Today is a (rather long) State of the Union address on my gaming life.

As best as I can remember, I started playing tabletop role-playing games (or TTRPGs) in Fifth Grade, in 1983, which would make me ten years old. It was one of those phenomena where a friend–though I can’t remember who Gamer Zero was–received a boxed set as a Christmas gift and we all dove in. Soon we all asked our parents to supply us with books, dice, graph paper, and pencils. Throughout the Spring, we played a mix of Basic Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, not understanding that they were two largely different games. It didn’t really matter, though… what we actually played was some rules-light, make-it-up-as-you-go game that didn’t even try to involve the many complex tables in the books we didn’t understand. Usually our first-level characters wielded something like a +5 Sword of Dragon Slaying that could cut through anything.

As we transitioned to middle school, a subset of that original group began playing anything we could get our hands on. The biggest boon to our fledgling group was my buddy Russell’s older brother Jim, who was happy to run our games for us. I’m not sure this is an exhaustive list, but I remember playing a lot of Tunnels & Trolls, Gamma World, Car Wars, Top Secret, Marvel Superheroes, Villains & Vigilantes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT), Heroes Unlimited, Superworld, Champions, GURPS, and, yes, a good helping of D&D (this time using the rules and their published modules). Just seeing the covers of those games triggers a flood of nostalgic make-believe happiness. Those were fun times.

I had a new group of friends in high school and quickly introduced them to the hobby. We almost exclusively played superhero games, primarily Villains & Vigilantes and Champions, though we sprinkled in some TMNT, Golden Heroes, DC Heroes, and Super Villains as well. My good friend Ted ran us through a particularly memorable V&V campaign, which clued me into how cool a longform set of adventures with the same characters can be.

We all scattered to different colleges, and I met new TTRPG enthusiasts. Throughout my time at Occidental College, I ran a monthly Champions campaign, even drawing the “comic covers” for each session we played as keepsakes. At that point, Champions was my only game, and I was deep into the HERO System and its math-heavy fun.

Then it was off to graduate school, where I met both my wife and a little game called Magic: the Gathering, which would be the object of my obsession for years. Then my working career started to take off, I had kids, we moved around, and, as these things do, TTRPGs faded into the background of my life for nearly two decades. I remember trying to organize a D&D adventure with my wife and some friends once or twice during that time, but it never stuck. During that time, I bought-and-sold the D&D 3E and 3.5 rulebooks without really doing anything with them.

In 2018, I took a year off work to recoup, then in 2019 started a job in San Francisco that, unlike most of my previous roles, didn’t require heavy travel. Around that time, I started listening to a ton of podcasts, including the Glass Cannon Podcast. The TTRPG bug started inching its way into my brain, and I began to seek out my local game stores to see if there were people with whom I could play. After some false starts with Dungeons & Dragons 5^th Edition and Pathfinder at local stores, I found a group that was playing D&D 5E and were happy to have me join. They were interested in switching to Pathfinder 2^nd Edition once it was released, and eventually I GMed us through the game’s first 1-20 Adventure Path, Age of Ashes over three years. During those years we took occasional detours, experimenting with Blades in the Dark, Symbaroum, Call of Cthulhu, Savage Worlds, and, at my urging, even returned to supers for a Sentinel Comics RPG one-shot.

That gaming group was my first experience with serious personality clashes in TTRPG groups. I ended up feeling picked on by a person there who was close friends with two other members, and after trying-and-failing multiple times to talk it out, my best recourse was to leave. Suffice it to say, it was the only real negative chapter I’ve had with TTRPGs, which have otherwise been a source of unqualified joy in my life.

For months I was genuinely wounded by my abandoned group. Thankfully the global pandemic had introduced me to virtual tabletops and online games. Eventually I found a couple fun virtual tables, including a delightful online group of Europeans that has met weekly now for almost two years. We mostly play PF2E, but have rotated GMs and done several sessions of Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer Fantasy, and most recently Mörk Borg. On our “really want to play list” are Vaesen, Dragonbane, Traveller, Forbidden Lands, Dungeon World, Lancer, Savage Worlds, and countless others.

It’s fair to say that, at age fifty-one, I’m in the midst of my Second TTRPG Renaissance. At the same time, the whole TTRPG industry is going through its own Renaissance, with intriguing new games popping up seemingly every week. Not surprisingly, my game shelf has exploded. I now own most of the games listed above, plus a metric ton of others I’ve Kickstarted, found in bargain bins or eBay auctions, or used birthday gift certificates on. I’ve even sold old game books and given my college-age son my D&D 5E collection to make room for them in my house.

