Aging and Gaming

[jordane1964]

By now you probably have a library of different rules and ideas in your head. Have you thought about cobbling together an RPG system as you imagine it? It doesn't have to be complicated at all, and in fact, if you can't remember something then it's probably not that important in the first place.

 

[billd91]

I feel lucky to have had largely stable groups to play with as I've gotten older (I'm mid-50s). But some of the issues brought up her definite resonate. I do find it harder to sit and read a rule book or adventure than I used to. I just don't have the patience and focus to grind through it all like I used to unless I'm really engaged with it. That probably isn't helped by my slowly declining vision. I can tell you that I very much appreciate the decisions made by the 5e.2024 team in making the books published so far more readable.
As far as remembering rules, I don't seem to have too much trouble with that aside from keeping straight the various editions and where something might be from. I at least partly blame game editions that lurch through major rule changes. I don't really have this problem as much with Call of Cthulhu - a game that evolved in steps rather than massive jumps. But that might also be fostered by the fact that I learned CoC in my 20s when my brain was younger better at retaining info that is still highly relevant to the current edition.

 

[R_J_K75]

I do find it harder to sit and read a rule book or adventure than I used to.

I've sat down a few times to try and read through the new PHB and just can't stay focused.

I can tell you that I very much appreciate the decisions made by the 5e.2024 team in making the books published so far more readable.

I disagree; I tried again this Thursday to read the new PHB but I still find it too dense with walls of meaningless text. Sometimes less is more and I think they could have cut the book in half and made it easier to read, while still getting the same result. Shadowdark is a very easy and quick read, D&D is not. Just my opinion.

 

[el-remmen]

I'll be 54 this year, been playing since the summer I turned 12.

• I hear you all on needing readers (been using them since 41 - after a year of squinting and having to have my wife read menus to me in dark restaurants).
• I never developed the patience to read long things on a screen. I will if I must (but even in grad school in my late 30s, I killed my fair share of trees printing out articles, b/c if I can't annotate it easily - and please don't suggest the comment/notes functions - I am not gonna absorb it as well. So I still need a print version of anything I am gonna take more than a paragraph at a time from - in other words, I am fine with a book of spells as a PDF on my laptop but an adventure or rulebook needs to be printed out.
• back in college we used to play 6+ hour sessions regularly and sometimes when I was working a swing shift job, we'd start at MIDNIGHT! and play to about 4:30 AM. Nowadays, 4 to 5 hours is the maximum I can do if everything goes according to prep, I don't ever railroad, but if a session goes in an unexpected direction and I need to improv, then I might call it early b/c I find the brainwork more taxing when it never seemed taxing before. if we play online the max is 3 maybe 3.5 hours - more is too long to look at a screen and more exhausting than in-person play. I feel the same way after a 3-hour online game where everything goes according to prep as I do after a 5 hour in-person game of mostly improvising.
• I need to stand for the majority of my DMing. If I sit that long, my hip and back start barking. Since I used to frequently stand and and pace around anyway, this was not a big change.

 

[R_J_K75]

Nowadays, 4 to 5 hours is the maximum I can do if everything goes according to prep

3-4 hours is our max but we lean towards 3 hours a session. We play Monday afternoons at 4. By the time we start and between side conversations we're usually done by 7:30-8 with A good chunk of that time eaten up by things other than actual gaming. I find the less serious we take the game nowadays the more fun it is.

 

[el-remmen]

3-4 hours is our max but we lean towards 3 hours a session. We play Monday afternoons at 4. By the time we start and between side conversations we're usually done by 7:30-8 with A good chunk of that time eaten up by things other than actual gaming. I find the less serious we take the game nowadays the more fun it is.

Yeah, I'm the opposite. The older I get the more I expect everyone to focus and I am blessed with two groups who do so (we got one guy who can inadvertently rattle on when he gets going, so I try to jump on early we can chit chat before hand). Luckily, I see everyone in my in-person game socially for other reasons fairly regularly (one of them is one of my wife's best friends and her husband - my wife doesn't play), so we don't need the "catch up" time.

 

[R_J_K75]

Yeah, I'm the opposite. The older I get the more I expect everyone to focus and I am blessed with two groups who do so (we got one guy who can inadvertently rattle on when he gets going, so I try to jump on early we can chit chat before hand). Luckily, I see everyone in my in-person game socially for other reasons fairly regularly (one of them is one of my wife's best friends and her husband - my wife doesn't play), so we don't need the "catch up" time.

We dont need catch up time either I see my players regularly too, but by the time we have a beer and settle in to play its anywhere from 15-30 mins. We're easily distracted.

 

[cranberry]

I find that I don't have the time or patience to lean new rules anymore. The one recent exception is Pathfinder where I engaged in a several day cram session. But I still find it necessary to look up rules - so the internet and VTT's are immensely helpful to my old brain. With a VTT, I can watch others play, and lean the important points while doing, instead of digging through thick books. Which is how I leaned Blades in the Dark and The One Ring.) And most of them have in-app ways of looking up specific rules when necessary

 

[Joshua Randall]

I'm too lazy to look up the science on this; I swear I read an article on it sometime, somewhere; but I find that my recognition is better than it was in my youth, but my recall has gone to hell in a hand basket. Decades of experience being a geek and a bookworm are great for understanding new things I read and making connections, but boy do does it take a lot more time to create the grooves in the gray matter to be able to bring something to mind when I need it.

