A new door opens means an old one closes?

Our group is starting a new campaign. We've never been good running two games at once so this means we're shutting down our previous campaign. With excitement about the new game on the rise, was this a foregone conclusion?

I’m pretty chuffed (can you tell I hung out with some Brits during GenCon?) right now about kicking off a new 13th Age campaign tonight. If starting a new campaign less than two weeks after purchasing the book seems fast, you’re probably right. But that’s how excited our group is to get this thing going.

Before we got this far, however, I needed to have a conversation with my best friend who had been GMing our group prior to GenCon. We have this old maxim in our gaming group, “As soon as we start getting excited about the New Thing, it spells a quick end to the Old Thing.” A week ago I felt like I could probably forestall the start of 13th Age in favor of his Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying 3e game if needed. I didn’t want him to feel like I was dictating an end to his game.

The conversation went about like I expected, with him saying it was fine to set aside WFRP and start up 13th Age. Throughout the spring and summer he’s been in the process of selling his house and moving a few miles away, so he’s been distracted and harried by the process almost constantly. Taking away the weekly responsibility of running a game is actually somewhat of a relief for him. He even said, with everything else going on, he’d had little time to prepare anything with depth and he wasn’t very emotionally invested in the game.

There have been times in the past where such conversations have gone less smoothly regardless of which side one of us was on. In situations where you do have a lot of emotional investment in running a campaign, hearing one or more of your players are ready to do something different can be tough. Especially if you are then asked to participate in the next campaign as a player. It’s a little bit like hearing, “I want to break up with you but we can still be friends!” Yay?

It can be rough to hear the players are not enthusiastic about your game anymore. But what are the alternatives in that situation? We’re doing this to have fun, and having players forcing it or faking it is probably not the best way to do so. A couple times we’ve managed to refocus on what makes for the most fun and sort of “rally the troops.” But usually we end up seeing some new, shiny thing which pulls us in a new direction.

This whole situation suddenly took me back to the end of last year when I was still running my video company as I transitioned into full-time coaching. Videography had been my primary occupation for the previous eight years. I had been reasonably good at it. For most of that time, I viewed myself as somebody who worked for the time and money to enjoy other parts of life, not somebody with a “calling.” Because I’m an innately happy, upbeat person, I didn’t typically dread my work. Until one day I recognized the new, shiny alternative.

One day I woke up and realized, for the relatively modest income I was making, I should be doing something which brought me genuine enjoyment rather than mere sustenance. After quite a lot of soul searching, aptitude testing, and an epiphany or three, I discovered I DID have a calling all this time. I just wasn’t listening.

The romantic version of this story is one where I began my coaching career that day and never looked back. But practicalities intruded of course. There were bills to pay, and I had a long way to go before I was deriving substantial income from my coaching business. So I kept my video business open even as I worked to launch my new venture.

It was then I got to taste the ashes. What had previously been a job now became a chore, because I saw it in stark contrast to the joy I found in coaching. I dreaded it. I breathed a sigh of relief when jobs would cancel. This is a dreadful state of affairs when you are the owner of such a business.

The last day of 2012 I made it official: My video business was CLOSED. I have heard the day you buy a boat is nice, but not nearly as nice as the day you sell that boat. I guess my feeling about my business was a lot like that. It had become a liability and it felt very, very good to put it astern. Let me move on from this boat metaphor before I mix it further…

It’s a cautionary tale, this business about vocations and campaigns. If we’re not careful about what we choose to do and how we choose to do it, we end up with the taste of ashes in our mouths. If we pick the stuff which is best for us, truly in alignment with our joy, it will be much easier to sustain. And if we picked wrong, or if we have evolved to a new frame of mind, let us have the wisdom to embrace the new shiny.

What is new and awesome that you have recently dived into with gusto? What has lost its flavor that you know you should let go of?
 

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My current job, working at what used to be my favorite restaurant. Started great. Poor management decisions by the owner have me looking forward to leaving for the last 4 weeks. Decided to postpone for a month, because the manager (who I like) would not have been able to handle training 4 brand new people. Between that and a sick kitty (the real Sabrina), I'm done at the end of September. Burned out in 6 months. Can't even eat the food at the place without getting sick--and I used to eat there almost every day.

There have been a few games that I thought should be great, but actual play ruined.

When I was at McGraw-Hill in Berkeley, it was mostly fun. Then they moved to Emeryville (which was actually 2 miles closer) into a building that was just cold, lifeless and sterile. worse, the upper management was on a different floor on the previous building, so their toxic political machinations were kept away from us. At the new building, it was an absolute joy kill. Almost everyone was miserable. And they started outsourcing overseas--treating people in India so well that they were complaining. Yeah, it was that kind of setup. Was glad I left when I did. The whole division shut down except for 4 people within 6 months (not my fault!!!).
 

I think each thing depends on the thing.

I used to work at a big corporation. Originally, I loved it. Great people, great work. Then we got a merger and a re-org, and everybody got split up. I put in 7 more years as the people got worse and so did the work.

Then I decided to leave and I did. And some of my work friends moved into my position at the old place.

I'd do lunch with them, and give them advice on how to solve the problems they were facing (or point them at the specification I'd written to solve just that very problem).

Now unlike Rel, I didn't dread having to do old business. I like solving problems. I do it for a living. So my friend's masters were jerkholes. I got the same satisfaction from solving the problem for my FRIEND, as I did when I got paid for it.

