Chainsaw Mage said:
I think the issue is how busy you are in "real life". Some of us have wives, children, jobs, etc. And thus realistically have time to only really play one system in any great depth. Others here at enworld, I suspect, have such an enormous amount of free time on their hands (no pesky "human relationships" or "jobs" to get in the way
) that they can easily bury themselves in multiple RPGs.
Such a clever implication that people who play more than one game concurrently are losers with no lovers or responsibilities!
I'm married, work a forty-hour week, and at the moment have a forty-five minute one-way commute to get home - and both my home and my office are forty-five minutes at least from either of the two places I game right now.
Yet I play one game, run another, and am considering starting up a third. How can I possibly manage this?
I don't define my gaming as "a weekly campaign on a set night which continues for as long as possible", for one thing. The Eberron Savage Tide campaign I'm running, for instance, is on a fortnightly schedule, playing every other Wednesday, but I made it clear when we started the game that I wasn't expecting everyone to be able to make it every two weeks, and that I was perfectly happy to fit it in around everything else that my players have on in their lives. Some are full-time students who don't work much, some are full-time students who work a
lot, some work full-time like me. If the game ran monthly or less frequently than that, I'd be as happy as I am now with it running fortnightly, and the only reason I'm hoping it will last for a long time is because it would be nice to finish up the Adventure Path.
The
GURPS campaign I play in is even more irregular. It can only run fortnightly, on Mondays, and it has been more often than not cancelled because two or more of the five players can't make it. I know the GM has an ongoing story in mind, but I also know that he's not planning to run it as a game without end, amen.
The World of Darkness game I'm thinking of would have a definite ending in mind, not that I'd object if they wanted to continue on past it.
The point I'm trying to make is that playing or running more than one game is only an issue if you artificially restrict yourself to an onerous playing schedule, as so many gamers seem to think is "necessary" for the game to be in any way worthwhile. I think that's silly.
Even if I wasn't using the Savage Tide adventures to run my D&D game, I figure I could prepare enough to run once every two, three, or four weeks!
Imaro said:
You are in, what I would consider anyway, a situation that is not common to most gamers. I know I am the GM in my group . . . The others in my group aren't interested in absorbing the amount of rules, in most rpg's, that it takes to run a game.
I think that if I ever found myself stuck in one of these groups that has a (fairly) set composition, with one GM who runs every game and everyone else just plays, I'd give up gaming altogether until something else came along. I don't want to play with the same people every time, and I'd hate to be stuck
only GMing or
only playing.
) it's debatable if I could even find the time to learn the system, what with the four year old and all. Reading some people's posts makes me nostalgic for the good old days of university life: oodles of free time, no responsibilities, and gaming in multiple campaigns (including all night sessions), including hours spent online. Sigh. 
