No, this isn't about girls. This is about me.

I haven't had a game in about six months now. This is due to a combination of many things, but the interesting thing is that I'm not really missing it at all.

No, this isn't the first break I've had from the hobby. As many things in life, it comes and goes. But previously taking a break meant a pretty complete pause. This time I've continued to do modeling and painting, research, rules development...

...pretty much everything except actual gaming.

This lead to some thinking (dangerous, I know) and eventually an epiphany of sorts. To better understand what I came to realize, we need to start at the beginning.

As I have mentioned before, I came into the hobby via role-playing games. That in itself explains a lot: my emphasis on small scale personal actions instead of huge mega battles with rows upon rows of identical parade ground troops, the wide variety of subjects instead of razor-sharp focus on the orchard gate of La Haye Sainte...

It does not explain my infatuation with battleships, though. I blame the dinosaurs for that.

Fair enough, many gamers especially on the fantasy and sci-fi side have started out with role-playing. They love playing the games, sometimes so much that the RPG side has disappeared completely and only pure wargaming remains. Why am I different?

This is what I finally realized.

Even back then, I was always the Dungeon Master. For someone with over 20 years of RPG experience, I have actually played very little. I always ran the games instead of playing them.

You could argue that in RPGs game mastering is an aspect of playing, and there is a nugget of truth in there. But it is an aspect somewhat missing from wargaming. It is completely devoid from tournament gaming and not really present in random pickup games either. Narrative campaigns have similar components, and those are the games I'm most fond of.

It's not that I dislike playing. I like games as an intellectual challenge. I like researching them. I like analyzing them. I like developing them. I have a collection of... apparently over 160 rulesets by now, mostly just for ideas and reference. I do like playing one-off games to get a feel for the rules...

...but I can usually get a good enough grasp of them in a couple of plays and then my interest wanes. I don't want to do it any more than I want to watch the same movie over and over again.

One-off games with no rhyme or reason behind them are just the very bottom of the barrel for me. I've never seen a ruleset I wanted to play just for the rules, and that includes the ones I've written myself.

And calling a series of games a campaign just because you keep a running score isn't any better really, sorry.

I guess I'm not much a gamer after all...

P.S. And those 160+ are just the print ones. PDF and such don't count. And I do mean systems, not individual books.

P.P.S. Oh, those pics? Just a few of the models I've been working on lately.

maxxon