Herding Cats - Part 6

Apologies for the long break - things have been hectic!

It's been a few Deathwatch sessions since the last post, and we've had some interesting changes; briefly, Jim is now playing a Blood Angels chaplain, having converted over since we obtained the new 'Rites of Battle' sourcebook.

We've been chugging along well with the new story arc, which has shown to be very interesting - a series of three missions compiled in 'The Emperor Protects'. Seems a pretty ironic title, as there is plenty of stuff in here for GM's to kick some major PC butt with!

In fact, as I write this, I currently have a hapless Ultramarines Librarian currently without his left arm (Tim), and my poor Blood Angels Assault Marine missing his right leg (Chris). Would be a much, MUCH uglier situation if not for fate points! With this in mind, the players are close to the end of the first mission, with plenty left to go and this week I expect the arrival of 'Mark of the Xenos', which is basically the DW version of the Monster Manual :-)

Other events of note since the last post include Jim's 40th birthday and my 30th. Some bloke called Damien also turned 32, but it was decided that this was of no real consequence.

What I've found interesting is that my 'How Old Do You Feel?' stat seems to have paused somewhere between 19-21 years old. I've considered this for a long time, and firmly believe that it's our hobbies and other diversions that keep us young. For geeks, this makes us all practically eternal children, who never really grow up in some ways.

After all, our spare time - outside family and partners - is invested in the playing of games, which sadly, a lot of adults simply do not make time to play any more. Consider the make-up of our current playing group:

Chris - Manager at Woolworths and night-shift planking supervisor
Damien - Door manufacturing and panda keeper at Melbourne Zoo
Tim - IT guy at some dodgy company which will probably end up on Wikileaks at some stage
Graham - IT guy at a secondary school and 'Is it plugged in?' solutions expert
Jeff - Service station worker at Woolworths and Canadian
Dave - Croupier at Crown Casino/7th Layer of Hell
Silas - Pharmacist and recent corporate shill
Michael - Secondary teacher and CRT whore
Jim - GE Money/8th Layer of Hell
Myself - State & Federal Government/9th Layer of Hell

A pretty diverse group, with extremely diverse hours of work among the ten of us. Yet we all make time to get together at least every fortnight (and for some of us, every week!) to sit around a table, spin stories, roll dice, take the piss out of each other and generally have a pretty good time.

Those of you familiar with this bunch will also attest to the fact that there's a few big kids in there, and I wouldn't have it any other way. It's never all sunshine and lollipops, but we get along well most of the time. Like most kids :-)

Ask yourself - among your 'non-geek' friends, how many people can say they do something social with such a large group regularly? For a lot of people, the answer will be something along the lines of 'Not as much as I'd like'. I think the current corporatespeak refers to this as a state of being 'time-poor'.

One of my favourite teachers had a particularly erudite way of putting things, and one of his favourite sayings was this - which I close with:

'We never have time, because we never make time.'

I've been making time for playing games since as far back as I can remember, and I intend never to stop.