Limping along together

A handful of The Delver's will be meeting later tonight and once again we will settled on a simple board game as our entertainment of choice for the evening. Its been a bit of a struggle getting the group together for a game recently. We all have the sort of busy lives that prohibit anything like a regular schedule of games and just getting together a minimum number of attendees can be difficult to say the least. Around midnight when the guys have gone home and I have finished tidying up I'll probably find myself thinking about where we are going and worrying about the future of the group, just like I do after most game nights.


[This has morphed into quite a long post and sort of an 'open letter' to The Delvers; so you might want to get comfortable and settle down before reading it. Alternatively just hit the +1 button below and pretend you've read it!]  


The Times They Are a-Changin'

According to the Bob Dylan song "Then you better start swimmin', Or you'll sink like a stone" and he was right. If we don't make an effort to change the format of our group it'll sink without trace and before we know it the Delvers will be no more. We've been discussing this issue for years as our schedules have got busier and the games have become fewer, but the catalyst for this latest round of naval gazing has been the demise of our 4e campaign. Our GM has effectively left the group (although he seems reluctant to admit it) and what started as one missed game night has turned into 8 months of missed games with no end in sight. Its not his fault, he has kids, commitments and a demanding job - life has temporarily got in the way of gaming for him.

Other members of the group have their own issues and commitments to deal with. Three are actors and the very nature of their work means they are either away on shoot's or tied up in the evening with performances etc. They make those game nights that they can, and we all appreciate the chance to meet up, share news and relax. Of the eight members of the group probably only two of us have something that could roughly be described as a 'regular' job with regular hours. So a rigid schedule of games is bound to fall foul of our lifestyles.

Multifaceted Gamers
Most of the gamers I know have more than one hobby. I have a theory that if you are inclined to take up a hobby you have already crossed an invisible dividing line between those that do and those that don't. Once across that line, the barriers to taking up another hobby - and another and another - are only limited by how much spare time you have. So most 'hobbyists' (for want of a better phrase) have multiple demands on their time, and gamers are no exception. I'm a roleplayer and a wargamer, and I love Photography, and reading, and painting, and living history, and... well, you get the picture.

So expecting every member of the group to have the same level of commitment to roleplaying games would be pointless. Aside from our busy careers and home lives most of us are also trying to find time to squeeze in several hobbies and spending days and weeks planning an RPG campaign is increasingly unrealistic. Our last GM discovered this last year and so far none of the other Delvers have been able to find the time commitment necessary to run a campaign of our own and I'm just as guilty. I started preparing a HEX campaign but progress stalled because I got sidetracked by other things (namely my 6mm North Africa project). The lesson I take from this is that we need a much simpler approach to RPG's with a focus on quick, single session games that don't require lots of planning.

Shiney!
I'm the only wargamer in the group but I can still see an element of the traditional gamers desire for 'the new' in my fellow roleplayer's. They may not be out buying miniatures (there are only two of us that own a painted mini let alone paint them) but the desire to try new stuff is as strong as it is in any wargamer. The drain on our collective wallets is constant and never ending.

Over the years we have indulged in Fantasy RPGs (D&D, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay), horror RPGs (Call of Cthulhu), Sci Fi RPG's (Dr Who, Traveller) and Super Hero RPGS (Marval Heroic) and there's a very real liklihood we will eventually play some Pulp games (HEX) as well. We've dabbled with CCG's (Babylon 5 and Magic: The Gathering) and countless boardgames of varying genre's. Variety is the spice of life as they say and you don't get much more varied than the gaming tastes of this group.

As a group we clearly like variety and don't like to be tied down to a particular game. We also all have different opinions about what makes a good RPG game. Some like them complex, others hark back to simpler days, some like miniatures based games others prefer pen and paper only. I think this goes some way to explaining why we have found it increasingly hard to hold down an RPG campaign, especially in recent years. With our erratic schedules it just takes too long between games for us to progress with a story or keep up to speed with the rules. Eventually some of us loose interest [Sorta like reading this post!] and when the group is in discord things just don't work properly.

Location, Location, Location
Another problem we have is the lack of a suitable games venue. For years most of the games have been at my house, but this has meant packing my family off upstairs out of the way. That was OK when the kids were little, and entertaining them was just a matter of finding a suitable film to watch on the bedroom TV. But my kids are getting older and don't want to be exiled upstairs whenever I have a game... and for that matter neither does my wife. She's a great sport, and dutifully trots off into internal exile on Friday nights, but its not fair on her and I know it.

When I win the lottery and buy a big house I'll make sure I have a large purpose built game room, but in the meantime we'll just have to make do with what we have. And what we have are seven semi regular players and therefore seven potential venues to meet at (hint, hint!). One of the advantages of sharing games around like this is that everyone gets a chance at an evening where they don't have to pay for a taxi or get the bus or a train. Hosting a game needn't be strenuous.

Put it out of it's misery, or find a solution
I remember reading a great article on GnomeStew a few years back about the GM that decided enough was enough and dissolved his gaming group. At the time I read it and thought "I'm glad that's not my group" but now I realise it is us.

We have reached a decisive moment in the Delver's history and we need to change what we do or the group will fall apart. Sooner or later we will call it quits and go our separate ways, and that scares me because I know that 'the group' has kept us in contact with each other even as our lives have diverged and members have moved away. More than that it has given us thousands of hours of shared adventures and stories that can never be replaced. I'll be an old man - sucking food through a straw - and I'll still be telling tales of my adventures in Greyhawk and Krynn, Pelinore, Ravenloft and the Forgotten Realms.


