I am disabled and no longer work. You'd think I would be able to game any time I wanted. My regular group meets, on the average, every two weeks. I'm ALWAYS the GM and while I love this role, I'd like to be a player sometimes but no one in the group will run PF, so I'm stuck on it.
Having said all that, let me repeat I have all the time in the world. But I also suffer from really bad general and social anxiety. The prospect of meeting new people to game with frankly terrifies me. I've been with nearly all of my guys over 30 years now and working with new players or fellow GMs just makes me anxious to consider.
Back in my golden age of gaming I was all about meeting new gamers and playing with them. I didn't have the problems I do now. I was always ready to learn a new system and delve into it. But I just can't do it now. And it really makes me sad.
Same old obstacles, I spose:
Finding a group, or, Convincing your existing friends that playing Pathfinder is a thing they want to do.
I haven't been able to do either, and so I've turned to playing PbP and watching other people play via livestreams etc. It soothes the itch, but I'd much rather play in person, and of the two options, I'd rather play with people I already know and am comfortable with, than inviting total strangers into my living room for hours every other week. And no matter how geeky and creative my circle of friends is, they all seem turned away from this particularly geeky and creative form of entertainment.
Cal: We've been reasonably successful in rotating GMs, though two of the guys in the group have done it a lot more than the rest of us. If no one else wants to run Pathfinder, consider having someone else in the group run a completely different game. We have at times had simultaneously open campaigns in some combination of D&D 3e, Pathfinder, Ars Magica, Castles & Crusades, and Warhammer FRPG, rotating every few weeks or months between them and coming back around. And in between completed campaigns we've run shorter games of Harn/Master, HERO system, Call of Cthulhu, D&D 5e, etc.
Griggs: I'd say the biggest problem I have is other people's schedules. Some of us in our gaming group have been together for over 20 years, and in theory we play weekly. And sure, you have to expect that every once in a while a game will get cancelled due to a schedule conflict.
But gradually over the last few years we've had stretches where we miss 3-4 weekends in a row, 2-3 times a year due to various conflicts hitting all at once. Someone will have to go to an out of state business conference, someone else will have a family event, others will take a vacation that spans two weekends, deer season will open, etc. It's almost never my wife or myself that has the conflict, although I might miss one weekend every 2-3 years to visit my family out of state, and the wife and I do occasionally get sick.
Add to this the fact that our game days have gotten a lot shorter. Our current group is six people, and has been for the past several years. The "new" people (we don't actually think of them that way) always have to cut out by 4:30 or 5:00 on Sundays...and we can't get started before 1:30 or 2:00 most days.
The two of them, plus the guy whose house we play at on Sundays, are all part of another group that meets on Saturdays -- with longer play hours than the Sunday group. I don't want to solve this by joining a second group and play two days a week. One day a week is fine. I just wish it was for more than 3 hours and that we missed fewer weekends than we do.
Same old obstacles, I spose:
Finding a group, or, Convincing your existing friends that playing Pathfinder is a thing they want to do.
I haven't been able to do either, and so I've turned to playing PbP and watching other people play via livestreams etc. It soothes the itch, but I'd much rather play in person, and of the two options, I'd rather play with people I already know and am comfortable with, than inviting total strangers into my living room for hours every other week. And no matter how geeky and creative my circle of friends is, they all seem turned away from this particularly geeky and creative form of entertainment.
This. Getting a group together is hard.
YOu don't say... then again, finding a DM is not that easy either... I lost the sacred fire and stopped mastering some 18 years ago... I'm fortunate that several ofmy friends are willing to DM, but it's not PF, these days it's either D&D5, or rules light games like Barbarians of Lemuria, or AGE system games...
Then again there's the problem of troublesome DM, a friend of mine literally sabotaged the end stage of a campaign because he was in a hurry to move on to the next thing, and he only wants to do stuff that I find udderly uninteresting (superhero games, Star Trek, Dr Who... whatnot)... and then it's hard to keep a group with him, because he got chips on his shoulders the size of aircraft carriers... recently he managed to dismiss a player who'd been a key element of a campaign, if only because he was one of the more active members of the group (5 players, 2 fairly active, 2 near mute, I'm in the middle but more on the silent side, if only because my char does not know what he's effing doing there)
Cal: We've been reasonably successful in rotating GMs, though two of the guys in the group have done it a lot more than the rest of us. If no one else wants to run Pathfinder, consider having someone else in the group run a completely different game. We have at times had simultaneously open campaigns in some combination of D&D 3e, Pathfinder, Ars Magica, Castles & Crusades, and Warhammer FRPG, rotating every few weeks or months between them and coming back around. And in between completed campaigns we've run shorter games of Harn/Master, HERO system, Call of Cthulhu, D&D 5e, etc.
