18 Sep Gaming With No Time: GMing Tips #25
For many people, gaming is a luxury they just don’t have time for.
Life’s busy. Many people, work, have families, run businesses, have other interests and commitments – squeezing in a few extra hours every week to sit down with some mates and roll dice can just seem unrealistic. It’s relegated to the reminiscence of the “good old days.”
I’ve been having my own struggles with time over the past eighteen months, and it’s given me a few perspectives that may help others in the same boat. So here’s a few thoughts on how to make time to game!
1. Make Gaming Important
This applies to other things you’re trying to do as well – writing a book, learning a new school, getting your fledgling business off the ground. But for our purposes we’ll look at gaming.
If it’s not important to you, you simply won’t allocate time for it.
If you think gaming is silly, or not really an important part of your schedule, then everything else will be prioritised before it – and there’ll literally be no time.
Think about how enriching gaming is to your life, and how much this improves your outlook, your productivity and happiness as a whole – or just decide that you want to do it.
2. Don’t Wait For the Perfect Moment
The stars have aligned – you have all of your gaming buddies arrayed around the table in your sound-proof gaming bunker, stocked with the perfect table, minis, reference books and ambient music… now, finally, you can start that campaign… at the age of 95…
Things are rarely perfect. People miss appointments, you forget a character sheet, you don’t feel in the zone… it doesn’t matter. At the allotted time, just sit down to game. At first it may be a bit rough while you find your gaming feet – just go with it!
3. Use Whatever Means to Game
A friend of mine lives in another city some five hundred kilometres away, and does night shift working security most evenings. I often have to work in my game-shop late at night. However, we’re both free to talk – sometimes for hours at a time while we do grinding work. Why not game?
But! But! What about the dice?! What about the atmosphere? What about a carefully crafted adventured, map and stats?!
Psshtaw! Where gamers speak, they can game. I’ve had a lot of great games late at night, with nothing but a phone and a d10. I do all the rolling. My mate tells me what he does as the game progresses. The story has to carry our interest. And you know what? It’s awesome! These have been some epic games.
The truth is, there’s always time to game. If you want to do it, you can find a way. Just don’t let anything stop you! Accept no excuses – even from yourself – and before long you’ll have a killer campaign going.
~Oliver R. Shead
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