After 2-3 years of the pandemic everyone’s lives have changed as everyone had plenty of time to re-evaluate their lives and make changes. A number of changes born out of the pandemic, or just happened at the same time, have effectively meant that our gaming group is dead.
The beginning…
I sat down to write this and I realised I can’t remember the exact origin of the gaming group. Possibly other people remember it all slightly differently. I’m sure @vodkashok has a take.
To keep it simple. There was an extended gaming group in Newcastle, a guy in Sunderland and myself a number of miles further south. All of us in the North East of England. Someone put out communication and a gaming club was formed.
It lasted two meetings. Possibly one. It did give us the disastrous Dragon Warriors game and the infamous group who got 20ft into Moria story.
Commit! Commit! Commit!
In forming the group commitment was the problem
Too many people wanting to game. Too many people with it at too low a priority. If you’re spending time doing five other hobbies in front of something then you’re expectations are unrealistic.
@Vodkashok decided to launch a Dungeons & Dragons 3E campaign. It was decided we’d launch only with people who could honestly and realistically commit to a bi-weekly session. We knew who those people were we just knew we needed to have everyone else realistically give the campaign a pass so we could start with a clean slate without causing aggro or breaking friendships.
It worked and the gaming group was formed.
Twenty years of gaming
A gaming group was born out of the commitment and twenty years or so of glorious gaming happened. We tried different games. We pushed boundaries. We experimented. We discussed how to do things better. We started Cottage Con, which is still going.
We weren’t the most prolific of gaming groups. If we added up the number of campaigns we ran in that twenty years it’d probably be less than one a year.
I often say on social media when people lament their lost gaming of yesteryear that I am lucky. Role-playing games have slowly delivered on the style of game I like rather than leaving me behind and I’d say my best gaming is happening now.
Nothing lasts forever.
What killed it?
The death of the gaming group was brought about by the pandemic, a migration and changing priorities.
The pandemic delivered the killing blow. First, the gaming group effectively stopped gaming together over the pandemic. We were a face-to-face group so shifting the experience to online never took hold consistently (though I happen to think we did it very well, and it’s the commitment that is online gaming’s problem, not the format itself). Second, the pandemic saw people flourish online. It was the days of playing 5+ nights a week, keeping crazy spreadsheets of session counts and games played. Gaming became a bit like a dating app, there was always easier to spin up alternatives that could be done from the comfort of your own home picking groups from completely random people or extended connections.
The migration involved one of the gaming group going to live in Australia which is bold and awesome. That’s one of four, at the time, surely that could be survived? Well, the truth is not everyone is equal and while it was probably never said aloud there was definitely a core three who always had gaming with the group as their top priority, enjoyed discussing it and viewed their gaming, with the group, as a serious way to spend their time. One of those core three going was a bigger hit.
The priorities people held definitely changed coming out of the pandemic. While I wasn’t the one trying to martial a new group together, getting people to commit to a bi-weekly schedule had become more difficult. It was the problem the gaming group had when it formed. It’s not surprising, as everyone altered their priorities during those long periods of lockdown.
At first, this was taken as a problem that maybe time would solve. Apparently not.
Long-form gaming: RIP
So, a number of weeks back I admitted in my head that the gaming group was dead and ironically Werewolf Accelerated was the last campaign of the gaming group.
It’s sad because this effectively means long-form gaming has died with it. A combination of people, playstyle and a form of gaming was lost to different degrees all at once.
I get it, many people wouldn’t describe our campaigns of 8-14 sessions as long-form, but those sessions mattered. In terms of the story we got through, the amount of world-building and player authoring they were built on they were definitely long-form in every meaning of the word.
In terms of gaming for us, we got pretty damned good at it.
The gaming landscape
The future isn’t one of ‘can gaming happen’ but more about ‘how gaming happens’. It’s about the format. A regular, weekly or bi-weekly game is out but there are more formats.
Daycon is the primary gaming experience. It’s a simple idea. We’ve done it a few times before (and it obviously happens at conventions as well). If people can’t commit to a bi-weekly campaign can they commit to a day of gaming once a month? Apparently, the answer was sort of yes. Let’s be clear, Daycon works and is brilliant. The first game we played was effectively a campaign over three days. It also has a different social quality that weekly or bi-weekly doesn’t have which is a big positive of this format.
Playing online could be a whole new landscape of gaming. It certainly is for many people. They are tearing through sessions and campaigns via this method. It makes sense, you can rock up to play a game within minutes just by turning your computer on. The frictionless nature of our Rime of the Frost Maiden campaign is so easy, from a player perspective, it’s almost scary. Get some people together, form a group and go for it. Is it possible? Possibly if I was really persuasive and leveraged a few people.
Cottage con is still alive and well and I will always look forward to it every year. Even that venue has seen role-playing games deprioritised over the years. It’s a mosaic of individual decisions that have brought that about. Hell, even I go sometimes now just for the break, the chat and the food. So while Cottage Con is great, its focus is no longer role-playing game experiments. I am sure it could be.
There is a common thread that I see across this new landscape. It’s to do with temporal timey-whimey stuff. There is something unique about regular sessions with a break of time that is lost when you move to a different schedule.
I tend to think online sessions tend to track a bit shorter. Since there is a focus on still delivering something complete in that shorter time things can inherit some of the con slots feel of moving to achieving that completion rather than letting things breathe. It becomes less sumptuous with less focus on building and instead a focus on hitting beats, brevity and completion. We’ve had conversations about squeezing out more breathing room in our face-to-face long-form games so seeing it go even faster (as we’re quite fast) online is challenging.
Even Daycon is different. It can give the illusion of having that long-form campaign but there is no break between the sessions. There is no chance to decompress and expand. People often think the amount of sessions is the win of a long-form campaign, I actually think it’s just as much the regularity of sessions with time between them.
What to do?
Change happens. It’s how you deal with it that’s important. Ultimately only four options exist.
Let it all fade into the west. That could easily happen. I’ve been through periods of not being involved actively in role-playing games before. The difference is I was in my twenties then and I’m now in my fifties so a decision now could effectively be a decision forever.
Actively playing and crossing my fingers is probably the exact same strategy as let it fade unless I find a bigger pool of people to play with as DayCon might not survive with just one person running.
We could form a new face-to-face group of absolute strangers but that ain’t going to happen and if it’s an online group it’s essentially a different strategy.
The exploit the forms strategy is the one that involves taking control. This breakdown into a face-to-face strategy and / or an online one. The former obviously involves Daycon and Cottage Con and is likely to feature Cortext Pime as it works much better face-to-face. The latter, should it come about, is a coalition of the willing challenge a game at a time and via systems that are a conversation as that works better online.
It’s just facing the perennial challenge of something else that always feels more immediate, easier and comfortable. I should maybe add this as something to tackle as part of my Comfort Crises.
And, Finally…
Time moves on but I think the end of an era is worthy of acknowledgement. Some people will say it’s just gaming, but it was damned good gaming. It’s very weird and occasionally frustrating and sad that it is moving into being written about and talked about in the past tense.
It is a creative endeavour that was successful and meant something to 3+ people at least and now it no longer exists. Possibly I’m just hopelessly nostalgic and my feelings about it are unique.
If I’m really lucky I’ll be looking back at this in a year or two and thinking ‘glad that did not fully die’.