Ramming home my points in 'The Conclusion'
So there are my thoughts and ideas. We need a more flexible approach to game nights, with 'event' games rather than a schedule. If we are going to play RPG's we need to find systems that encourage single session adventures and are easy for the GM to prepare and run. When we aren't playing an RPG we need to embrace a broader range of games to keep things fresh and interesting. And we need to be a bit more creative with where we have games, sharing the load a little better. Whatever we do we need to do something, because the status quo just isn't working.

I hope it hasn't sounded like a long moaning rant, because I don't feel like that at all. My main concern is ensuring we stick together as a group and if that means shaking things up a bit then that can only be a good thing.

Google Reader murdered in cold blood - NSFW

NSFW - I'm letting rip, and there will be swearing! 

I'm a little bit pissed off right now. Hell I'm fucking livid! This morning, like every morning, I turned on my computer and went straight to Google Reader to catch up on my 422 blog feeds. Without reader I would have found it very hard to keep abreast of such a mass of incoming 'news' items and the best stuff would have been lost in the noise. But now I (and every other user) have found out that Google are shutting down Reader effective 1st July. To say I'm annoyed would be an understatement. 

I should make it clear that I'm not the sort of person that Google should be screwing over, because I'm a committed and loyal Googlephile (or I was until this morning). I subscribe to most of their products including Blogger, Gmail, Drive, Calender, You Tube and of course Reader. In fact I use their family of products so much I have bought additional cloud storage for all my services and I pay for BLMA's domain through them. So shutting down a much used and well loved service and basically telling us to find a non Google alternative seems to me to be insanity. Once that move away from their products has started they may find their users like the alternatives and keep on moving.

Thankfully I have found an alternative to Reader, its called Feedley. It looks pretty good although I have found its response times to be a bit slow - although that might just be down to a surge in new users! The developers of the site anticipated the closing of reader and have enabled the programme to sync with it and upload a users RSS feeds from the soon defunct system. I'm also going to try out a couple of other feed readers as well until I find one that suits me. But whatever one I eventually settle on, it obviously won't be a Google product.

Judging from the on-line response to this change I think I can safely say I'm not the only hacked off user. I think I can summarise our collective response thus:

"Shutting down Reader was the idea of a nobhead. Don't do it again!"

A big leap forward

A couple of weeks ago I and some of the other rejects went to the Cavalier wargames show in Tonbridge Kent. Like pretty much every other blogger that went I posted a load of pictures but I also showed off some of the hobby loot I came home with. One of my best acquisitions was a collection of books on North Africa that I got from David Crook (check out his blog A Wargaming Odyssey). Now that I have had a chance to look through them in detail I feel I should shout out an even BIGGER thank you to him than I did at the time because they are proving to be really really useful. 

My book haul

The two books by Ken Ford (the Gazala and El Alamein Osprey books) are particularly relevant as they cover the specific period I am working on. The Tobruk and Libya books also help set the scene and fill in my knowledge of the campaign up to this period. As you'd expect from Osprey's they have plenty of colour plates and maps and are very clear and well written. The best of the bunch though has to be the Desert Adversaries book by George Forty and Chris Ellis. This looks at the 21st Panzer and 7th Amoured Division in some detail from their origins, through the desert battles and through to the end of the war. Each 'half' of the book comes with a really good bibliography and even a list of useful Internet sources.

All these books have plenty of period photo's and its these and the sections on vehicle markings that have proved most useful so far. Google Search is a very useful tool, but sometimes nothing quite beats just grabbing a reference book and looking at original period photographs. Another thing in these books that I have found really interesting was their references to the extensive use of minefields by both sides. This was something that I already knew about but hadn't really appreciated the scale of their employment or how valuable they were tactically... this is definitely something that needs to be worked into future games!

Thinking the Unthinkable

The siren call of 6mm Wargaming could be heard in my house at the weekend. And for one brief moment of utter madness I actually contemplated the idea of selling all my 15mm WWII stuff to make room for a wider range of 6mm terrain and armies. Such heretical thoughts don't belong in my head and I had to stop myself because that way lies madness - the madness of selling armies that have yet to be played with properly and haven't even seen the surface of a decent sized games table.

"Buy more 6mm! You know it makes sense!"
Source : Kamran Goudarzi on deviantART

So what spurred all this nonsense? The wife and I spent Saturday afternoon doing a little spring cleaning (despite the plummeting temperatures and very un-springlike weather) and that also meant re-organising my wargaming stuff. A major part of the big clean-up was sorting out the bedrooms which have grown more and more cluttered over the winter. The younglings rooms are always a mess (I hope your reading this kids!) but ours has also become less like a bedroom and more like a store room. And I have to admit that my ever growing collection of figures and terrain isn't helping matters. It's not a bone of contention yet, but it could be if I don't find a better storage solution soon. 

I recently bought eight 60 ltr lidded storage boxes to help us make better use of space (the loft is too damp and inaccessible to be of use at the moment). So I pulled out all my terrain boxes and cases of models and had a radical reorganisation. This mostly consisted of deciding what I could safely box up long term and what I needed ready access to. The problem is as I was doing this I found myself looking at my 15mm collection and thinking how much easier it would be if I were collecting just 6mm stuff. The Siren song was tugging at my willpower like never before...less storage, cheaper models, easier to paint, bigger armies and 'larger' games... oh you temptress!

Odysseus never knew how lucky he was, all he had to loose was his life! My usual lack of willpower is legendary (hence the 'Big' in BigLee) but for once I resisted the whispered entreaties of these muses of ruin and decided to keep my 15mm models. In fact I'm going a step further and have spoken to my Brother-in-law about fitting in a game sometime in the next few weeks (ie as soon as our schedules come into alignment). I feel the need for a Normandy battle coming on. Maybe my Panzergrenadiers verses the Parachute infantry of the 101st Airborne defending a vital crossroads in a French town. Anything to get these models out of their boxes and onto the games table before I am tempted to sell them again.