When the Hobby Feels Far Away

I realized the other day that I haven’t written anything here in about a month.

I’ve certainly had dry spells before. Life gets busy. Work gets busy. Family gets busy. Sometimes writing just falls down the priority list for a while. I had been SUPER consistent for about 6 months recently.

This time feels a little different.

Lately, I’ve been feeling disconnected from the gaming industry.

I don’t mean that I’ve stopped liking games. My office is still full of RPG books, miniatures, terrain, old collectible games, half-painted gangs, and enough dice to survive some sort of polyhedral apocalypse. I still think about games constantly. I still come up with campaign ideas. I still want to play.

But I don’t feel particularly connected to what’s happening in gaming right now.

Dungeons & Dragons is probably the clearest example. For years, D&D releases were something I paid attention to automatically. Even when I wasn’t actively playing, I generally knew what books were coming out and had some idea of what Wizards of the Coast was doing.

Right now? I barely know what’s being released. I’m simply not paying attention. New books appear, people discuss them online, and most of it passes me by without much interest on my part.

Star Wars is even more frustrating.

Star Wars has always been one of my favorite RPG settings. I’ve run Star Wars games for decades, written extensively about the old West End Games system, and spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about how blaster fights, starship battles, Jedi, smugglers, and Imperial officers should work at the table.

There’s plenty of older material to play, obviously. West End Games alone could keep someone gaming for the rest of their life. But I miss having something happening now. I miss new books, new ideas, and the feeling that the game itself is moving forward.

A big part of the problem is probably simpler than anything happening in the industry.

I don’t have a regular gaming group right now.

I’m trying to put together a local game, which I’m hoping will fix some of that. Gaming has always been much more exciting to me when I’m actually playing. Reading rulebooks and collecting miniatures is fun, but games really come alive when there are other people around the table.

Wargaming has been similar.

I tried joining an escalation league for the new edition of Warhammer 40,000, and I genuinely wanted to make it work. The problem was the schedule. Keeping up with regular league attendance just wasn’t realistic for me.

That was disappointing because escalation leagues are the sort of thing I like in theory. You build an army gradually, learn the rules, play against different people, and watch your force grow over time.

But hobbies have to fit into your life.

Right now, committing to games on a fixed schedule every week is difficult.

I’ve also gotten interested in the new edition of Necromunda. I’ve been building gangs, thinking about campaign ideas, reading rules, and generally falling back into one of my favorite corners of the Warhammer universe. I just haven’t actually played yet.

Painting has become another bottleneck. I enjoy painting miniatures, but I don’t have endless evenings to sit at a desk working through squads anymore. When painting time slows down, miniature gaming tends to slow down with it. Boxes start accumulating. Projects sit half-finished. That exciting new gang stays a collection of grey plastic longer than you intended.

Eventually you start feeling like you’re preparing to play games more often than you’re actually playing them.

I think that’s where I am right now.

It’s frustrating because gaming has been such a constant part of my life. It has been a creative outlet, a social activity, and something I’ve written about for nearly two decades. I’m still interested in tabletop gaming. I’m still designing things. I’m still pulling old games off the shelf and getting excited about forgotten systems. I’m still thinking about campaigns I want to run.

I just need to find my way back to actually playing.

Maybe that local game will help. Maybe I’ll finally get my Necromunda gang onto the table. Maybe I’ll find a wargaming schedule that works better with the rest of my life.

And maybe the blog being a little quieter for a while is part of that process too.

I’m still here. I’m just figuring out what gaming looks like for me right now.