« We're Famous! | Main | Kobayashi Maru Play »
May 17, 2004
Gaming Less Or More But Enjoying It More Or Less, Or What?
Hey, folks. Jim and Bryant asked me if I'd like to join in, and upon consideration, I decided "Sure!" So here I am. I'm going to do one of the traditionally weaselly things and open with some questions.
In recent years, have you been gaming more or less than in the chunk of years before that? Has the fraction of really satisfying sessions grown or shrunk? Are you experimenting more or less with unfamiliar games, styles, approaches, etc.?
One of the big unknowns for both the gaming business and for external analysis and speculation is how much folks' play over time actually does change, and in what ways. Do we learn from our experiences how to avoid trouble and get more of what we want? Do we learn how to make use of changing circumstances to have fun even if it's not in the ways that we used to?
Lay some info on me.
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8342026ca53ef00e5501e036c8833
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Gaming Less Or More But Enjoying It More Or Less, Or What?:
Comments
I am gaming more. Satisfying sessions -- about the same, more or less. I am trying way more different things.
I blame all of this on moving to a new city, and doubt it would have happened without that impetus.
Posted by: Bryant at May 17, 2004 5:55:59 PM
I'm definitely gaming less, but it's been "less" for quite a few years now. The main reason? No pool of good players/GMs in a reasonable distance, since I'm not in a big urban area. I have one good group I game with monthly by driving a couple of hours, and they're great, but I think I'd be happier gaming a bit more often (so more games could be tried out) and with less time chopped off the day for travel.
Posted by: Michael Curry at May 17, 2004 8:17:14 PM
I'm gaming less, the same and more. Less: I'm not in any PBEMs any more. Playing or running PBEMs took hours a day most days. The same: still the "same" Wednesday night game session I've been attending for something like 6 years. More: When Nate put his Amber campaign on hiatus, the group shrank. I loved playing Amber, but with seven do-your-own-thing PCs in a weekday evening, it often meant a total of around a half-hour's spotlight time apiece. Now that we are down to 4-5 participants, with 3-4 showing up most weeks (playing MURPG), I end up with more actual gaming time on those nights I'm a player. (As official campaign alpha GM, my player nights are rare.)
Enjoying it more or less? More. The truncated player roster is the best, most sympatico gaming group I've been part of in 20 years.
Oh hey: welcome, Bruce!
Posted by: Jim Henley at May 17, 2004 9:46:32 PM
I am gaming, well differently. 25-25 years ago gaming was an all the time affair. I had a moderately sized group of like minded friends who all wanted to get together and game all the time. When we all discovered girls we also discovered girls who gamed. No problem.
Then one day about 10 years ago I stopped gaming altogether. I became more and more interested in the simulation than the gaming and steadily increased the detail and complexity until there was no game left. I spent a lot of energy writing software and talking about game theory. No more gaming.
Then, about the time that D&D 3E came out, I became re-energized with respect to gaming. I realized that a lot of my earlier ideas about gaming and simulation missed the point -- all the flat out fun we had when we were gaming were not with hyper-realistic systems or with astounding efforts of role playing. They were with just getting down and playing together. I was very nostalgiac for the earliest games we played, which were all D&D campaigns, so I picked up the 3E rules and started a campaign with a couple of friends.
Well, now I run a weekly game from 7pm to midnight on a weekday for two to three players -- it's usually Classic Traveller (another early favourite) or D&D 3.5E. I also play in a weekly IRC D&D game and was shocked to find that it works pretty well over IRC. My partner and I are working on some software to allow a shared grid for battles, as that seems to be the major deficiency with the medium. Finally, I am refereeing an IRC based D&D game for my 7 year old nephew.
So I've gone from gaming all my waking hours to zero gaming to a more sedate pace of about 10 hours a week. And I am enjoying the restrictions -- working in less time turns out to be a net benefit for our gaming, I think. We no longer play well past the point where the good ideas are dried up for the session and instead leave with everyone wanting more. And of course, as some of us are veterans from that early period, we have some 20 years of additionaly maturity to bring to the game, and that too seems to make a big difference.
