A Difficult Choice

I find that as I get older more things make demands of that most precious of resource...time. Most things that take time also take money but I consider money far less valuable. I find that currently my time demands are as follows:

Family
Business
Workouts
Rugby
Home Maintenance
Pool Maintenance
Computer / Console Gaming
Roleplaying
Wargaming

to mention nothing of my other hobbies which sadly have been neglected
Firearm Training / Practice
Fishing
Hiking/Camping
Gardening

In addition to all of the above I am working with my Rugby club to create a youth rugby program in town and I will be administering and hopefully coaching this program and this will take a considerable amount of my time.

I struggled heavily with what I am about to say. I find that I am having a lot of trouble finding time to make game and story posts because of these other obligations and so I began analyzing how to make time for such things. Then I made a stark and surprising discovery...I don't really derive much enjoyment out of rpgs anymore. I never expected this to happen as I used to love them, but I find that real world experience are far more enriching and so I would like to spend more of my time and money on the hobbies I neglected, and maybe on some new ones....Scuba Diving, Spearfishing, who knows what else. I also need more time for my family as between work, workouts, and rugby practice / games I feel I have little time with them. Spending time nose deep in rulebooks and writing up plot posts is time I no longer feel is well spent. I appreciate rpgs and the creativity that comes with them, I just no longer seem to enjoy them. I no longer look forward to making posts and reading posts, but instead it has begun to feel like a chore. I enjoyed rpg in person and I could tolerate it live over skype, though that was filled with distractions and difficulties, but I just cannot seem to get into forum rpgs. I considered dropping many of the above activities to make time and when it came down to it the choice was obvious.

All this said I am not saying my farewell. I still might enjoy an occasional read, and may still have ideas to contribute to help keep resources available to keep the hobby alive. I also consider the success of this site very important to me. As such I decided to I would just have a social membership. In our rugby club we have social memberships for people who want to help grow the sport and support our club but who do not want to play. That is what I am going to do here. I will help with site issues, Faqs, and moderate if that is ever wanted. I will lend my two cents to various topics brought up on the site. I will continue to contribute to the wargaming sections and to the guides. I will create characters and add them to the library, and may help in other ways as time dictates, I just do not want to hold up any more games because I have become a sporadic at best poster.

I apologize to the GMs whose games I am suddenly dropping from, and I apologize to those who were in my game and wanted to see it grow, but I have to do what is best for my life and my family. I will be completely and adding all of my characters to the library over the next few days and I highly encourage any and all GM's to utilize these characters in any way you see fit. Especially in the games that these characters were created for. I hope no one bears ill will and I will continue to to contribute to the site in any way I can. I will see you all around the boards.

As one of those GMs: All good, man. Real life comes first. I'm glad you're still going to be around on the site, even if you're reducing your role to what your schedule can handle.

Yah, RL always comes first, and you've supported my attempts to get this site going through the years, so I can't fault you for much. As always, I'll say, if you know friends who wanna play, remind them we exist :D

Either way, take care of what needs to be taken care of.

Thanks for the understanding guys and like I said I will still be about contributing and recruiting. I wanted from the beginning to create a repository of wargaming resources to attract that demographic but found I couldn't make time to make those posts amidst rping posts. I will be trying to make weekly contributions to the wargaming section.

That sounds great. It'd be great if we can get a wargaming side of this site up and running alongside the RPing. Been a long time since we played on Vassal.

Would love to get some vassal games going if possible.

I'm sure we could set that up. Hell, organizing the sort of league games we tried to set up before would be great.

3x matches weekly with scoring and then a ranked single elimination tournament, over several months.

Indeed would be quite an enjoyable endeavor, I will make that a project, might take me some time to set it up, plus we need to find interest.

We've got time. I'm sure we'll find interest.

What is this thing you're thinking of doing? Vassal, heard of it before.. Wargaming is fun.
Take some time and do the things in life you love Azzorak :)

A few years back we tried to set up a Warhammer 40k league, where each player would face another player in 3 matches, scored based on wins, losses, and ties, and then ranked every week. At the end after some number of matchups had been done, we'd do a tournament to see who the league champion was, with the prize being (as I recall) getting to set a house rule for the next season. Or something.

Oooh that's neat. I haven't played 40k in years *mostly due to GW pumping out new codex after codex and new rulebooks every year, it gets a bit much.

I'd be interested in doing this I think, assuming Vassal isn't a pain in the arse.