Because we can't...(sort of)

In my interests is a little game called dungeons and dragons. This is prolly the thing that I do the most besides dicking around on the internet and watching movies (bad and good). Once a week we gather and play. Course there is more than simply playing. The extension of yourself via your character, the collective story telling that only comes when one person directs 2 or more people in epic battles and bar brawls. I you haven't played you should and if you don't play enough then you should. The other half of the coin is the DM. All joking aside they may be running something they bought or something they made from scratch. Their job is to create and give you the player the ability to interact with another world so to say. Sadly this is something I have done less and less over the last few years. One of the problems I have seen other DMs face is that they have all this material and never the time to do it. One reason is availability of players. Most times people can get together once or twice a week. Factor in other DMs and then other groups (depending on how many) and you may not get to things often. This brings the old paragram that groups that only meet sporadically or in between months at a time face. The old "what were we doing" bit. Often players lose interest and just don't care anymore (no mo no mo). Instead of being honest they continue to just kinda go with the flow of things. This makes it harder for the DM and sometimes ends campaigns all together. Resources like "Obsidian Portal" help alleviate some of these issues with the ability to put up adventure logs and the like. Even with this player boredom wins every time. Another is when the players (especially when there are few of them) become to awesome too fast and basically run the table as it were. This can be controlled but never eliminated altogether. With veteran players this is especially hard. The encounters a player goes through need to be at least challenging even with the smaller groups. This means the reward needs to be scaled to keep balance but doing so hardcore alienates players. In large groups the bit is that equipment and rewards are distributed to the whole which means people aren't always toting around rings of power. The downside to this is that a player who sets up a hard path for their character instead of taking the path to more power faster finds themselves having a hard time. This frustrates them and often leads to characters being abandoned and other more power gamed ones in their place. Story wise this kills things to a point but so does character death or players who decide to stop playing. This later problem affects the DM the most; though the players feel it too. Years ago I had a largeish group and through reasons only known to them they decided that they would play other groups with other people and were never seen again. Okay so maybe never seen but they made it clear that there was things they want to do and I wasn't part of that. Players who lose interest also hurt cause you often will put in time to teach them only to later on have that time ultimately wasted. Players out of reach also bring in hard times as they may want to play but can't and ultimately someone or someones will have to make concessions to keep the game going (or in most cases just stop altogether). These and other reasons that I can't come up with at the moment are some ways that the game can get annoying and take a toll on one after a while. The payoff is still worth it most of the time though. "It's only after we lose everything that we're free to do anything"