One of my guys will run either this weird mashup we have of d20 Call of Cthulhu and Vampire: The Masquerade or DC Heroes, but only when he "feels like it". So that's about 3 or 4 times a year. Last year a friend was starting to run us on some games then he passed away after a lengthy hospital stay. Tomorrow in fact it will be one year since we lost him.
One of my guys will run either this weird mashup we have of d20 Call of Cthulhu and Vampire: The Masquerade or DC Heroes, but only when he "feels like it". So that's about 3 or 4 times a year.
One our two more frequent GMs seems to get bored easily. He's one of the two [relatively] new players in our group -- I'm bad with dates so I don't remember how may years he and his girlfrend have been with us -- has run one of the published adventurea for Savage Worlds Deadlands, Mage: the Ascension, Warhammer FRPG, Ars Magica, a homebrew OSR and a couple of others for us. But the only one that can be said to have finished a campaign was SW Deadlands. Right now the Warhammer and Ars Magica games are considered as active but on indefinite haitus; the homebrew OSR could be played again but he's made no noises signaling interest in it; he might or might not ever get back to the Mage game we never finished; and he's asked if we'd want to do another Deadlands game, but if we did it would be another published adventure using diffenent characters.
The other GM is a lot better about finishing what he starts, though his Castles & Crusades game is currently on indefinite haitus. He's run two short games of Harn, a system he likes a lot; one D&D 3.0 homebrew campaign; one D&D 5th introductory adventure, and a couple of others.
Last year a friend was starting to run us on some games then he passed away after a lengthy hospital stay. Tomorrow in fact it will be one year since we lost him.
That's hard. You have my sympathies.
Thank you. We had a "con" back in December in his honor. We rented a cabin and gamed all weekend. We called it "JerryCon".
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I put up some orange cones, and a few cutouts of deer and children.
Next week hopefully I'll be able to afford a good barricade.
Honestly, the biggest obstacle to my gaming life if is finding a decent group. I have one now (and they're GREAT) but I would like to play and run more often and I think that the only way I can do that is with a different group.
I absolutely DREAD the process of weeding out the undesirables and the unreliable and the sociopaths and the ones who lack any kind of social graces. But if I want to play more it looks like I may have to submit myself to that soon. I've put it off for years but I think it's time.
My wife despises the hobby.
I never understood that. One of the guys I play with has been part of my group for 30 years. When he got married several years ago his wife came to me and told me he had to quit the game because she hated it. Fortunately that did not come to pass.
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I played the long con, I didn't break out the RPGs until we'd been married for five years, by that time she wasn't going to leave me because I "developed" a hobby I could share with her and our daughter (and the younger son that soon followed).
My wife despises the hobby.
Why?
one friend who's a complete cyclothymic and who seldom finishes what he starts (or worse, he sabotages the ending), and who never knows if he still wants to play with you... plus he's convinced that another friend cheats at dice (I've got no proof, but his defense raises reasonable doubt)
I had to look up the word "cyclothymic".
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I'm like that, I like big words.
I know lots of words, big ones included. That just happened to be a new one!
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actually, it's old fashioned, psychiatrists liked it back in the 1930's-60's... nowadays, it's fallen out of use... or I've not been seeing the right psychiatrists.
Emotional ups and downs.From the sound of it he swings from masochist to sadist. He's got to write things down and stick to it. Otherwise, he might just go,"Why don't I just blow up the dungeon?"
There's got to be a warning, a way to disarm things, and maybe a countdown.
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Particularly nasty in the guy who's DMing, I mean, we would do things and work toward our goals during a session, and next session, he would set us back, put us into a changed situation, and generally get us PO'ed major way... plus, he would bypass stuff he had dangled in front of us, that we wanted to do, and that got relegated to the dustbin of game history... (like when we played Out of the Abyss He let us go to the surface, on a trip to go fry an NPC's called Gromph Baenre's ass... but after we had started things in Luskan and had been making way, next session, he decreed it had been a dream sequence induced into our brains by the MInd flayers who had captured us, never mind how they had done it, as we were already high level , able to take on a Death Tyrant, and more than able to resist arrest)
Hmm, that sounds like my sister, I haven't played with her in almost thirty years.
problem is, he's a good friend, I still want to give him his chance... of course, if he does it again, I might get really tired of it.
