Aging and Gaming

[Clint_L]

I’m convinced that, aside from sleep, nutrition and exercise, which are baseline needs, there’s nothing better for your brain than learning, playing and especially running social games.

 

[The Soloist]

My verbal descriptives also goes out the window. I spend a lot of time thinking how to describe something and when the time comes it just comes out wrong a lot of the time. Definately an age thing.

You could write them down and paraphrase them when you GM. I do that. Matt Mercer does that, and he is 42.

 

[GothmogIV]

Fortunately my players are all my age, too, so they also suffer from CRS (Can't Remember Sh*t).

 

[The Soloist]

Fortunately my players are all my age, too, so they also suffer from CRS (Can't Remember Sh*t).

LOL!

My players are in their mid-30s and mid-40s. I better remember sh@t or I get the boot!

 

[Jd Smith1]

I just post written descriptions. Not because of age, but because inevitable one player missed something, and has to be brought up to speed, or we get two different interpretations/recollections of what I said. So I just put a decription of the room or area (when needed) into a info dot on the Roll20 map, and then cut & paste it into the Discord channel.

 

[Cynicide]

I'm knocking on the door of 50 and the biggest problem has been eyesight slowly going. I'm pretty physically active so that's not an issue.

Probably the biggest thing for me is social isolation. I don't interact with online communities anywhere near as much as I used to and tend to lurk a lot. It takes a lot of effort to contribute and I don't see the value of arguing about things anymore. I recently cut off algorithmic sites like reddit and Facebook for mental health reasons so maybe that will have a difference.

 

[Bae'zel]

Early 40s. Sometimes I have to close my eyes to focus on a mental picture of a scene before I can describe it to my players.

And now I have to ask players to keep a map because I simply can't be bothered to re-explain the orientation of rooms and hallways anymore. I just use compass points for directions based on how they entered the location.

 

[Sacrosanct]

From a designer and publisher's standpoint, as we gamers are aging, I get a more and more feedback about using highlighted bullet points of the important stuff so it's easier to find, and to use use larger font. The days of 10pt TW Cent font for those AD&D books is long gone.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Early 40s. Sometimes I have to close my eyes to focus on a mental picture of a scene before I can describe it to my players.

And now I have to ask players to keep a map because I simply can't be bothered to re-explain the orientation of rooms and hallways anymore. I just use compass points for directions based on how they entered the location.

I gather the first of this is new to you? Because I've had crud spatial memory and imagination for a very long time (maybe always), some it associated my aphantasia. Without some kind of map/display I couldn't keep track of people's positions and the layout of a situation on my best day.

 

[The Soloist]

I gather the first of this is new to you? Because I've had crud spatial memory and imagination for a very long time (maybe always), some it associated my aphantasia. Without some kind of map/display I couldn't keep track of people's positions and the layout of a situation on my best day.

I noticed early on that some of my players couldn't visualize theatre of the mind combat. That is why we started using pennies for PCs and erasers as horses on a grid map. As kids in the 80s, we didn't have a name for it. It's good that you talk about it. The more people know about it, the better.