The Gaming Pendulum

When I started DMing at age 14, I was a roleplaying fanatic. Sure, we had combat aplenty, but the heart of the game was roleplaying interactions between the players and the various NPCs. I had dozens of minor characters developed, from barmaids to shopkeeps to bystanders. The players came to know everyone in their hometown practically, even forming attachments to a number of them. The players and I would spend hours playing out shopping or having a drink at the bar for hours. One seemingly-minor NPC not only became a character's love interest, the roleplaying prompted that character's player to develop a real-life crush on the girl who I had used as a template for the NPC!

Yesterday, I ran my regular group through a shopping experience where I described every shop and every shopkeep, and the players were bored to tears. More tellingly, *I* was bored to tears as well. The detailed roleplaying minutiae that had filled days worth of gaming in my youth was just not interesting to me anymore. It baffled me; I was deliberately trying to recapture that first-campaign feel, only to find that I didn't really enjoy that anymore. I started to think about what has changed in both roleplaying and my life that would cause this shift, and I came up with the following:

Time: When I was a teenager, we used to play every week, like clockwork. Not only did we have our regular sessions, though, we also would do solo roleplaying between one player and myself on odd nights when we were free. The total number of hours for gaming were so much greater that I was able to spent a huge amount of time adding "texture" for its own sake. Today, I need to maximize our gaming time; we're lucky to get two games a month, for 5-7 hours each. Using that time for shopping feels like a waste now when we could be slaying monsters.

Technology: We have email and message boards now; when I was 14, they were nonexistent. That means that we couldn't use these mediums to get mundane tasks "out of the way" for meatier gaming. Now that we do have that capability, spending face time on these errands feels like even more of a waste.

Novelty: In 1988, we were all new to D&D. Every aspect of the game was new and interesting to us, no matter how tiny and ultimately insignificant. Now, all but one of my players has played the game before, in some cases for years. We've all shopped before. We've all done "the bar scene" before. We just don't mind using shorthand for these scenes and moving on to something new and exciting.

Different Folks: I have to admit: I love my current players, but they have less tolerance for roleplay-for-roleplay's-sake than my high school crew. Part of this is because all of them back then were theater people; half of them went on to study drama in college. In some cases, the ONLY part of the game they cared about was roleplaying; the numbers were irrelevant to them.

So what does all this mean? Well, maybe nothing, but often I see people saying that certain styles of roleplaying are more "mature" than others. Often, it's floated that hack-and-slash is a less developed form of gamer. I guess what these recent revelations say to me is that the style of game you prefer will change over time, regardless of where it started; I think of it more as a pendulum than a straight progression from one to the other. I used to prefer detailing every last person, now I prefer to gloss over everyday interactions. The day may well come where I am once again engrossed by the life story of every blacksmith. Who can say?

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