Hello all, Due to some recent soul searching while toiling away at my mundane job I went through the old exercise of trying to find my "true calling". I basically fell back on the old high school guidance counselor bit: ... What problems do you have as gamers ? What keeps you from enjoying your games as much or as often as you would like ?
Good question ... my personal answer has several parts. Gaming fun (enjoyment) has always been something multi-functional for me. (1) It is part spending creative time immersed in a different setting than the mundane (as is true for readers of novels, travelogues, or descriptions of anything other than the readers' own experiences). (2) It is part helping facilitate fun for others both by being a decent, fun person to be around as well as the role as creator for worlds and adventures for others to venture into. (3) It is also part catharsis and the ability to work through broader, vexing issues through the mechanics of the gaming table. (4) Finally, the ability to learn new things through play and preparation for gaming is the icing on the cake of gaming. That said, the main reason (5) for limiting gaming is a lack of time and players willing to commit to regular, on-going sessions.
When any of those (1 - 4) is limited, the enjoyment is lessened, and sometimes it is lessened to be un-enjoyable. When (5) is true, you simply cannot game because of the constraints.
I was running a large group a while ago, but within the last several years. Originally the party members signed up for a mini-campaign (two or three sessions), but the players asked for (nay, demanded) more sessions. We were all professionals with many competing time demands. Factors (1-4) were strong and drove us to play well beyond the initial commitment.
Alas ... Finally, the spouse of the person hosting the sessions said essentially "enough is enough. I want my husband and my home back and don't want you to invade our space every three weeks for several hours." You can't really blame her. We were well past the original time frame for the social contract when she raised her concerns.
The group looked around for other logistical possibilities, but the large number of gamers (nine players) with many outside commitments made the solution set infeasible. So the constraints (5) kicked in.
In another case, Meetup has provided many players for the Zhalindor campaign over time, but in the last five years there seems to have developed an unwritten rule that you can commit to something and then either cancel at the last possible moment or simply ghost away the social obligation. The last five times that I have set-up Meetup RPG sessions, out of five to six players who signed up, zero or one actually showed up. That ends up being factor (5) again, constraints. It also makes the prep and potential play something less enjoyable too. If you know that there is a 75%+ that you will not end up playing then you will not have the fond anticipation when prepping.
As another example ... When I got back from a very stressful combat tour in the early two thousands, I lacked the creative energy to put into gaming for a long stretch. It was a combination of (1-3). I needed to apply all my emotional and creative energy dealing with day to day, mundane requirements, and a gaming session that I could run would not have been fun for the gamers involved (well, more accurately, not up to standards of reasonable fun that I would set for a successful session).
Finally, there is also the challenge of those close to us who are "not into gaming" and would like to see you limit your involvement too. This one has been relatively minor for me, but gaming friends have certainly had this loom large in their non-gaming. The nay-sayers can be friends when you are younger, kids/children who are embarrassed by a gaming parent when you are older, or even a spouse that feels that you should give that up along with your other "childish" hobbies.
That is plenty to chat about.
Another topic is, given the constraints, what do you do to get your gaming fix?
In service,
Rich
www.zhalindor.com/staats2.htm
What problems do you have as gamers ? What keeps you from enjoying your games as much or as often as you would like ?
The core of my current group is myself, my wife, her best friend, and the best friend's husband. I've been gaming with these two women for over 20 years, and the other guy for at least 15. (That core even survived a cross-country move 5 years ago, because our wives were coworkers in the same office that relocated.) So while other players have come and gone, I've always been able to depend on having those three in almost all the long-term campaigns I've run.
However, we all have a lot to juggle in our schedules. Above all else, we're all parents. My kids are 14 and 13, have been gaming for a few years now, and joined PFS a year or so ago. The other couple has a 5-year-old, which is a very different (and more constant) demand on their time. We usually meet at our friends' home to game so that they can put the little one to bed before we start playing. It's only been in the past few months that they've felt free enough to join us for PFS at the local game store--and never both at once, because someone has to watch the kid.
(My wife and I went through a similar trade-off when out kids were younger. But we also had a larger network of gamers and games to join before we moved here.)
(Maybe more later, when I have time and don't need to catch a bus...)
I thought you were going to start something like match dot com, but with gamers. The same engine could match Pathfinder players with pathfinder players, D&D players with D&D players, Pokemon card gamers with Pokemon card gamers, ect.
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Or, match Pokemon players with Pathfinder players.
Players. Players are sometimes obstacles.