There are two major differences between my TTRPG life as a gray-bearded geezer compared to my young, wispy-mustachioed self. The most obvious one is that it’s more difficult to find a group with which to play. Throughout middle school, high school, and college, I rolled dice with my core group of friends. Most of our interests were shared and we spent a ton of time together… easy squeezy. These days, in contrast, the vast majority of my contemporaries have neither the time for, nor interest in, TTRPGs. While online platforms make the pool of potential players wider, these online groups are ephemeral. It’s clear to me that if one of my current group members (all of whom are twenty years younger than me) has kids, takes a new job, or moves, it probably spells the end of the group… that sort of “life event disruption” can happen with any group, but somehow in-person groups feel stickier because the investment feels somehow deeper. Meanwhile, I’ve tried to think of how to conjure another reliable, fun in-person group and failed to come up with a solution.

The second difference is in the type of games I’m playing now versus in my youth. If it’s not obvious from the banner image on this blog, my first love is superheroes and comic books, and at one point in college set my sights on becoming a comic book illustrator. As my TTRPG life deepened as a young person, it skewed heavily–and eventually exclusively–to superhero games. Yet all of my groups in the last six years want to play fantasy or investigative horror games. That’s okay, because I can get excited about those games. But none of the groups I’ve encountered want to play superhero make-believe.

The feeling of being an odd-shaped puzzle piece continued recently as I started to discover the “Old School Renaissance” (or OSR) movement within TTRPGs. These games are built by people who love early Dungeons & Dragons and want to recreate the feel of those games for modern audiences. I’ve looked at OSR-type games like Old School Essentials, Knave, Ironsworn, and have absolutely fallen in love with Dungeon Crawl Classics. I’ve also rescued a bunch of my old D&D modules from my mother’s garage, joined the Ancient Dungeons & Dragons Players Facebook group, and have been bingeing the Vintage RPG podcast. Yet when I tell my online group that I’d love to run them through a DCC beginner adventure to test out the system, I get the same lukewarm response that I received when I tried to get my in-person group to play a superhero game. They’ll probably roll with it because they like and trust me, but there isn’t an itch there they need to scratch.

All of this has me reflecting deeply on the years ahead. I’ll certainly keep seeking out online groups and brainstorming how to form an in-person group, because these are games that are most fun when they’re social and played with friends. Just last week, for example, I jumped online with a bunch of strangers to learn to play Dragonbane, a game I own and have considered running for my regular group. I’ll also keep collecting games, because I find real pleasure in reading the books cover-to-cover and seeing them on my shelf. We truly are living in a glorious period of TTRPG innovation, and the sheer diversity and volume of options is awesome.

But I’m beginning to accept that a) I may never have a long, stable group of gaming friends again, even as an empty nester nearing retirement where my time is beginning to be more spacious, and b) the number of games I own and want to play far outweighs the number of hours I’ll be able to play with friends. I surely won’t ever get a chance to play everything, much less everything beckoning to me.

The final addition to my reflections is the rise of solo play in TTRPGs. Solo play has always been a feature of some TTRPGs dating back to the 1970s, but thanks to the global pandemic it has a lot more support now than ever. Many games, like Ironsworn and Vaesen, have solo play built into the base game as an option. Meanwhile, tools like the Mythic GM Emulator allow for being able to play any game solo, without the need for a gaming group. Indeed, one of my recent podcast obsessions is Tale of the Manticore, a great audio production of a guy solo-playing an old-school D&D system.  

Maybe the answer is to begin solo play on the games no one but me wants to play? Would I enjoy that, or is the fun of TTRPGs really tied to a group? I’ll probably dip my toe into these strange, solo-play waters soon, while continuing my epic quest to find more time with awesome groups like my current online one. My enthusiasm for TTRPGs is as high as that ten-year-old kid pretending to swing his overpowered sword around. How best to channel that enthusiasm, though, is something I’m still contemplating.

If you have any thoughts about the TTRPG hobby these days, or ways you’ve tackled the hurdles I’ve outlined, I’d love to hear it. Comment below or shoot me an email at jaycms@yahoo.com.

Enthusiastically adventuring,

-jms