In a Slump

A belated happy new year to everyone!

I know i have been neglecting this blog for some time now. At first I thought one of the main reasons was the disaster of a convention I was on (and work ...). I tried to prepare something and failed (some people would say I tried too hard). Tried to improvise and almost no one showed up because so many other things went wrong it was almost cruel (for one thing, my game was to start late at night, but to add failure to bad luck,  they forgot to register I was even there ...).

Another thing was something I overheard while standing near the hangout that announced my game. There were 3 gamers that looked at it and started to be funny about it, too. Something like "Rules Cyclopedia with some AD&D and Hackmaster in it? The guy got to be wrong in the head!". Their dismissive attitude was discouraging. And it raised some questions.

For one, I started to ask myself how compatible the OSR really is. Turns out, as far as I could glean, the idea of keeping old games alive and attempting to customize them seems not to be very appealing to the general audience. Not only because of those three stooges talking about it, but also because of the general vibe at the convention. It's always the shiny new and/or the hyped games that get the attention.

This shouldn't be surprising, at least that's what I tried to tell myself. After all that's the society we have to live in. Idealism only seems to work if it's marketable. Just like everything else.

In the end I had two people at my table (which was, rather fitting to the day I was having, isolated from the others and between the toilets ...). One of them was a buddy of mine that had decided to join me at this convention, the other was a girl that'd rather play something than going to sleep somewhere. I believe we had some fun. After all the game had lasted for nearly four hours and was only ended because we were all to tired to continue. I even was able to test some of the new house rules I had cooked on this here blog.

Nonetheless, it had left a bad taste in the mouth.

It really made me think about quitting gaming and I really wasn't in the mood to read or write about the hobby.

But every story, indifferent to how poorly executed, deserves a happy end. It took a few weeks, but I started to miss blogging. Trying to gather the motivation to do so or coming up with something worth writing about turned out to be difficult, though.

But last weekend the veil seemed to lift and the ideas came back and without every thought process ending in what I perceived as a fail.

In the end it was about time and distance.

The next weeks will tell if I'm able to make a happy ending and successfully revive the blog with some new ideas.

Until then I wish all of you a good start into the new year, with some good writing and reading along the way and a lot of gaming!