Hopped in to say: this is 100% true and backed up by science. I happen to know a bit about this from some prior real-world work on accessibility; i.e., how do we design things for broad use among people with different vision / hearing / motor skills / etc.

I'm going to link to a presentation from Jeff Johnson, Ph.D., one of the foremost experts on accessibility as it relates to user interface design. This was given at a public presentation several years ago so yes, it's OK to share.

Here's the presentation, and I will quote a few super relevant bits.

We begin with a super important point about Technology Generations (slides 13-15). Older people are not dumber than younger people when it comes to tech, but all people are most familiar with the tech from when they came of age -- as opposed to the tech that was developed after that. For those of us in our 50s as I type this, we came of age in the 1980s and so our familiar tech is personal computer + basic internet (slide 15). Everything past that feels increasingly unfamiliar, right up to today where we could add to that slide LLMs or VR or whatever buzzy tech you want to add.

As Dr. Johnson puts it (slide 18),

People have trouble with technology they didn’t grow up with.
• Tech later than their “technology generation”

This does not mean that older gamers are hopeless fuddy duddies who can never learn to use Roll20 or whatever futuristic neural interface / VR / Matrix-style ~~hellscape~~ wondrous reality we end up living in. But it does mean that we need to look later in the presentation at the part about Cognition.

Let's stop at slide 20 to observe the following:

Good Things about Aging
• Greater knowledge
• Greater vocabulary
• More real-world experience to draw from
• Less tendency to worry
• Higher rates of life satisfaction
• Senior discounts
• “It’s better than the alternative!”

The 1st and 2nd data points are directly relevant to what @MNblockhead intuited: older people do have greater life experience to draw upon, particularly around language-based activities such as RPGs. (However, older people may take longer to learn things even with their superior knowledge and vocabulary -- see below.)

The 7th bullet point, "It's better than the alternative!" is axiomatically true.

Moving on to slide 40 we get the most important points relevant to RPGs.

Age-Related Changes:
Cognition: Attention, Learning, Memory
• Reduced short-term memory/attention
• Difficulty keeping track of tasks
• Harder to concentrate; more distractible
• Longer learning times; more repetition required
• Less generalization between situations
• More difficulty retrieving words
• Reduced ability to multi-task
• More susceptible to change blindness
• More easily overwhelmed

The bolded points directly relate to longer learning times (it does take you longer to grok RPGs now than when you were 20) and less generalization between situations (it is harder to pick up new RPGs because it's harder to generalize them back to things you already learned in your 20s).

I will finally call attention to slide 49 which, IMO, has the most subtly important point for older gamers and RPGs.

Age-Related Differences: Attitude
• Less comfortable with digital technology
• More risk averse

• Strongly prefer familiar paths over efficiency
  [*]Afraid of “breaking something”
• Tend to read everything on screen before acting
• Afraid of embarrassment

• Often get frustrated, give up
• Tendency to assign blame (to self or app)
• Reluctance to give personal info

Many RPGs, particularly modern "storygames", subtly or not-so-subtly encourage players to take risks. But! Older people are inherently more risk averse so this type of gaming may feels weird and hard to push themselves to do. So, for example, if your cadre of older gamers don't immediately heed the Blades in the Dark advice to "play your character like you're driving a stolen car" (i.e., take lots of risks) -- part of this is quite literally because they are old(er) and not necessarily because they don't like the game!

In addition "strongly prefer familiar paths over efficiency" speaks directly to the min/max element that is a part of many RPGs. Yes, even storygames. Once an older adult finds a familiar path that works for them, even if it is not efficient, they tend to use that same path because of familiarity, risk aversion, and fear of embarrassment.

In conclusion: yes, older adults are different from younger adults, and several of those differences are directly relevant to RPG play.

 

[Morrus]

"Old" and "Smart" aren't mutually exclusive. I promise you can be both.

When you're young, peer-pressure and social proof are way more important than they should be. So we're interested in ttrpgs that, deep down, we think are trash. It took me decades to realize I was only interested in D&D becuz hype.

The reality is D&D's been trash since AD&D. Most PbtA games are trash. Traveller and most "space" ttrpgs? TRASH. 99.9% of the "indie" games? TRASH.

Find 2-3 ttrpgs you really like and just play those. Life's too short for dumpster-gaming

When I look at a post report for threadcrapping, and see that person has NINE warnings already, with one from me saying I was getting bored of this several warnings ago, the only conclusion I can draw is that when you come into your house and put your feet on the furniture 9 times in a row despite being asked not to, you do not respect me or my house. This is a week's ban. The next one is a permaban. No negotiation. I suspect you won't be able to control yourself well enough to avoid the latter, but I'm comfortable with that.