A Perplexing Mental Spiral

 I'm not doing a lot of gaming these days. I've canceled Open Quest more than I've run it. 

I like buying gaming books. I like buying them a lot. 

I sort of like reading them. 

I like world/setting building. 

I don't like prepping for game sessions.

I don't really like running game sessions anymore. 

I'm at this really weird spot. I like the *idea* of gaming, I just don't seem to actually like *doing* it anymore. 

I've been playing the remaster of the Bard's Tale trilogy, and I find that in my head, I have backstories, and even personalities, for the characters in my party. There is absolutely no rp in BT. It's a dungeon/city crawl, with the second and third titles adding wilderness. Your characters never talk and have no personalities, yet I imagine it as a sort of campaign in my own head. The issue with that is that I'm in a space where I vastly prefer to play fake campaigns in my head than to deal with human beings, even friends. 

I still co-sponsor the board game club at this school, but I'm basically just an adult body in the room so that they can have a club. Some of the kids still ask me to roll out 5e for them, but after the last session... I'd rather put all of my dice in a blender and drink the resulting container of plastic shrapnel than DM for them again. I am trying to gently persuade one of them to become DM. (There was a girl who was DMing, but she moved away at the end of the previous semester.) 

Not really sure where to go from here. Ostensibly, I like rpgs, I just don't...like, *actually* like them anymore, when it's time for the plastic to hit the table. (Or, more accurately, for the prompt to hit the Discord dice bot...) 

Oh, I still need to go through that manuscript for JB. I fully intend to do so, since I still like reading gaming shit, even if I don't really enjoy participation anymore. 

On the Barista Thing

 Every time I say "The discourse around D&D couldn't possibly get any dumber," the discourse says "Hold my beer." 

At least I didn't engage this time. I will, however, summarize the broil as I understand it: 

People who never liked 5e continue to dislike 5e. 

Did I miss anything? 

The Obligatory 2021 Retrospective

 Aside from getting married, 2021 fucking sucked.

Anyway, this blog is about gaming, so.....

....gaming in 2021 fucking sucked.(Until the very, very end of the year, that is.)

-Started the year continuing the OSE game I started in summer 2020. It wasn't great. I've been working on a blog entry exploring why for a long time. In April, we took a hiatus for one of the three players to work on some creative/professional stuff, and I took the opportunity to quietly deep six the game. 

-I had prepared to run six tables at KantCon, the tables all filled up, and then I had to go and cancel my trip and pull the rug out from under the convention. I didn't go for a lot of personal reasons I needn't discuss here. I'm embarrassed enough about my last minute cancellation, and leaving six tables empty, that I'll likely never return. 

-Ran nothing else until December, when I started up my OpenQuest 3 game, of which I snuck in two sessions before the year closed. One of the players in OQ3 was in the OSE game and she much prefers the former to the latter. 

-Presently have a manuscript of a game I've been waiting for quite some time. I haven't had a chance to dig into it, also because of various personal things, but I plan to start very soon. 

 

I will probably write some thoughts on OpenQuest again in the near future. So far, the game is so simple it's hard to have much to write *about.*  (Yes, that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned. Simple games, yo.)