I Have Five Thousand Games Left To Play

As of this year, I’m fifty-five years old.

According to my records, I wind up playing around two hundred RPGs annually in recent years. (This year was two hundred and thirty-three game sessions in sixty-two different systems!) Playing games is something that I love to do, and I tend to kind of hyper-focus when I find something that I love to do. (See also: performing/directing/teaching/producing improv/theater at an unsustainable pace in previous decades.)

Five years from now, I’ll be sixty. That’s 2030, which feels like the far-flung future to me, but here we are. By the middle of the twenty-first century—2050, equally ridiculous to think about—I’ll be eighty, barring unforeseen misfortunes. I don’t know if I’ll be able to maintain the same breakneck pace of playing games for the next twenty-five years, but let’s say that I do. By my reckoning, that means that I’ve got about five thousand good game sessions left in me, at best. I know that not everyone is as bonkers about this kind of thing as I am—although I know some who are—but I’m sure you can crack open your own personal box of existential dread and come up with the same kind of numbers for yourself.

So the big question for me is: what are those five thousand games going to be? I don’t necessarily mean what exact systems or adventures I’ll be running or playing—although I do have some ideas. There’s no reasonable way that I could have predicted some of my favorite games this year (Slugblaster, Heart, Trophy, and so on) or the ones I’m looking forward to playing next year (Triangle Agency, Ultraviolet Grasslands, Hellwhalers, and many others) ten years ago, so I don’t see why I’d expect to be able to predict the kinds of things we’ll have to play in the next ten or twenty.

No, I mean—what kind of experiences do I want to have at the gaming table (in-person or virtual) in the coming decades? How do I want to feel when I’m playing games with people, and how do I want the other folks at my table to feel?

Let me back up for just a minute here. I started my journey into tabletop RPGs like most people, with Dungeons and Dragons. I got the basic box set with the blue book with the dragon on the cover in 1983 or so, and I’ve been playing ever since. (That’s not technically true, I guess—the summer before, a friend came back talking about the game that his older brother had run for him, so we sat down and made up our own rules and everything before ever seeing an actual D&D book.)

We played a bunch of those games as a kid, D&D, Traveller, Star Frontiers, Top Secret, Gangbusters, Marvel Superheroes, Hunter Planet, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Cyberpunk, Paranoia, all of ’em. In college, we played more Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun, Rifts, and some homebrew systems. After college, I moved to Manhattan and just kind of … stopped? I got more into video games, I guess, and dropped out for a decade or so, missing all the Vampire and White Wolf and all that. I had a lot of real world grownup stuff to do, and moved around a bunch, so that all fell away for a bit.

Then in 2005 or so, I found the Forge. I seem to remember I was researching for a game pitch for some MUD project or something, and ran across the acronym “DitV”, and it was all downhill from there. Or, rather, back up the hill, right? I dove into the whole Forge and story game community and scene pretty hard—like I tend to do—for another ten or fifteen years, started going to a lot of conventions, and then the pandemic happened. But with everyone staying home, I found my way into playing more games online, and went even harder there. Since 2020, I’ve probably done around ninety percent of my gaming online, which has really allowed me to play and run RPGs much more easily, more often, with a wider group of people. And honestly, I don’t see that stopping any time soon.

So this is how I play now. I get on the Gauntlet or Open Hearth or any number of discord servers and play all the current hotness with like-minded folks. Powered by the Apocalypse, Forged in the Dark, Carved from Brindlewood, all the OSR and XSR-adjacent stuff, and the hundreds of other amazing independent games in itch.io that all do different things in different ways. GM-less, GM-ful, solo, larps, and everything in between, gimme gimme nom nom nom.

So yeah. That’s right now. What about the future?

I’m having a fantastic time now with a ton of great people, clearly, but I also know that my tastes have shifted and changed and evolved over the years. I feel pretty great about how everything is going right now, but what kinds of things are going to change? The RPG landscape has gone through some dramatic changes in the last twenty-thirty-forty years, and really, there’s absolutely no way for me (or anyone else, for that matter) to predict what might happen next.

But here are some things that I do know: I don’t want to get bored, and I don’t want to bore other people. I don’t want to feel bad when I’m playing games (bad in a bad way, I mean—there are plenty of great games that make you feel bad in a good way, right?) and I don’t want to make anyone else feel bad, either. I want to play games with old friends and discover more about each other, and I want to play with my current friends that I don’t get to play with often or at all, and I want to continue to meet new awesome people that I don’t even know yet.

And honestly, I want to play with more different kinds of people, right? I look at myself, and I see that a lot of the tables that I wind up are filled with people that look just like me. And I know that when our tables are made of more varied and diverse voices, everything gets a lot better for everyone involved. I want everyone to feel included and encouraged to play with us and to continue learning how to create more opportunities for that to happen.

I want to play with people who don’t even know what an RPG is yet, to introduce them to a whole new world of stuff they might fall in love with, and I want to keep bringing fresh games to people who haven’t had the chance to try something new. I want to continue telling stories together that touch us in different ways, and I want to explore things that you can’t easily explore in other types of media, and I want to keep creating and designing and curating new experiences that help us understand each other better.

But most of all, I just want to keep playing. Play is one of the most important activities that a person (or any animal, really) can participate in, and when we don’t find or make the time and space for play, we start to seize up, get all stiff and creaky, and I don’t want that for myself, or anyone. Who knows—maybe continuing to play everything I can get my hands on will help me push past those five thousand sessions? We’ll see.

So, after all that, what are my five thousand games? I don’t know, but I’ve already got a couple lined up for the coming year. My calendar for January is already looking pretty busy, so we’ll start there, and see what happens.

(This essay also available in video form over at Majcher Arcana on youtube!)