior in the bud. One game I ran had two players constantly tweeting instead of role playing; after I asked them not to, the game became a lot more fun for me.

- Sometimes it’s my plot, my pacing or how I structured the character sheets.

- Sometimes it’s just the mix of players you have, or how tired people are.

- Sometimes it’s all about expectation management.

I don’t think you should beat yourself up about this. Figure out what would have fixed the problem, or at least what started it, and run the game a second time.

– Kevin