Posted by: Halfjack at May 17, 2004 9:51:48 PM
15-25 years ago, not 25-25 years ago. :D
Posted by: Halfjack at May 17, 2004 10:03:37 PM
I'm gaming more and enjoying it more. I'm playing in an Amber Diceless PBEM along with playing in a weekly face-to-face D&D game. Once the D&D game is done I'll run a one-shot LUGTrek game which I will follow up with Nobilis.
I'm gaming more because I have a group of friends with very similar gaming tastes and a willingness to try new things. I'm also gaming more because I've been attending more cons lately.
I'm enjoying it more because I finally let go of the quest for that "Transcendent Gaming Experience" just set out to have fun. If the TGE happens, that's great but I'm no longer disappointed when it doesn't.
Posted by: Vaklam at May 18, 2004 12:26:10 AM
I'm gaming way less than I was a year ago. I fairly consistently played once or twice a week over a period of six or seven years. Then, I just burnt out.
I think the combination of a heavy freelancing load, some problems around that, a change in my life circumstances and the sheer drain of writing scenario after scenario (yes, I'm a perpetual GM), washed the joy out of it for me.
In fact, I haven't gamed in over a year now.
I'm tempted to suggest that the lack of readily-available "Pick up and use" material for the games I ran, mainly WoD stuff, contributed to this, now I look back. There was precious little I could just buy and use if I ran short of time.
Posted by: Adam at May 18, 2004 7:32:09 AM
Gaming less, to the point where a local con and a local minicon are my only gaming outlets. However, it's not because of in-game reasons, but for typical real-life reasons (having kids, moving out to the burbs so it's a real hassle to get to the nearest game). I was doing PBeM and e-tabletop gaming for a while, but other real-life reasons (a change in my work schedule, taking on a crazy freelance load) pulled me out of those too.
I have promised myself that I'm going to game again, once I get various projects off my desk. Hopefully some tabletop (or PBeM/e-tabletop) and I'm going to give City of Heroes a try.
Posted by: Rick at May 18, 2004 8:47:48 AM
I am gaming far less.
Various reasons: our gaming group is an hour away through the demon DC Beltway, I now have an hour commute to and from work, we're busy selling our townhouse to move into a house and get closer to friends, and a huge amount of real life "stuff" is going on. Also, I find working on games as a freelancer tends to drain me of any urge to play.
However, in about 8 months, gaming is going to become an extremely viable past-time, and I highly expect the amount of gaming in my life to increase a few dozenfold. There are few things you can do when you have no money and are housebound, and gaming is one of them. The thing about gaming is that a) people can come to you and b) it is relatively cheap if you just buy a core book.
Posted by: Emily Dresner-Thornber at May 18, 2004 9:02:45 AM
I'm gaming significantly more now, I think, than I ever have in the past.
I've been in a 3rd. ed. D&D game for 2+ years now which is the longest I've ever been in a continuous game. I'm doing the Age of Paranoia thing. I'm prepped to go for a Hellboy game, a Starchildren game and a Nobilis game.
My real problem is that there's just a boatload of stuff I want to run and getting it all in is just going to be insane.
Tom
Posted by: Tom at May 18, 2004 9:58:20 AM
I find my schedule allows one game session a week, so I'm gming less. The quality of game sessions is way up. I'm doing mroe innovative things and I continue to grow as a player and a gm. While not necessarily satisfied by my rle in the wider 'community' I am very happy with my immediate circle and the opportunities they allow.
Posted by: Jere at May 18, 2004 10:36:35 AM
Tom cuts to the heart of the problems I have gaming now. There's enough time for a few quality games but there's no longer enough time to play them all. We're down to two systems in order to get long story arcs, so there's no longer a lot of room to explore. I buy tons of new games, but mostly because I like reading the rules and stealing material for the games we actually play. Most of what I buy will never get played in its intended sense.
If there's a lesson in there for publishers, it's keep building new stuff for old systems. I don't have time to play new systems. d20 is a win here as a new d20 game can easily have interesting bits grafted into an existing d20 game, no matter how far apart they are in concept -- in fact I've just recently re-written a lot of Bruce B.'s material from Gamma World for use in my D&D game (with particular attention paid to the community description/advancement material).
