Wargaming Gives Me Something RPGs Often Don’t

I’ve been realizing lately that a lot of my frustration with roleplaying games has nothing to do with the games themselves, but has to do with the fact that they so often never actually happen.

I still love RPGs. I love the idea of campaigns. I love making characters, reading settings, coming up with adventures, thinking about weird little plot hooks, and imagining all the cool moments that could happen at the table. A good RPG campaign is still one of my favorite things in gaming.

But that’s also part of the problem. So much of the joy of roleplaying is wrapped up in the session itself. If the session never happens, or the campaign keeps stalling out, or the whole thing collapses before it gets going, then all of that energy just sort of hangs there. And man, I am getting tired of that.

I keep trying to get roleplaying groups going, and they keep flopping. Not always because of anything dramatic. Usually it’s just normal adult life. Schedules don’t line up, somebody gets busy, somebody is tired, somebody forgets, somebody can make this week but not next week, somebody is excited in theory but not really in practice. None of this is unusual. It’s just reality. Still, it gets old.

Because when you’re trying to run an RPG, you’re not just trying to find one free evening for one other person, you’re trying to keep a consistent schedule for a whole group. That’s a lot harder than people sometimes admit. You’re trying to line up six lives, six sets of responsibilities, six energy levels, and six levels of interest over a long stretch of time.

That is a huge ask.

And the frustrating part is how much work can go into a game before anyone even sits down to play it. You can spend hours prepping a campaign. Building out a setting. Writing encounters. Coming up with NPCs. Reading the rulebook. Organizing notes. Getting excited about where the story could go. Then the game doesn’t happen. Or it happens once and fizzles. Or it gets delayed so many times that everyone quietly stops talking about it.

Yes, I know you can reuse prep later. You can recycle the dungeon, pull that villain into another campaign, save the town map, keep the adventure seeds in your back pocket. That part is true. It still feels like a waste when the thing never actually becomes real.

That’s where I think wargaming has really started pulling ahead for me. With wargaming, there are multiple hobbies happening at once. Playing is only one part of it. There’s list building. Painting miniatures. Building terrain. Collecting an army. Displaying finished models. Reading lore. Messing around with an army builder app when you’ve got a spare ten minutes. Even just organizing your collection can feel like hobby time well spent. That matters.

If I paint a squad and never get a game in, I still painted the squad. That’s still part of the hobby. If I spend an evening working on terrain, I have terrain now. If I build an army list while waiting around somewhere, I’ve still done something real. My time still turned into something tangible.

That’s a very different feeling from prepping for an RPG campaign that never gets off the ground. Wargaming feels more resilient. It gives me more places to put my energy. It gives me hobby momentum, even when no game is on the calendar. It also helps that actually getting a game played is easier.

You usually just need one other person. Not five other people. Not a whole party. Not a campaign calendar that has to survive months of interruptions. Just one other player and a day that works. That’s a much lower bar, and these days, lower bars matter.

I think that’s a big reason I’m drifting more and more toward spending my time and money on wargaming instead of RPGs. It’s not because I love imagination less. It’s not because I think RPGs are bad. It’s not because I’ve somehow become too practical for them. It’s because wargaming feels like a hobby I can actually do, instead of a hobby I’m constantly trying and failing to arrange.

That may sound harsher than I mean it to. I’m not swearing off RPGs. I still want them in my life. I still want the great group, the great campaign, the great sessions that people talk about for years afterward. When roleplaying works, it does something wargaming can’t quite replicate. There’s still magic there.

But right now, wargaming fits my life better. It asks less of the calendar. It gives me more ways to participate. It rewards the time I put into it, even when no opponent is available that week. And maybe most importantly, it lets me feel like I’m making progress in my hobby instead of waiting for six schedules to line up long enough for the hobby to begin. I don’t think I’m alone in this, either.

A lot of us grew up thinking of roleplaying as the center of tabletop gaming. For some people, it still is. But the older I get, the more I understand the appeal of a hobby that can survive contact with adult life. A hobby where painting is part of it. Building is part of it. Planning is part of it. Collecting is part of it. Displaying is part of it. And yes, playing is part of it too. That whole package is getting harder and harder for me to ignore.

So I think that’s where I’m at right now. Not done with RPGs. Not giving up on them. Just increasingly pulled toward the hobby that still gives me something, even when game night falls apart again.

I think a lot of that comes down to this:

I’m tired of preparing for games that never happen. I’d rather put my time into a hobby that still exists, even when the calendar falls apart.