Life as an Old Gamer – part 1
by Tom McNeil

I’ve been an active gamer for almost 30 years. I started with D&D back in high school career and have been playing ever since. Some of the people I gamed with “back in the day” are still in my gaming group. Maybe we’re old and set in our ways, but we’ve rarely left D&D, except to move onto newer editions.

Our love of gaming has not changed, but pretty much everything else has. Gone are the days of weekend, overnight marathon games with barrels of Cheetos and gallons of Mountain Dew. Now we have spouses, children (grandchildren for one player) and busy careers. Finding time to game is increasingly more difficult. None of our spouses are gamers and while they all tolerate our hobby, their toleration only goes so far. Gaming is forbidden on weekends and holidays.

Currently, our group has six people, plus two more on hiatus. We play each week, usually on Tuesday. Because of travel times, our gaming window is only around two hours. Family life and busy careers mean that getting everyone together every week is nearly impossible. It used to be that that the only people guaranteed to be at the game were the host and the GM, assuming they weren’t the same person. Last year, we had so many instances of the GM not being able to play (not the same person every time – most of our players also GM) we decided we needed a backup GM. Our backup GM runs a different campaign and has one-night only games ready to go at a moment’s notice – sort of like a one person game rescue squad. Our minimum for a game is one GM and two players. (We draw the line at lone wolfing.) Obviously, we’ve had to adjust our gaming style to accommodate real life.

When we first started gaming, if someone wasn’t there, then we came up with some in-story excuse: they had to go back to town and handle some personal emergency; they were “scouting out the terrain over that far hill.” This was fine when we had long game sessions involving dungeon crawls where the PC’s came out of the dungeon and rested between sessions. As we got older, our sessions got shorter, our games become more story based and we spent less and less time in dungeons. When our in-game excuses no longer made sense, we just stopped trying to come up with them. The character is still with the party and if they have some party necessary skill, like healing, then that character uses it, but they never get killed or injured. They are always safely out of harm’s way. We refer to this condition as “adventurer’s flu.”

As we’ll see, this has had some major effects on our game.