At What Point Do You Leave a Game?

Greetings!

Matt has kindly asked me to be a contributor to this blog, so I'll give it a go. I hope to offer another viewpoint on games and gaming.

First off, my gamer cred: I have been rolling dice in PnP (Pen and Paper) RPG's since I was 10 (in 1980) when I was first introduced to Dungeons and Dragons by a friend in 5th grade.
I have never stopped, and now have dozens of different game systems notched on my dice bag. Currently, I am running a Pathfinder campaign that has been going on for a year. (Which is a near record; more on that below.) I think if the game nights were averaged out, (due to many years when I was involved in multiple nights a week campaigns)  it is a realistic estimate to say that I have played some form of PnP RPG every week for the last 34 years. (I never went through the stage in adolescence when girls became more interesting than role playing, not because I wasn't interested in girls, <or they in me> but because I truly loved RPG's. Nobody thinks the star athlete would give up their chosen sport for girls, so why do people expect male gamers to give up their games for girls? Or vice-versa?)

I bought my first computer when I was 13, (a Radio Shack MC-10 with 4k of RAM) because I was inspired by the movie WarGames with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy. (I was able to buy it for around $100 at the time because by 1983 it was already 3 years old...but my 13 year old self didn't know this.)

I taught myself BASIC on this computer (which barely deserves the name) and almost all of my programming efforts were directed at creating some sort of interactive World War III text-based game, (ala Zork, also one of my early favorites.) Every program I wrote started off with "Would you like to play a game?" just like the WOPR computer Joshua asked when Matthew Broderick's character taps into the computer for the first time. (I had mediocre success at best, but no one expects a kid on his first bike to be a Tour de Force champion at first either.)

This of course led me to computer games, and I have loved PC games for almost as long as I have loved PnP RPG's. Oddly, I have never found a digital "RPG" that could ever come close to matching the experiences I have had gathered around a table with a bunch of other RPG'ers. (And a good topic for a future blog will deal with that to me irritating label of "RPG" on a PC game.)  My computer game history is one that is focused on RTS (real time strategy) games and turn-based strategy games, such as Red Lightning,

 

Warcraft, Dawn of War, Steel Panthers, Civil War Generals, Hannibal, Art of War, etc,. (Along with some enjoyable forays into combat flight sims and racing sims.) Currently I am enjoying the hell out of World of Tanks, and Matt and I (along with our buddy Kevin) can be found blowing shit up on a (semi-) regular basis. (I say semi-regular because my 16 year old son is also an avid PC gamer, and there is intense competition for the one gamer-worthy desktop we have between us, much to my wife's irritation.)  Look us up as Pigiron5 (Matt), Sir_Roland (me) and Krap_game (Kevin W.)

I have long loved (if not played as much) such Table Top strategy games as Squad Leader/ASL and all the other "counter-on-a-hex-map" games. (Not to mention such classics as Risk, Fortress America, Axis and Allies and Shogun.)  I still have many of these games in their original boxes in my "man cave" study, and periodically break them out. (Sadly, PC games have ruined me, as the set-up and clean-up time for PC games is nothing compared to the same for box games, and I have become lazy and spoiled.)

I was also dragged (albeit not kicking and screaming) into table-top wargaming via Warhammer and Warhammer 40k about 15 years ago. I amassed (and then sold) untold hundreds of little plastic soldiers (and who-knows how many hundreds if not thousands of dollars.) I was heavily into painting and modeling figures and terrain, and exploring all the possible ways to combine one-off games with campaigns and tournaments. (This was the one time in my life when I gave up RPG's for another type of game, and if I'm honest probably ruins my "once a week RPG" claim above.) I haven't rolled huge numbers of sixes for a table-top game in years, but I still have a full Chaos Khorne Fantasy army and a Chaos Khorne 40k army. (BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! SKULLS FOR KHORNE!) I at one time had 6000 (or more) points of Empire, 4000+ points of Khorne Fantasy, several thousand points of Tau (for 40k, Battlefleet Gothic *and* Epic), Imperial Guard, Tyrranids, Orks and Black Templar Space Marines, as well as my aforementioned Khorne legion. I was also ready to jump into Flames of War WWII miniature wargaming, but economic realities at the time meant that I could never afford the models. (And the necessity of a part-time job meant that my one night a week of time I could devote to gaming was going to be RPG's, not table-top.)

Which brings me to my topic for this post: At what point does a gamer stop playing a particular game? I don't mean, "I'm bored with it." I mean, why does a game become boring? If it's a linear game with one possible path, and you've beaten that path several times, I can understand boredom. But what about open-ended games like RPG's and table-top?

As I mentioned above, I am running a Pathfinder campaign that has been ongoing for over a year, (and if you don't count the continuity of the PC's but rather the attendance of the players, it's been going on for almost three years.)  The PC's have reached 9th level, and as so many of my campaigns, I have grown bored with it. I just can't find the creative juices every week to come up with yet one more challenge for the PC's to face and overcome. Now, my creative juices *are* flowing for a Deathwatch or Only War campaign, and I find myself turning more and more to those books in my downtime after work and all the other responsibilities of adulthood are taken care of. (For those of you who aren't familiar with Deathwatch or Only War, they are the RPG version of Warhammer 40k published by Fantasy Flight Games.)

So, dear reader, (all two of you) what do you think? Comments/conversation below.