There are two components to the enjoyment of running a game, speaking as a DM.
The first and most obvious is when you sit down and share the world that you have created with your players. The second, which you come to appreciate after you have spent some time doing the job for a while, is the longer, more involved process of crafting these stories during the times when you are not sitting at the table with dice in hand.
More than once, I've found myself drifting off at work or in the car, immersing myself in the labyrinthine possibilities within my stories. I often find that this pursuit becomes my mental "screen saver", if you will. If nothing else pressing is going on, my mind often turns to my next session and the story I am planning to tell.
All in all, this is a good thing. I think putting thought into your story over a longer period of time results in a richer, more thoughtful product.
But there is a pitfall. A few, actually.
Again, the most obvious is that you should never get so engrossed in the alternate reality that you are creating that you start to ignore the real one that always surrounds you.
The second, and again less obvious, is the one I wanted to address today. Sometimes, these elaborate schemes you concoct during your down time are simply too much. Either you are trying to shoe-horn too much stuff into your allotted game time, or you've unwittingly overloaded one aspect of the story (e.g. - One hour of intrigue? Good. Five hours at a stretch? Stops being intriguing).
The solution to this very common pitfall is this: read your party.
I have wasted countless, precious hours of my life, sitting at a gaming table, patiently enduring an adventure that no one in the party wanted to play. The signs of this were always obvious. People started surfing the internet or flipping listlessly through a rule book. Some would elaborately position and arrange their dice, others would get up from the table altogether.
Not good.
I try to remain sensitive to my party's demeanor when I run a game. With the best of intentions, I sometimes come up with something that they simply aren't feeling. Instead of ramming it down their collective craw, I am willing to sacrifice my precious creation and come up with something more titillating. Such departures don't have to be vast. If the party seems tired of rolling dice and looking at a grid, turn that dragon fight into a social interaction. Tired of doing detective work to find a killer? Have one of the suspects start a bar fight to get everyone's blood pumping.
The trick is to do something different without smashing your story to bits. Avoid huge plot changes (improvisational dungeon-mastering always works better on a small scale), think your way through it (I suggest a 20 minute food-break to get your thoughts in order and get your new "on the fly" plan together), and have fun.
After you've done it a couple times, it gets easy to do. And trust me: your players will thank you.
