Mid-summer Musings

What’s this? A post from a long-forgotten, long-left-behind old guy?

Yep. It’s been awhile, granted – six months about since I last posted anything of consequence. To the few folks that still have me on their RSS feeders, a tip of the hat to you… I still have a few blogs on my reader as well, but I’ve hit that weird point in my hobby where I’m just in the mode of “doing” versus the reading and blogging and podcasting and … I guess outreach? Content creation?

I’m still gaming. Still running a few games and still quietly lurking and absorbing it all. I read things and some I’ll nod at, and others I’ll shake my head at, but I guess maybe I’ve hit a place where a lot of old gamers hit — I just don’t feel the old fire and even more, I don’t feel like I matter or that anyone will care.

I know, that sounds very self-serving, or narcissistic, maybe? I don’t know – I’m just another old gamer and nobody wants to hear one of them, I figure. So… I just keep gaming with my friends and keep on keeping on.

I’ve had to let go of two of my Etinerra games, sadly. The first was my play-by-post game. It had run for 15 years, with interruptions, but the players finally reached a climax of things… and the game just couldn’t move on. The biggest reason was because of me. I had mapped things out to that conclusion, and had assumed that I would come up with more after they finished the big quest.

However, since my move from Chicagoland, my bandwidth has decreased quite a bit! Work and life have filled my time and my creativity bandwidth has definitely shrunk. I just couldn’t come up with a whole new string of things for the players, and there wasn’t anything that they felt beholden to investigate so we all agreed it was time to hang it up.

Same with my original Etinerra face-to-face group. COVID had halted in-person games, we tried to do it online, but it didn’t work out as well as I had hoped. We had a long pause and once things lifted, we did have some in person games, but then I moved… and we would have to go back to online. I got the vibe that interest in that had dropped, I know my interest did, but there was another bigger roadblock – another need to create a ton of content.

The players had taken a path I hadn’t counted on happening yet, and I wasn’t prepared enough to just jump in. They’d found a way to by pass travelling, so they would need to have something to jump into right away. Once again, my bandwidth for creativity is very small, so … that game is unfortunately laid down.

I have hopes that some day, we can do some sort of get-together and do a weekend type of long game where things get wrapped up — but I wonder if that’s just the dreamings of an old man.

*sigh* I’m feeling my age lately.

My Traveller/Battlestar Galactica, OD&D/Dungeon 23 and remaining Etinerra – Western Borders games are going well though! I can keep up with them and have some content/creativity for them. I’m really glad I do have those going on.

I wish I had big revelations or new techniques from those games that I’ve not talked about before… but I’m doing my thing pretty much the way I’ve always been doing it, and the players are doing their thing and having fun. Kinda hard to fill a blog post about that! LOL

Well, I’m still around and kicking, still chucking the math-rocks and laughing my ass off at the players’ antics and shenanigans. I’ve always said that my main objective in blogging and doing stuff was to put asses in chairs and see people have fun gaming… so mission accomplished. 🙂

If you’re still reading, thank you. Thanks for taking part. Maybe I’ll have some time come up (although autumn hunting season is around the corner, so is harvest of my veggie garden and I’m pretty sure fishing will be fun here in fall)… so yea, maybe not have much time! Ha!