Hobby games and the lack of time.

[Hussar]

Since I moved to my current location, all my gaming has been over VTT. I started playing over OpenRPG in 2002 - gack, it's been that long.

Yeah, a lot of things happened to change my game style.

Much of it has to do with the realities of online gaming - flakey players shaping much of my initial forays into VTT's. Dealing with technical issues - connections dropping, some wingnut joining the game wanting to play with a 56k modem, etc.

I've managed to keep a three hour window open for that whole time. In that time, I estimate we've gone through very close to 100 players. Heck, even in the past year I've had three players drop and five new ones come.

This has meant that system is VERY important. With such a revolving door of players, trying to institute major rules edits is just not possible - I'd be spending half my time explaining my house rules. It's also meant that campaigns tend to be much more plot heavy with less emphasis on individual PC's. It does fluctuate. We get stable periods where the group is pretty solid and we can get to more player driven stuff, but then real life intrudes, we replace half the group and all those player driven plotlines go by the sideline.

 

[Pig Champion]

My life revolves around my gaming and miniature painting addictions. I'm a functioning addict but an addict all the same. I game for about 6 hours three times a week and spend a lot of free-time dedicated to it.

As a result, I have little to no responsibilities, no money, no kids, no house, no car and a very patient girlfriend. Although I do miss those things like not having my own home or money to spare but I wouldn't trade my time for them either.

Who knows what the future will hold however. Growing up is giving up!

 

[Derulbaskul]

(snip) The larger issue hasn't been the amount of time available for folks to spend on leisure, so much as getting schedules to match up so that we can all spend that time together at once. (snip)

That's my experience as well.

In some ways I have more time available to me than when I was in high school, and certainly more than when I was working during the day and going to uni three nights a week when I first left high school, but getting my blocks of free time to coincide with that of my gaming friends is really difficult.

I'm seriously considering moving to online gaming as many others have done.

 

[wedgeski]

Like most people I gamed heavily as a kid. When our little circle went its separate ways, we hit upon irregular sessions of D&D as a great way to keep in touch with each-other. So, we set aside maybe 6 or 7 weekends a year for nothing but D&D, food, drink, and laughs. It's really fantastic.

In many other ways, my current gaming is better than I've ever had it. I'm two years in to a weekly D&D campaign in my own world, with long-running campaign arcs and lots of character-driven stories... something of a holy grail that I've never achieved until now. Although we've had our share of player turnover (I call it the "player conveyor"), the current group is very stable and the game is just great fun.

Not only that, but we've recently instituted a weekly game where everyone comes over to mine straight after work, we order take-away, and play one-shot scenarios from whatever system anyone fancies running. So far, we're tried Savage Worlds, Dark Conspiracy, Dread, Star Wars SAGA, SLA... terrific fun.

Demographically-speaking, I'm in my mid-30's, married with no kids. Prep for the weekly D&D game eats a significant amount of my free time, but thankfully my wife, who plays in both games, is sympathetic to the commitment required.

Managing a weekly game of D&D, maintaining interest from everyone involved, and ensuring that it prevails through scheduling, work, and all the other myriad interruptions life can throw at you, is make-no-mistake-about-it hard work, but more than worth it.

 

[Aeolius]

I run my chat-based game once a week, on Sunday nights, for 3 hours at a stretch. Even then, as my wife and I have eight kids, I'll be pulled away from the screen every so often. However, when school is in session Sundays seem to work out for the best. I'd opt for a more sophisticated VTT, but some of my players are not comfortable with the tech.

I have not run a face-to-face game since 1994.

 

[IronWolf]

The larger issue hasn't been the amount of time available for folks to spend on leisure, so much as getting schedules to match up so that we can all spend that time together at once.

So true. Getting schedules to match up can be difficult. Luckily in our current group we all have a night blocked off during the week. This occasionally shifts due to a schedule change by someone else, but we have all been able to find a single weeknight that works.

When we try to schedule a "bonus" Saturday session though it can take 2-3 months to finally find one that works for everyone.

 

[nerfherder]

So true. Getting schedules to match up can be difficult. Luckily in our current group we all have a night blocked off during the week. This occasionally shifts due to a schedule change by someone else, but we have all been able to find a single weeknight that works.

When we try to schedule a "bonus" Saturday session though it can take 2-3 months to finally find one that works for everyone.

Similar story here. We play Monday night, because no-one has anything scheduled that night. The last "bonus" weekend game was over a year ago.

Less prep time means more reliance on modules for us. Fortunately, we rotate games, so people have plenty of time to prep till their turn to GM comes up again.

 

[Desdichado]

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?

For me it's not necessarily that I lack time, it's just that I have to balance an increasingly busy schedule with other people's also increasingly busy schedules. I've got plenty of time to play D&D... if only I could find a group that had the exact same schedule as me. As it is, our schedules are all different, so I look like I'm going to miss as much as three sessions in a row this month, for instance.

 

[Beginning of the End]

For me it's not necessarily that I lack time, it's just that I have to balance an increasingly busy schedule with other people's also increasingly busy schedules. I've got plenty of time to play D&D... if only I could find a group that had the exact same schedule as me. As it is, our schedules are all different, so I look like I'm going to miss as much as three sessions in a row this month, for instance.

See if you can find a campaign structure that supports a player pool instead of a rigid player group. That way if one or two players are missing, the rest of you can still play.

This can also take the form of a "pick up" campaign that's played at any session where someone is missing.

The traditional megadungeon or hexcrawl system (in which each session is a stand-alone expedition) works well for this. I also ran a Freeport campaign in which the players formed an adventurers' guild that was sort of like a D&D detective agency: The PC leaders of the organization could dispatch members to whatever the adventure seed for the session was (which were either those primary PCs or a number of ancillary PCs that got developed over the course of the campaign).

Of course, this assumes that the GM isn't among those with scheduling conflicts. But that can also be worked around with alternative GMs.

 

[Umbran]

See if you can find a campaign structure that supports a player pool instead of a rigid player group. That way if one or two players are missing, the rest of you can still play.

I tried that for a while. It actually worked worse than trying to work with a stable group.

For one thing, the player-pool mode has less continuity for all concerned. And, on top of that, there's the knowledge that your absence supposedly won't hurt the game. So, if you miss a game you don't personally miss much, and nobody else will suffer. That knocks any particular session down a couple of notches on the priority ladder.

If nobody cares if you show up... you often won't show up. Enough people do that, and the game suffers.