Productive Procrastinator
You’ve got competing demands on your time. You’re a student. You’re full-time office drone. You’re a parent or a volunteer or a key player on the local intramural quidditch team. And somewhere in the midst of all that, you’ve got to find the time and energy to spin worlds into existence.
As the forever GM of my own group, I feel the self-imposed pressure to keep the story alive. Our far-flung friend group still comes together week after week on Roll 20, and I’m not about to let that go. Only problem is, I’m also desperately trying to write my dissertation. I squeeze in adventure design when I can. The would be-novelist in me weeps from some demiplane known as “The Backburner.” And amidst these competing priorities, the echoes of Steven Erikson rattle around in the back of my head:
As for me, why, I miss gaming. But I found, during the writing of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, I could not quite both game and write. They drew from the same well, I think. The same narrative impulse, the same thirst for adventure, the same delight in characterization.
It’s a great interview, but it raises a very real concern. These games we play are fantastic mental toys. I’ll pour through sourcebooks, scour SRDs, and retool my world-building notes, session summaries, and (yes, Wizard) character write-ups for hours on end. But if these games are mental toys, they don’t run on batteries. They run on brain power. And some nights, as I stare blearily at Google Docs and wonder why the words won’t come, I begin to worry that I’ve left them in the Land of Adventure.
No doubt you other denizens of Handbook-World are equally creative (and equally busy) folk. So how do you balance your IRL responsibilities with your game time? Do you feel Erikson’s same push-and-pull dilemma between gaming and writing? Have you ever had to let go of some other time-sink in favor of the gaming table? Tell us your own tales of procrastination, delayed deadlines, and executive dysfunction down in the comments!
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Not much insight here, but I wanted to briefly celebrate the fact that, for the first time in years, yesterday I finished a short story in a period when I’m also running two D&D games and doing university work. It can be done!
Good on ya. It’s not easy to make time for all that.
This hits me where I live. I love GM-ing for my friends or one-on-one for my wife, but there exists a finite amount of my creative brain to share across that and other endeavours. I used to do some writing work that helped my wife’s job as an artist, basically helping her create comics or providing some secondary prose. But if I did that, I couldn’t run our couple’s Vampire game and for better or worse, she wants me for my GM-ing skills over my writing skills.
I’d like to write even a short story just to see how bad it comes out, but I know I’d be cutting off a big chunk of my social time with the people I care about and I’m a notoriously slow writer so it feels like its not worth the heart and/or headache.
I look forward to my retirement some 30 years hence. No doubt I’ll begin an illustrious fiction career once all my other responsibilities are behind me.
Hahaha ha ha ouch.
Yeah, this is very “me”. For me, too, ambitious excursions into being a novelist fall by the tracks of the unstoppable D&Dm campaign train. My creative works all go to the writing, the planning, and the art for the newest adventure for my players.
And beyond that, the time it takes out of my private life – the 16.5 hours of each weekday not owned by my employers – needs a balance somewhere. Between D&D, maintaining and upgrading my home, keeping an athletic body in the face of middle age, and the bleak uneneding hellscape that is dating in the modern era… I have almost no time left to just unwind and relax. I guess for me, writing for D&D has *become* my relaxation activity.
I am alway proud of the end product. But damn if it doesn’t demand a heavy toll.
Weirdly, I think the players may be at fault. They provide the immediate feedback and instant gratification you can’t get from fiction writing. Maybe that’s why the chapter-a-week types publish as they go….
o I’m in this strip and I don’t like it.
I can easily pour through nethys archives links and handbook rules for different systems to update my character on a weekly basis or make a new character from scratch… And not touch my other responsibilities – even when I know they’re more urgent. Executive dysfunction is a heckin’ bummer.
Me, not having a PF game in months, still compulsively building new PF characters on the daily, despite any number of other things I should be doing
I imagine the Handbook-verse version of this is the ‘Hall of Unsung Heroes’ – where carbonite-frozen heroes and their exciting lvl1 backstories await in limbo to be finally played.
That, or Cleric has a secret stash of character sheets and builds – not unlike an antique gun collection.
Heh. That really ought to exist.
Where does the Village of Brie fall in today’s topic?
MOTHERFUCKER
…
I mean, yes, I really ought to get on that.
I’ve gotten better at doing my homework at least. Though I have been procrastingating hard at assembling some of the Crisis Protocal miniatures.
Honestly, the hardest part about writing my characters backstory for the game thats gonna start this summer is the DM is being super god damn vague about the entirety of his setting. I’m a cleric sir, I need to know what gods are in your setting in order to even function.
That is exactly when it’s time to back burner the backstory. Can’t proceed until you know what’s what.
Personally i do my best thinking during the brainless labor hours of my job. Keeps me sane during the otherwise excruciating boredom, and means i dont have to dedicate any of my actually important time to it except for the minimum time it takes to write it down so i dont forget.
My work and play is all made of wordsmithing. I really ought to find a way to fit some excruciating boredom in. Sounds like a nice balance.
Balance?
No, I’m sorry, I don’t understand…
They just updated it to “Acrobatics” in later editions.
Wait…
you can do stuff other then gaming?!?
Heh. Flatland but with gamers.
My unfinished second novel and mid-term tutoring case notes hoist a tankard in your direction and say “Yup.”
Just plop the clients in front of some Coursera and call it a day. 😛
Prior to the pandemic, I used modules. But now that everything is on virtual tabletop (VTT), I can’t even do that anymore. There relatively few modules programmed into VTTs.