So I see my early gaming years as kind of exploring the wilds. Then I spent a few sedentary years away pondering what I had learned, and now I am re-travelling those paths that bore the most fruit during exploration.
Posted by: Halfjack at May 18, 2004 10:50:28 AM
Gaming less: ONE FTF session in more than a year, although I hope to change that soon.
Gaming more: Involved in several PBeMs, including as a GM. Going to a con to game FTF with some of the people I've been gaming with online for years. Possibly, now that I've moved into an area where I know some gamers, getting a real-life game going.
Gaming differently: Swore off games and systems and styles that don't work for me (specifically d20). Tried some things that worked, and a few that really didn't. Willing to try more approaches and games, as long as they don't take too much time.
Since I've just moved to the metro NYC area, I expect to go through a period of experimentation, and then, as Halfjack says, retravelling paths that bore fruit later. I did this after I divorced my ex, and with him, my gaming group. I got several years of great gaming out of it. Now it's time to do it again.
Posted by: Ginger Stampley at May 18, 2004 12:15:51 PM
Over the past couple of years, my gaming habits have shifted to a couple of short sessions each week rather than one long weekly game. I think there's been a net drop in the number of hours, but the fun/hour has gone up more than enough to compensate.
As for experimentation, I'm not yet at the point I'd like to be. I think that after my Nobilis game winds down, I'm going to shift to running a series of one-shots in lots of different systems. My play got substantially more fun after I started deliberately experimenting with different styles and techniques, and I want to try and systematize this process by carving out some time to deliberately try new mutant forms of gaming.
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at May 18, 2004 3:28:48 PM
I'm gaming less -- actually, right now not at all. I'd written a bunch more, but then I realized what it comes down to is that as I get older, I'm increasingly picky about what sort of game I want to bother with. I won't game just to be in a game anymore... I want to find a game that fits me just right, schedule-wise, system-wise, and gameworld-wise.
I like systems with which I'm already familiar better than trying new stuff. I want the game mechanics to fade into the background. I don't want to commit entire Saturdays to sitting in a dark room rolling dice and eating takeout. And I'd like my gaming style and setting preferences to mesh with those of my group.
I suppose the only part of this that's really relevant to a game publisher is that as an old gaming fart, I'd rather see improvements and extensions of solid, established systems than a bunch of new ones.
Posted by: Meredith at May 18, 2004 3:33:11 PM
Gaming less: F2F weekly sessions have become monthly sessions.
Doing one convention a year instead of two or three. I'd love to do four or five.
Gaming more: daily F2F sessions with S.O. seem to be better than ever.
:)
Also involved in four classy online PBEMs, which is really too many for me to do justice to. I could stand to drop one, or hiatus two of them, but I don't want to.
But I've met folks online who participate in eight or ten PBEMs at once--I am in awe.
Posted by: Arref at May 18, 2004 4:28:33 PM
Gaming less, though not nearly as little as I'd expected. A little over a year ago, my gaming group was playing about twice a week -- Wednesdays were for HeroClix (with the rare Fading Suns or Delta Green game) while Fridays were for our Dungeons & Dragons game. Then life ... changed. I became a dad, one of our group moved two hours away from the rest of us, while another's job changed to second shift.
The changes immediately torpedoed Wednesday night gaming. Friday nights took a few hits, but fortunately the players who's shifts/locations had changed were still able to make the games. I didn't lose nearly as many Fridays to dadhood as I'd expected and recently have even been able to start DMing again.
This year, I expect we'll be gaming more -- Wednesday night gaming is creeping back, and we'll probably be doing that about twice a month. Friday gaming is solid, and will become more so when we start dedicating one Friday a month to playing non-D&D games (D&D's great, but I've got a heck of a lot of other games on my shelf I want to play).
All of this pales in to comparisson to college, where I was gaming several nights a week, and playing a different system each night. But while I may play less than I did 10 years ago (ugh, college was 10 years ago...) I think the quality is way up. I'm a better DM, my players are more experienced, and while we may be focused on D&D we have diversified into other kinds of games (board games, card games, etc.)
