Routines

My friend Allan has a useful theory about running weekly games when you’re in your all in your forties and people have lives: you don’t run the game for the people who aren’t there; you run the game for the people who show up. You don’t cancel because someone can’t attend, you game regardless and people will either start showing up or fall by the wayside.

It works incredibly well when you are the one who shows up every week, less effectively when the person running the game is the one most prone to flaking out.

Tonight, I’m running a session of my superhero campaign for the first time in about eight months. It fell off the weekly to-do list months ago, right about the time I started loosing grip on 2016, and by the time I was coherent enough to actually think about running sessions many of the players were doing other things with their Thursday nights.

I kept waiting for a clear spot in everyone’s schedule to restart, but no such spot exists. Even now, multiple people are going to disappear on holidays before the month is out. One of them will move house. We will spend the first few weeks working around absences.

Honestly, the only time February is good for is me, but…

Look, this week has been the first where I felt like I’m settling into a new normal. I’ve gotten things done for GenreCon; I’m writing regularly for the first time in months; I’ve answered my email and maintained my systems and I haven’t lived on pizza and chips and ungodly amounts of carbonated beverages.

This is the month where I add in habits that need maintaining, otherwise I the new normal calcifies and becomes the new routine until something comes along to break things up.

And so, tonight, we game.