When I first packed all of my gaming books away, it was because I was too focused on them. I was spending all of my free time, and a significant chunk of my work time, thinking about gaming. I was creating adventures I would never run, characters I would never play, and I was memorizing rules that I would never use so that some time in the future, after the sky turns yellow, if I ever was in a place where someone wanted me to run a game, I would have enough of a grasp of the rules to do so.
This created a sort of gaming… umm… onanism. I was thinking about gaming all the time, and fooling myself into thinking that I was gaming (“I’m prepping the next game!”), but everything I wanted – the puzzle solving, the friendly chatter, using it as something my wife and I could share – was absent.
So I put them away. I’ve done pretty well since I did this back in March. I haven’t pulled them back out, and I’ve deleted a lot of files from my computers related to the games. (more…)
