Turning over a New Leaf

[Hussar]

Good for you.

I tend to be rather selective about which parts of a forum I go to, and even more selective about which threads I bother to read.

And after that? Half the time I'll make a reply, and then I simply delete it unposted. Heck, I've spent more than a half hour on some of these posts, doing searches, formatting it nicely, and so forth. At the end of the day, a lot of it just doesn't matter that much.

You know another thing that might help?

Try not buying anything for a while. Yeah, I know it sounds crazy... try it anyway.

Funny thing that. I'm most certainly NOT a completist. I gave that up with 3.5 to be honest. I buy what I am 100% certain I will use in my games and that's about it. My last purchase was Bo9S which I got for cheap off of Amazon. I haven't bought any gaming material for ages. Helps being a player right now and not a DM and my next campaign is pretty much prepped for about six months in advance (Savage Tide! Which will start soon! Yay!)

So, yeah, the whole gotta gettem all thing wore off for me a long time ago.

/snip
Welcome to the more relaxed side of things. Just be careful, or you might wind up getting slapped with that dirty "casual gamer" label.

Disclaimer: I'm so unconcerned about most gamer things that I don't consider myself a gamer. I've played and run so many rpgs in the last 20 years I can't remember 'em all. I don't see that changing either. While I personally advocate actually playing the damn games you buy and treating rpgs as a hobby instead of a way of life, I'm aware of the fact that I'm a minority.

Hopefully more folks will follow your example.

Heh, I agree with you more than you think. And, I have a sneaking suspicion that we aren't alone in that. It's a hobby for me, one that I fight tooth and nail with my wife over (to protect my once a week block of time ) but still a hobby.

I see nothing wrong with the "casual gamer" label whatsoever.

But, yeah, I think I've done a good thing here in trying to get away from all the higher level hoopla and concentrating on my game.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Ironiclly, simply playing and having fun with your friends is a great way to help out the industry!

 

[Foundry of Decay]

I've actually started doing this myself in the last couple of weeks. I found that I was getting pulled into (and getting worked up over) things that didn't actually pertain to the game itself. I was getting caught up in opinion.

It wasn't until I thought about the old days when my friends and I would play 1e or 2e. There were no boards, no opinions of what was 'wrong' and we just had fun.

So I'm doing the same thing. I'm not worried about the industry, I'm not worried about what folks might think of my play style or whatnot. I'm just going to play and enjoy. Its been years since I had a really solid schedule for gaming, and I'm not lousing it up with worrying about the fiddly bits of internet opinion.

Oh, and I found a lot of the storyhour threads to be fascinating and pretty much 100% opinion free. Heck, I'm stealing some ideas for my own games now.

 

[Kzach]

Good call. I hope I and many others can follow your example.