The Non-Euclidian Staircase

It has certainly happened, and I even did so for a short while. For a good time before my move to New Hampshire, I was doing no face-to-face gaming at all (excepting at Origins, GenCon, AmberCon, and AmberCon North), but I was heavily into gaming via CompuServe RPGames forum. However, that forum didn't really survive the reorganization of CIS (and the noise and bother that proceeded the dissolution did a very good job of reducing my interest). I followed many others to DreamLyrics, where I got into a few games for a while, but the involuntary break in the interim proved easier to take than I had expected. When I moved to New Hampshire, I was without easy connectivity for a month, and short on free time for a few months following that (buying a house, getting into the pace of a new job, wrestling with actuarial exam time requirements, etc.). That period caused me to fade out of DreamLyrics and, at the same time, most non-convention gaming as well (and, since I'd moved further from Origins and GenCon than a convenient drive, I'd stopped attending those as well).

It wasn't really a full break... I still organized and GMed at AmberCon North in this period, but for a 6 or 7 month period, that convention was pretty much all the roleplaying I did.

After a few months, though, I got myself back into the mood and started back into gaming, first with a PBEM game, then by joining into regular face-to-face gaming in Fall River, MA, both as a player and as a GM. Currently, I'm playing in two games there (one bi-weekly, one monthly), but am not actively GMing (my Feng Shui game is suspended pending being able to assemble a critical mass of players for the last session and I haven't started something new just yet). I've recently gotten into a new PBEM (James Kosub's Passions of the Tide) and I'm doing some preliminary work on developing a new game or two as GM. And I still am part of the organization of ACN.

Did the break help? I think so. It helped me regather my ideas, re-think some of my assumptions about roleplaying, how I did it, and how I wanted to do it. Shifting back from PBEM to F2F was really only made possible thanks to the gap as well, since PBEM will, if allowed to, take as much time as can be poured into it.