In high school and the Navy, there were long stretches of time during which I could gather with a few friends and play RPGs to our hearts delight. Not so much now as other things in life only leave a single night a week for gaming (and sometimes even that gets cancelled).

So what real life things get in the way of your gaming?

For me, there is my daughter - she requires time, although not as much as she used to. I have to work for a living, which limits game time. I have a social life outside of gaming, that even though several friends are also gamers, we like to drink and watch/perform burlesque shows which do not involve RPGs.

What about the rest of you?

For Extra Credit, if you had more time and the opportunity to, would you choose to use that time and oppurtunity to do more gaming?

I've got friends I regularly hang out with who also game. Not every time we hang out do we game because of particular moods (health of other players, mental states.) Focus is sometimes an issue.

A few times children have distracted their parents preventing play. Nothing wrong with that--children are more important than my entertainment. Period.

It's mostly little things. Work and life related. Never anything big.

If I had more time I'd probably use it to play more video games or read books. Gaming is wonderful, but even I like to have time to do other things.

Children, family, work, home repair, sports, reading, all these things vie for time.  Children, family, work, home repair are the ones now that I did not have in the days of my youth that make putting aside 4-5 hours to game more difficult.

I'm lucky if we can game every other week.

Quotewe like to drink and watch/perform burlesque shows which do not involve RPGs

I'm not sure even where a burlesque show could be found these days let alone how to perform one.  I shudder at the implication that there are burlesque show RPGs.

Family, work, friends, community, various responsibilities, personal health, other types of entertainment, you name it. Sometimes, circumstances in life demand all of my attention. Tough times at work, traveling to see my family, take care of my loved ones, just "being there", you know... gaming just has to be put on the back burner for some time, until things work themselves out.

Working full time + going to school + keeping a social life outside of gaming.

Granted, it helps that some of my close friends are gamers, but scheduling is a pain when everyone works or is in school, especially when everyone has different schedules.

Quote from: Xanther;363686I'm not sure even where a burlesque show could be found these days let alone how to perform one.  I shudder at the implication that there are burlesque show RPGs.

Off Topic:

About a third of the members of Salome Cabaret are gamers or have been in the past. Burlesque is pretty popular in the South now with several performance troupes doing shows at small venues.

Quote from: jeff37923;363683For Extra Credit, if you had more time and the opportunity to, would you choose to use that time and oppurtunity to do more gaming?

No.  I probably would burn out a lot faster these days, than when I was younger.  Even when I'm out of work, I generally try to avoid gaming during the day on weekdays.

It seems like I burn out a lot faster and more easily, as I get older.

Quote from: jeff37923;363683I have a social life outside of gaming, that even though several friends are also gamers, we like to drink and watch/perform burlesque shows which do not involve RPGs.

From what you've described, real life is not getting in the way of gaming. You have friends and time to spend socially, but you are choosing to spend it doing something other than gaming.

I think that if a lot of people looked at the time they spend watching TV, playing video games, etc they would find enough hours to get together to throw the dice.

It's all personal choice. As for me, I'd love to check out some surf spots I don't have time to explore during the week, but on Sundays I choose to roll dice for four hours.

Although we used to spend an awful lot of time gaming between tabletops and LARPs, once our son was born, we chose to cut way back.  My wife still goes to LARP fairly regularly (as her 'get out of the house' night), and we hand-picked some gamer friends we knew would be toddler-tolerant for a tabletop group.  Four and a half years in, still grinding away.

I have a social life outside of gaming, but I have few regular commitments outside of school and the related work. I tend to treat gaming as a form of socialising, rather than something that interferes with it. While occasionally other commitments interfere (weddings, funerals, holidays, vacations, etc.), I generally hold gaming to be a high enough priority to make time for it in my schedule.

Largely 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.

Two of my players are parents, and although they can usually schedule child care for a Saturday, sometimes they can't, and have to call off, often at the last minute. Also, one guy has a very irregular work schedule; most of the time his weekends are free, but every few months a shitstorm strikes and he's unavailable for weeks. So sometimes there is as much as a month or two of unwanted downtime between games.

Unfortunately the last campaign had such deeply-ingrained plot threads that running with a partial crew wasn't an appealing option to anybody. I don't care if someone misses a dungeon crawl or pickup game.

What makes it doubly depressing is that I just recently quit a D&D group that had been running every Sunday night like clockwork for nearly fourteen months. We've hardly ever had to call that game off, and the GM would just phone it in every week. I finally got bored and left. I'm jealous that he has such a stable time slot, though.

I rarely have any real-life obligations that prevent me from gaming; the worst that happens is I get a spike in depression and call it off because I don't want to be around people. Thankfully that hasn't happened for over a year.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;363707You 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.

This.

One of my players is a woman with a full - time work, a marriage and 3 small children, one of them requiring special care. Despite that, she has managed to make the necessary arrangements togame with us twice a month, like clockwork. We just ned to schedule the games at the start of the month, and she can't acommodate sudden changes. Of course, we do our best to be strict on that so she can play.

Thing is, despite having many adverse to gaming circumstances, she has made the time because it's important to her. No more, no less.

As we like to play once a week, is not a big burden and we manage to play almost every week. Some weeks are golden and we can get two sessions, some random thing (a trip, holiday, work problem) may prevent us from getting together a concrete week. But we like to game, so we make the time.

I don't think I would spent more time gaming. I go for quality rather than quantity, so I would spend the extra time getting more prep and doing other things.

Oh, and ticopelp, glad to hear that depression hasn't been a problem lately. Depression is a terrible and very hard thing to fight, is great to see that you're doing well.

Right now I'm in the midst of a mid-life career change, one that won't be complete for at least another eighteen months due to schooling and internships, in a job with a highly variable schedule. My ability to commit to a time and place to play a ftf game is pretty much nil at the moment, so I'm left with pbp as my only real option.

On the plus side, in eighteen months my kids will be seven and five respectively, so hopefully I'll have the beginnings of my own gaming group under the same roof.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;363707You 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.

Precisely the kind of answer I would expect from a personal trainer, but what makes up the "ordinary day-to-day life" of some people makes committing to a regular date and time problematic at best.

I'm presently starting as an ambulance driver/attendant, and my goal is to be in paramedic school by this time next year. That means for at least the next eight or nine months, and possibly as long as sixteen months, my work schedule will be highly variable, without regular days off, followed by six months of eight-hour school days followed by field internships on ambulances and in emergency rooms. I think it would be quite frankly pretty dickish of me to offer to run a game or join a group and ask everyone else to float their schedules in accordance with mine.

It was even worse when I was a park ranger and firefighter: I could be detailed out for five to twenty-one days on forty-eight hours notice, and my schedule was never regular, with mandatory overtime and emergency call-outs on literally no notice whatsoever.

It's very easy to say, "Make time for what's important to you," when you have regularly uncommitted blocks of time to choose from, but "ordinary lives" don't always work that way.