Posted by: Ken Newquist at May 18, 2004 4:49:49 PM
I only have time to play once a week if that anymore. And fewer people to game with. That maybe a factor of I am fussier about who I game with. I play poker or a board game far more often now than an RPG.
Posted by: L0N at May 18, 2004 10:24:03 PM
I play poker or a board game far more often now than an RPG.
This is definitely happening to our local group. While there are games still being run, poker (Texas Hold-em), card games and board games have leapt in popularity. I even have played Magic lately, and I didn't even play Magic when it was popular!
The thing about card games and board games is that they are no setup one shot entertainment. There's no arguing over the rules of Settlers of Catan (yay sheep!) and no one has to GM. With poker, just about anyone can sit down an learn how to make suit, and there's little actual ramp up time involved. And you can yack while you play.
Posted by: Emily Dresner-Thornber at May 19, 2004 9:41:13 AM
Recently my gaming has gone through significant transitions; five years ago I was just about out of the hobby, with "campaigns" that would last one session. I found a new group and returned to a game a week. That grew to two (Mage and Vampire), which mutated into Mage (GMing) and D&D for about two years. Then a hiatus (for both long running games), followed by a glut (D&D twice a week and Mage once).
Since then I've settled into a consistent two groups pattern, each once a week. The Saturday night group plays tried and true games (D&D [upgrading to 3.0 was a big change], Mage, and D20 modern). Sunday night's group is more varied (lots of short Vampire campaigns, Shadowrun (2nd), My Life with Master, and now a homebrew Wheel of Time campaign, vaguely inspired by WOTC's version.
The Saturday group, to me, is OK with intermittent gripping parts. The good parts are usually focussed on challenging combats and cool displays of prowess. It's a larger group (fluctuates from 4-8 players), and plays for 5-8+ hours each session. Sunday night is more consistently good; it's a smaller group (3 or 4 players) that plays shorter (3-5 hour), more intense sessions. The third group that I tried (during a drought of gaming) was a game-shop 3E D&D game; it was pretty well done, but impersonal and easily dropped.
Posted by: ScottM at May 19, 2004 12:04:14 PM
An addendum: Much like Emily, our group is also into card and board gaming. We'll often play board games one or two nights a week; most Mondays and occasionally another day during the week. (It's not roleplaying, but it's the same group of players, and it competes for time). Game Wish #69 (my response) was about these games.
Posted by: ScottM at May 19, 2004 12:11:49 PM
Due pretty much entirely to moving last year, I've gone from virtually not gaming to playing in a weekly game and running a biweekly one. Quality is up from my last major period of gaming, but again that's overwhelmingly related to location and thus to gaming group(s).
Degree of experimentation very close to the same; "really satisfying" perhaps marginally higher. Actually, the major improvement in my gaming experience across the years has been an increasing ability to focus prep time as a GM on the things I enjoy designing. Most of that is increasing confidence at winging other aspects of the game; some of it may be system-related, but I'd have to try one of my old standby games to find out for sure, since Nobilis isn't easy to compare to anything else I've done.
Posted by: Craig at May 19, 2004 10:44:04 PM
It's intersting. A few years ago, I was single, living at mum & Dad's, dropped out of uni to work full time. Now, I've moved into a rental house with a lovely woman, still working full time and squeezing a life in between.
And you know what? I'm gaming mroe now than I ever used to.
Sure, I don't attend / write games for as many conventions as I once did, but I never really got involved in any ongoing campaigns when I was younger. Sometimes it was a paucity of campaigns, or at least, ones that suited my tastes; at other times, it was my inability to run a campaign without getting stuck on what to do for Session 2.
Now, though, I'm running a campaign of my own (the first to ever get past a single session), I have a mad-keen gamer friend who's run us through a few short campaigns and a good bunch of mates who like to game (and occasionally make noises about campaigns themselves). On top of all that, I managed to rope my lovely lady into the hobby!
In general, we play an RPG session once a month, alhtough conflicting schedules can stretch that out a bit. Session quality is good on average, although the fact that some of my friends have weekend shifts and the odd bit of trackwork on the rail lines can interfere with that. Still, when we get together and relax, we have good fun.