I think it's a matter of outlook and what your positive and negative feelings are attached to.
 

Workwise, I've been where I am for 20 years, just about. I've had essentially identical job to what I have now for over 10 years. I love it. While I don't always love my current bosses, the job itself makes up for the occasional miscommunication or disappointment. And I work with great people.

As far as gaming goes, I've been testing out a new game online - DungeonWorld, while my 3.5 campaign is on hiatus due to moving (my husband and I are selling our home and moving in with my mother). When we get settled in the new place, I hope to start a fresh new campaign of DW and inject lots of new life into my games. It was time. I had tweaked and E6ed 3.5, tried 13th age, tried Next, tried 4e, and none of them fit. I'm hoping DW will fit with my 3 regular players as well as it fits me, and we'll be set for another 20 years!
 

I've lost touch with any and all passions I used to possess. Gaming still brings the occasional rush but the times I do game are few and far between. Online gaming sustains me, but only a handful of games have ever given me a genuine feeling of elation.

I think that being in my late 30's and still living a life not unlike many mid-20's (no kids, no wife, no ex-wife, no 'career' growth) has made it very difficult to relate to my peers. I even went back to college to get a Radio Broadcast diploma with hopes of getting into voice work, but I now stand as the last of my class who isn't in industry a year later and I'm nowhere nearly as passionate about radio as I was when I first went to school... kinda like learning 'the truth' about wrestling and being ruined by it.

I guess I'm just lost, because it seems like very little right now is being me any kind of joy. :/
 


I think that being in my late 30's and still living a life not unlike many mid-20's (no kids, no wife, no ex-wife, no 'career' growth) has made it very difficult to relate to my peers. I even went back to college to get a Radio Broadcast diploma with hopes of getting into voice work, but I now stand as the last of my class who isn't in industry a year later and I'm nowhere nearly as passionate about radio as I was when I first went to school... kinda like learning 'the truth' about wrestling and being ruined by it. /
It does feel kinda sad when I walk into a class and everyone thinks I'm the teacher.
Don't worry about the no wife/ex-wife: you really aren't missing out as much as you might think.
No kids: same thing. Sounds great in theory. Cats are generally a better investment of your time and effort. And they don't crash the car or have parties.
 

Two thoughts:
1) Changing careers is a change on an entirely different scale from changing gaming campaigns, to the point I'm not sure there are any insights to be drawn from comparing one to the other. The impact on other people in your life is similarly different. Sure, they're both "change" but beyond that there's very little similarity.

2) If I'm running a game for a group which has acknowledged they can only play one game at a time and another player starts talking up how they want to run a new game, I might view that as someone deliberately sabotaging my game. Now it worked out in this case as the DM was ready for a break anyway, but that doesn't sound especially positive at the first, and I don't think anyone likes being "voted out of the chair". This group might consider running for a set period of time (six months, a year, one school year, one school semester) to avoid the abrupt and potentially unpleasant campaign change experience.
 

In the Thursday Night group that I play with, we don't typically shelve any game indefinitely. If we're playing something at the time and someone other than the GM has an other idea, we'll discuss it and basically stick in the queue to be picked up at a point in which the current game is ready to stop for a while. Sometimes, we also have a backup game going in case the current main GM is too busy to prep or has a schedule conflict.

For example, right now, we're playing a Mass Effect game based on the SWSE rules and working our way through a substantial story arc based on ME2. But we also have the backup D&D 3.5 game in which we rotate GMs and play relatively short adventures for when the Mass Effect GM has been too busy on a work deadline to prep. Before the ME game, we were playing Torg and Dragon Age, which followed the 4e game we finally decided to give up (with the possibility of converting it to Pathfinder at a later date). And the current ME GM has also hatched a campaign idea set in the Forgotten Realms involving Zhentil Keep that we may eventually use D&D Next rules for (and the supplements he'll be basing it on are all 2e). This is also the same group for which I've run a long standing "Classic Modules" campaign of 1e modules converted to 3e - though I doubt we'll pick that campaign up again any time soon since I feel it has lived up to its purpose of testing out 3e while also giving younger players a chance to play through some serious classics (Keep on the Borderlands, Ravenloft, Slaver series, Giant series, White Plume Mountain).

So, I guess, when it comes to gaming and campaigns, I don't really subscribe to the theory that when a door opens, another must close. Sometimes it does, but quite often it does not and we circle back around to play some more. It helps if the GMs involved simply like to play lots of different games because we're usually pretty good about handing off the GMing spotlight in order to get a chance to play on the other side of the screen. It also helps if the campaigns planned are somewhat episodic because that makes it easy to reach closure on the current episode as well as easier to pick up again once the sequel is ready.
 

Two thoughts:
1) Changing careers is a change on an entirely different scale from changing gaming campaigns, to the point I'm not sure there are any insights to be drawn from comparing one to the other. The impact on other people in your life is similarly different. Sure, they're both "change" but beyond that there's very little similarity.

true enough.

Not only that, in the work place, when management brings in the Change consultants or the free copies of Who Moved My Cheese, they're forgetting one important thing.

People hate having changes inflicted on them without any say or involvement in the decision.

People don't get mad when THEY choose a new job. They get mad when management forces a different job on them.

Generally speaking, players are probably part of the campaign change in the gaming group. So they are more likely to not be suffering from Forced Change Grumpiness.
 

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