Isn’t Fantasy Grounds supposed to be good for this?
I may be an interesting case here. I am a writer and I used to be notorious among my friends for the sheer QUANTITY of story ideas I had. And not vague, one-sentence ones either, but highly complex and well-planned ones. This happened in part due to something I called “file cycling”, where I would think extensively on an idea for a few days, then get interested in another one for a few days, and eventually cycle back around to that first idea. Of course, this meant lots and lots of plans and not a whole lot of actual written prose on most of these ideas.
More recently, the influx of new ideas has slowed down a lot, and I think it is because I became a DM (of two campaigns at once). That siphons off a lot of creative energy, I think, and I don’t consider that to be a bad thing. I still have all these old story projects which I work on – I just haven’t added many new ones recently, so the possibility of accomplishing something with them has increased. I also seem to have largely stopped developing fanfiction projects, which may be related. It could just be that getting older has changed my brain’s relationship to media and creation. (Incidentally, I have channeled one of my DMing settings that I’m unlikely to use, “Shadowfire”, into a written story project, with the protagonists being PCs I’ve played, created or seen!)
With my actual campaigns, I have an unusual method in that I plan VAST amounts of stuff at the start of the campaign (the really fun part), and then I can kind of coast afterwards. Sometimes that causes some minor issues (like when I had some handouts that I really should have written before the session and not during the session), but generally I have to do very little work outside of actually running the sessions. So it really doesn’t take up THAT much of my week.
Hey, there ain’t nothing wrong with adapting RPG campaigns. Lodoss War, Vox Machina, and that Malazan biz I quoted up top all pulled the same trick.
I’d say it’s actually the opposite.
To make good tabletop, you must balance the needs of others and be ready to play off of them. To write, you must be all the players, you cannot leave room for others to insert their own ideas, you must come up with all of them.
To write is to fill in all the parts of the story, and to game is to deliberately not fill in those parts. The very things that make one excellent ruins the other.
Trying to switch back and forth between the two would be like driving a car that turns left when you turn the wheel right on the way to work, and then on the way home you have a normal car. Even if you could learn to drive the backwards car properly, every time you switch, you’re back to doing it wrong and having to unlearn what you just learned.
I think you’re talking about the act of RP itself. Improvisation at the table. But there is a great deal of prep work, design, and world building involved in many GMing styles (mine included). That work looks an awful lot like the writing process.
Huh, I was expecting a Valentines Day comic. Poor Queen Scratchypaws of the Demon Web Pits is probably lonely in her isolation from team Bounty Hunter, unless you count Woolantula the Servile as appropriate Valentines Day company. Probably as a pillow to cry into.
Not to mention, Thief and Wizard have some romance to catch up on since that infernal wedding.
Or maybe go in a different direction and do some kind of spoof of the heart scene from Temple of Doom
Wait… Do you mean *Her Majesty* Queen Scratchypaws of the Demon Web Pits?
What else would a Queen be?
You would be surprised how much free time you can afford when you wreckage country economy mean you don’t have a job 😀
Silver lining I guess. :/
Our government wrecking the economy so people got more time to play 😀
As a DM I balance time by basically not doing “prep” outside of writing stat-blocks. I think aboot what I’ll run in the back of my head while doing other stuff. My players loved my DMing so I guess it worked.
You mean to say you don’t stress out, lose sleep, spend so much time writing notes that all the fun of the hobby drains away through your pores, and then second guess yourself afterward? Sir! Are you quite sure that you are a DM?
Oof, that’s the realest. When it comes to balancing work and creativity, my potato clock of a brain can barely manage one or the other, so I have to put a huge block of time aside to actually build characters.
Yeah… Alternating between big projects is rough. I find that trucking myself I to starting is the key.
“Alright, dude. Just open the document. That’s all you have to do today. Good job. Now write one line. Just one line. There ya go! Now it would be silly to stop here….” Etc. etc.
Trying that with a midterm writing assignment right now. I’m realizing that sometimes my creative brain flares up when I’m supposed to be focused on work. I just know that I’ll forget the ideas I had when I finally have time to put them on paper.
By which I mean that it only seems to flare up when I have other stuff I should be doing, but it doesn’t flare up every time I have other stuff I should be doing. Reading that back, I thought that might have been unclear.
The only time I ever seem to really be able to think out an idea is when I’m supposed to be working
Imagination is the recess of adulting.
My job is incredibly menial, with next to no thought required, so I spend most of my work day brainstorming to pass the time.
I killed at keeping up with session summaries back when I had a baring desk job. Plenty of down time to sneak in my own projects. Now that everything is on my own time, it’s a lot harder to feel like prep work is a playful escape.
I’m pretty lucky in this regard; I’m a Canadian cattle farmer, so the energies I need to expend for work are almost 100% physical. However, during some particularly rough patches (like now) when the farm is consuming a lot of mental/emotional energy as well (three dead animals in two weeks AND a rejected calf who needs bottle feeding), sometimes all I can do is put games on the backburner and pour some of that mental energy where it’s needed.
I did a summer as a mover back in undergrad. Heavy physical labor takes its toll, just in a different way from the desk jobs of the world. Carving out time for creativity is a lot harder when you also have to carve out time for rest.
Oof…this may actually be why I’m not playing so much in my Changeling game right now. The Saturday Pathfinder game is holding up though, and has been for years, so I don’t have to feel too bad, I think.
Making a split personality or having a personal AI manage things is one way to handle it.
A bit more on topic, I typically find time to do writing/worldbuilding/design during lunch hours and weekends.