Posted by: IMAGinES at May 19, 2004 11:30:08 PM
On the topic of experimenting more or less with unfamiliar games, styles, approaches, etc. - well, I've been buying small, indie RPGs lately, like Inspectres and octaNe. I ran the first at a gaming convention a year or two ago, and did a short session of the second for my friends in January.
In terms of styles and approaches, we tend to be pretty conservative; ideas like blue booking seem keen to us experienced gamers, especially as ways of getting around "face-time gaming" constraints, but the newer gamers (like my lady) find concepts like that hard to grok (especially when grasping the intricacies of the average game system alone is something of an uphill slog).
Posted by: IMAGinES at May 19, 2004 11:36:47 PM
"Blue booking?" Please to enlighten this one. I've never heard the term before. Sounds interesting.
Posted by: Jim Henley at May 20, 2004 12:31:05 AM
Phil Masters explains blue-booking and its origins here.
Posted by: Reimer Behrends at May 20, 2004 2:46:47 AM
My gaming patterns seem to have settled into a nice and easy period of flux. A bit like a float in the middle of a lake, there are periods with lots of motion, and periods when everything is calm, but ultimately, it's all good!
The group I play with locally is a bunch of friends beyond gaming, and the games are just something we do when we hang out. I remember feeling a lot of pressure to Play Games Now! Have Fun! Which, of corse, means that you might have a lot of games going on, but none of them are actually very fun! Several of the people involved where going through some life changes at about the same time (leaving grad school, career shifts, taht sort of thing) and realized that fewer occassions of more fun was a better thing to aim for. Our lead GM switched from weekly to every two weeks, and several people have stepped in to fill the alternate week. It rotates around, so short and to the point games are in order. It's also a good opportunity to experiment, as the pressure to make it "The Big Game" has been removed. We're playing with Fuzion right now, which is something I have been agitating to try for years now, for example.
I have also met another gamer from the big world, and all we do is play games together. He lives far enough away (2 hour drive) that our games are anything but regular, twice a month if we're lucky, but the quality is so good that the long breaks are OK.
So, yeah, a general agreement that quality is infinitely preferrable to quantity and the game scene has made a real turnaround. (which seems to be leading to an increase of quantity anyway, but that's another story!)
Posted by: Michael Pendleton at May 20, 2004 2:13:26 PM
Gaming? Well.. haven't had a TT game consistantly since 1999. Did online play and had an online chat of my own for several years, but I burned out and barely played on that. Tried a Nobilis game, but that crashed and burned with only one whole session in six months. Might try a WOD (not the new one) one more time, but I have the suspicion that I'm out of the hobby.
Posted by: Mike Sims at May 21, 2004 4:02:54 PM
I've definately been gaming at a fairly consistant level over the last 15 years. In the late teens it was 1-3 times a week, we were playing lots and LOTS of Cyberpunk 2020 and 2nd Edit AD&D - about 2 years of 'Punk and 2.5 years of AD&D (1st and 2nd Edit) plus a few months of a great Earthdawn campaign and a few Shadowrun one shotters. Oh, I nearly forgot the incredible Amber F2F that went on for nearly 1.5 years. Then there was a 4 year break for me as I went into the military.
Last 5 years?
F2F Amber DRPG (about 2 years)
F2F D20 3.0 & 3.5 Scarred Lands Campaign Setting 1x week (player 1.5 years and now fledgling GM with my first 4 months experience under my belt)
It's been a consistant 1x/week F2F and with that level of regularity the games quality has never been better.
Posted by: Jay Mac at May 24, 2004 1:59:40 PM
You know, I keep being amazed when people talk about "twice a month" being a scale-back. For me, it would be a scale-up in gaming time! I don't think I've ever gamed more often than once a month (with twice a month being a bit of a marathon effort)!
There was the odd short campaign or two back in the late nineties which saw me gaming weekly for a month or two, but that was about it.
Posted by: IMAGinES at May 24, 2004 10:36:32 PM
Right now I'm gaming more than I have in 7 or 8 years.
Mostly because I'm bored easily and between girlfriends, but still...
Posted by: Patrick O'Duffy at May 26, 2004 3:27:13 AM
