Quote from: Joshua Ford;365207And equally fair to say that in certain circumstances that's not a bad thing.

Occasionally, yes.

RPGPundit

wrong fucking thread. sigh. long day.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;363707Largely all that gets in the way of gaming is gamers. They're a disorganised bunch, reluctant to answer emails, return calls, show up on time, and so on.

You get the married with kids, a job, study and working out people who show up regularly on time, and the single, no kids, unemployed, lots of quality time with PS3, who miss half the sessions and are late the other half.

You make time for the things important to you.

I mean, sure, someone's moving house that weekend, or getting married, or just had a baby, they're going to miss some sessions. But aside from those sorts of things, ordinary day-to-day life, it's just a matter of whether you have your shit together or not.

It's uncanny how dead-on this gibes with my actual experience. It seems that the people who have the most responsibilities, or at least the greatest inclination to actually fulfill those responsibilities, are the ones most easy to rely upon when it comes to gaming. P&P gaming requires more planning, and thus would appeal to those most inclined to take on a lot of structured activities anyway.

Looking back on it, P&P gaming came along at a perfect time to get it entrenched - computers were rare, computer games even rarer, cable TV wasn't nearly as varied as now, and home video was just starting to get its head of steam going. A lot of the love for the less structured games of the past indicates to me that many of those who love those games would never have taken up P&P gaming in the first place had WoW, XBox Live and the like been available back then. So a lot of the stuff that would later distract the slackers (and I'm not saying everyone who loved OD&D or the like are slackers, to be clear) just wasn't there. Of course, the advent of all that stuff would ravage the ranks of P&P gaming and leave a relative handful, much of the handful being composed of those who were drawn to the structured nature of P&P gaming.

Hope you don't mind, but I thought I'd share a bit of an amusing story that points to the inverse of the OP: Gaming getting in the way of real life.

A member of my gaming group came to visit me a couple of weeks ago.  I live two hours from them currently.  Throughout the whole weekend she would bring things up and I'd give her a confused look; we realized I missed out on quite a bit because I was prepping game material all the time (we gamed a lot and I'm GM 90 percent of the time).

Couple of scenarios went like this:

Sarah: ...yeah, we could do a whole campaign like Firefly
Me: ::confused look:: I was writing for the xyz campaign when you guys watched that.

Sarah: It was that seedy trucker bar we went to.
Me: ::confused look:: The one I skipped because we needed an adventure the next day?

And so on.  That sort of thing doesn't happen anymore, but we were fiends back then.  

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;363865It's alright if you won't. But it's rarely true to say you can't.

Your examples and reasoning are, again, on-the-money. I could find a game (or players, since I like to run the thing when I can) if it was of paramount importance to me. I have a lot of what I'm sure are picky preferences - I don't want to game on weeknights; I'd like to game with people roughly my age, or at least no younger than their twenties, if need be; I'd like to game once a week or every two weeks...so add that all up, and for me it becomes a pain in the ass to game. You're absolutely correct; I could probably find a game easily if I didn't mind going out of my comfort zone to do so. But I do mind, because gaming isn't that important to me. It's not an end in itself, but a means to an end - having fun with people I know and like.

I agree that if you want to game you have to figure a way to fit it in.  People have busy schedules and it can be difficult but it can happen.

I was able to finally get a group together (it took some time, a couple of years) because with the shrinking gamer pool there arent a lot of gamers in my area.  But I finally got a group together.