Hobby games and the lack of time.

[MerricB]

From the designer notes of Twilight Struggle:

Like most freshman game designers, we spent many years putting this game together. Twilight Struggle, more than anything else, is a game designed to meet our needs. We are both huge fans of the card driven wargame, and how it has breathed new life into wargaming in general. Like a modern day Lazarus, card driven wargames have brought our hobby back from the grave. Yet even five years ago, when Ananda and I first decided we wanted to try our hand at design, the writing was on the wall. Card driven games were going to become less and less like We The People, and Hannibal, and more and more like Paths of Glory and Barbarossa to Berlin. That is not a critique of Mr. Raicer’s work. In fact, we think that it took Paths of Glory to demonstrate just how rich a card driven game might be. But it conflicted with another reality. We were getting older. Our lives were less like the gaming rich days of college, and more like the work-a-day world of the “nuclear” family. Eight hours for a single game was becoming less and less likely. So selfishly, we designed a game to fit our schedules. You can play Twilight Struggle from beginning to end in the same time it takes to play the “short” scenario of many other games. Heck, you can switch sides and play the Cold War from both angles if you are really ambitious. That is a long way of saying the number one constraint on the design was time.

I've seen the issue of lack of time raised in a recent thread (about published adventures and the rise of Adventure Paths), and I think it deserves its own one: How have your gaming patterns changed as you've gotten older? How much time can you devote to playing a game and - especially in D&D's case - preparing for it?

Cheers!

 

[Henry]

Like most of us here, my gaming time declined over the years; i've gone from twelve-hour marathons every few days in my youth on spring break, to six-hour stretches in my 20's and 30's, to now, about 3 - 4 hours at a pop, mostly on weeknights, and then only one a fortnight. (Well, two a fortnight, so it's averaging out as 1 per week still). For a while, it was one 3-hour session per fortnight! EEK!

As age rises, goof off time declines.

 

[pogre]

It has directly affected how I set up my next campaign. It will consist of episodes that can be played in 3 to 4 hours. There will be much less of a campaign arc and much more direct action. I am planning on 20 sessions and I plan on making a schedule with the players for every single session. Gone are the days of the 20 hour marathon gaming session or calling the guys up to play that night.

 

[Festivus]

Amount of time that I can dedicate to planning campaigns is reduced directly by the number of offspring I have. When I had no kids, I had lots of time to plan and plot, and would game all weekend long. Married, it became a couple a month. One child, that was when I picked up Age of Worms and ran with it, meeting biweekly. Now with two kids, I pretty much run short one or two shot adventures, and LFR adventures because the require almost no time to do, which I run at our monthly meetup, plus Encounters which has zero prep and 90 minutes a week.

Now to be fair, I do organize our rather sizable meetup (500+ members), so that also consumes a fair amount of time too, but there is little thought required as far as campaign planning, so I manage that on my lunch hours at the office.

 

[sev]

Now that I'm home all day with a preschooler, I have a lot of prep time, but it comes in five minute chunks and I'm infinitely distracted & can't remember what I've been working on from one moment to the next. I have no sense, yet, whether this is going to be better than working sixty-hour weeks and having no prep time at all...it really might not be. On the upside, I'm holding myself to looser standards, now; I no longer have this totally unreasonable bar for how well-prepared I think I should be.

My whole group has less time -- we still manage weekly sessions, but they're only two hours long, now, which is way too short.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

I've never done those fabled marathon sessions for any RPG; our typical games run for three to five, maybe six hours.

For boardgames we run our weekly game night on Wednesday, lasting about four hours. Every so often we try to organise a special game day for a specific game (Civilization, 18xx) which lasts the whole Sunday. The number of these special events has decreased a lot over the years, from about once per month to maybe once per year.

 

[nedjer]

Now that I'm home all day with a preschooler, I have a lot of prep time, but it comes in five minute chunks and I'm infinitely distracted & can't remember what I've been working on from one moment to the next. I have no sense, yet, whether this is going to be better than working sixty-hour weeks and having no prep time at all...it really might not be. On the upside, I'm holding myself to looser standards, now; I no longer have this totally unreasonable bar for how well-prepared I think I should be.

My whole group has less time -- we still manage weekly sessions, but they're only two hours long, now, which is way too short.

You're well lucky. Great chance to get out the Playmobil and Lego for prep. Just stick the kid in a cupboard . . . didn't have to. It was real easy to trade full attention for a game with an 'I get half an hour's peace' before or after deal.

 

[DragonLancer]

I've never been one for the big marathon sessions so that hasn't changed. Essentially all that has changed for me are the days.

My current weekly gaming is as follows:

Sunday afternoons: 4 hours of CCG and boardgame at the FLGS.
Sunday evening: 4 hours of Pathfinder (DMing).
Every other Tuesday: 4 hours of Call of Cthulhu (GMing).
Wednesday evening: 4 hours of Warhammer/Warhammer 40K.

I don't have other committments right now so I can get a fair bit of gaming in.

 

[Stoat]

I'm down to two, maybe three hours a week, on the weeks when enough folks can get together to play.

Everybody in my group is over 30. We all have (at least) full-time jobs. Half the players have small children. It's pretty common for one or more of us to have some scheduling conflict on game night.

So it goes.

 

[IronWolf]

We (all of us in our 30's) game one night a week. We meet around 6pm and play until 10-10:30pm, though the first 30 to 45 minutes of the session is more socializing, waiting for people to get settled and such before we actually get to playing. So we end up with 3.5 to 4 hour sessions each week. We occasionally schedule a Saturday game day which runs much longer, but these are infrequent as it usually takes a couple of months just to find a day everyone is available to play.