by David Dickerson
Art by Dan Smith
Popular wisdom has it that the gaming habit does not survive adulthood. Many of us who were gamers in high school and college find that, when we get our first 40-hour-a-week job and perhaps a mortgage or a marriage, the gaming habit falls away. It's a sad thing to hear the wistful tones of people who once loved gaming but can't find time for it anymore. Often people will talk about having tried it once or twice, but finding themselves unable to sustain it. They mutter something about "you can't go home again" and sadly close the book on a hobby that once provided a great deal of pleasure.
This doesn't have to happen. But it does far too often. The reason for this, I suspect, is that the conditions under which most of us learn to roleplay -- high school and college -- are ones that afford us more free time than we ever see again. As a result, we tend to develop a roleplaying style that involves hanging out for hours, slowly meeting NPCs in town adventures or making our leisurely way through a room-by-room dungeon or a massively epic adventure, secure in the knowledge that whatever doesn't get finished can be picked up next week. After all, you have the time and no one's going anywhere.
Gaming in this milieu is a form of hanging out that actually seems to invite a time-wasting approach -- one that lends itself to very intricate game worlds modeled on all those bulky fantasy trilogies that have maps at the . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: November 17, 2000
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