Sunday, January 24, 2010

Why I Don't Game Much These Days

Recently DW and I had a discussion about why we aren't gaming much right now. Here's the list of factors we came up with, in no particular order:
  • Not socially acceptable among our circles of friends from work.
  • Tired of maintaining two separate circles of friends -- it requires lots of energy.
  • Takes up too much time: In college, we could easily throw together an impromptu session. Everyone lived within 20 mins of each other, so it was easy to say, "Hey, you free? Yeah? Me too. Let's meet up in 15 mins and play for an hour." Now, it requires scheduling ahead of time. We were playing in a real time game via skype with our old college group which was fun, but it required wiping out a whole day every weekend. The beauty of gaming locally is that you can utilize time you would have wasted anyways watching TV or something.
  • Worried about the character of people we game with. We had a bad experience with a group in Texas where one of the members turned out to be a felon or something. Associating with such types is bad juju for both of our jobs. Unfortunately, it seems like our hobby tends to attract a fair number of skeezy sketchy dirtbags.
  • Elitism -- we won't accept a shoddy DM. I will DM but it gets tiring.
  • Online play by post games often move too slowly and require a much higher effort to entertainment ratio than tabletop games do -- especially to run.
  • Constantly moving. Since 2007, I've lived in three states. Since 2008, I've spent less than 9 months at home due to travel for work. Its just too hard to build a cohesive group much less a decent campaign in that time.
So, for now, I am playing in a single 4E arena game online (its actually quite enjoyable). That's about it. We've thought about running some games between just the two of us but that seems weird. It'd be nice to have another two gamer couples that lived nearby, so you could whip up a three person + DM group anytime.

2 comments:

Restless said...

I agree about the skeezy types. It makes me not want to game in my home because not only do they know where I live, but they also get to see what I have in my home.

What kind of jobs do you and your friend have that you care if it's socially acceptable to game?

Vedron said...

We are both in leadership roles, and both have the equivalent of morality clauses for our jobs. Its not the 1980s but there are still enough folks out there that equate D&D to Satan Worshipping that its just easier to avoid the issue.

I definitely agree with you on the first point. In TX I ran the game out of my house and in retrospect I think that was a big mistake. However, on the flip side, I don't want to game with people that aren't my friends. So its kind of a catch 22. You don't want to "out" yourself to friends, but you don't want to befriend random gamers due to character issues associated with befriending random people.