After multiple months, my saga with the unfortunate sunday gaming group has come to an end. My time with the people who were part of my introduction to Pathfinder 2nd Edition has concluded. Despite my plans to give the group six full sessions to see if we could salvage the group, we only ever played five. Which probably sounds funny because I started talking about this group back in June, but we only got two more sessions in July and then one in late August due to scheduling issues, the GM catching Covid, and my grandmother’s passing. We skipped a lot of weeks, as it turns out, and apparently I wasn’t the only one who was on the verge of withdrawing for a while since I found out today, two days after I withdrew, that the whole campaign was shuttered (which saves my friend the trouble of figuring out how to gently break it to the group that they also weren’t interested in continuing to play). The GM has had some on-going health issues (which contributed to us skipping sessions) and one of the other players apparently also has some scheduling conflicts, so the GM sent my friend a message that he was shutting the whole thing down. I wish the group had been able to continue (since I know how much it sucks to lose a game because a group falls apart), but I got the strong sense that only a couple of the players were really enjoying themselves and since I’m pretty sure the GM is struggling with Long Covid, I really don’t think things could have ended any other way.

Now, with those weekends free again, I can start thinking about what else I want to do. Maybe set up another game with a different group. Or maybe I’ll just figure out something for my every-other-Sunday group to do on our off weekends since the reason we’re playing once every two weeks is because one of the players can’t make it every week due to work. I don’t know how interested everyone else is in trying some other games or establishing a parallel campaign, but it couldn’t hurt to ask during our next session. I’ve got some other interested parties with more restrictive schedules (we all live in very different time zones), so I could always try to collect a new group of people, too, if my current Sunday group doesn’t want to fill in our off weeks. Currently, I’ve got a one-shot this upcoming weekend (as of writing this, but last weekend as of it being posted), a floating one-shot conclusion session that needs to be scheduled at some point, a Tuesday game, a thursday game that plays maybe once a month and is slowly grinding toward a conclusion, and the ghost of a Friday game that I’m probably going to give up on soon, all on top of what I’m running. I should be good for a bit. Plus, I need to keep resting for a bit longer. The last thing I need is to burn out by giving myself too much stuff to do when I’m still struggling to fix my sleep schedule and properly decompress from the stress of the past month.

I’d really like to get tabletop gaming back into my life as the major factor it used to be, back before the winter of 2022-23 absolutely destroyed every game I was a part of (which is me being a little overdramatic, but I haven’t had a solid, dependable game since then so it’s difficult to avoid giving in to a little bit of drama). I miss having it to think about, having games to look forward to, and having weekly topics to write about. I miss having a monday post gushing about whatever gaming I did over the weekend. It felt nice to have all that in my life. I really got a lot out of it, wether I was running it or playing in it, and I really miss the joy I felt playing games with my friends all the time. For the most part, it isn’t anyone’s fault. It’s just one of those things that happened as life grew hectic and we all grew unable to commit for a period of time. I just wish my attempts to bring some of those things back to life had been more successful.

Instead, I’m back to reading books. Which, you know, is also good. I just do that by myself and I really need a source of fun storytelling that involves a decent amount of socialization. After all, other than work, I do pretty much everything else alone these days. It’d be nice to socialize more than I currently do, especially in a way and with people that I’m comfortable with. Gaming was always my outlet for that and while I really enjoy the burst of excellent single-player games we’ve had this year, I really miss having games I’m excited to play with other people (and I’m sorry, my friends, if you’re reading this, that I could not get into Palia as much as you both did. It just never really clicked with me). It’s difficult to not get nostalgic over games like Overwatch in situations like this since that was the last time I actually made friends playing an online game. Sure, I never really connected with any of them outside the game, but they were reliable members of our little multiplayer community. I miss that. I miss my tabletop gaming, too. Maybe once I’m done recovering from this year I can start working on fixing that. All I need is a quiet month and I should be good. That shouldn’t be too much to ask, despite this entire year being evidence to the contrary.