Online Gaming and Parenthood or "That which you learn hardest, you learn best."

This may relate more to MMOs than online Roleplaying but with technology assisting online roleplaying more and more I can see the creep, and falls into the realm of fatherly advice vice gaming revelation.

An active gamer with 2 children I learned quite a lot over the years. I have been the young dad with babies and like most young men I was selfish and did not truly understand my role in marriage or as a father.

You eventually grow into the role but you only have the image of your own father in your minds eye to serve as a template. Those images can be good, bad or indifferent. You hear about a lot of negativity associated with gaming.

To me gaming is a great hobby; it kept me from running around with the guys who were still single chasing skirts. spending all weekend on the golf course or banging heads on the pitch and drinking after wards. The wife could always look over and know where I was at in the evenings! LOL

There is a period of your life where everything of a personal nature must become secondary for a couple and that is during the infancy of a child, and probably up until they can communicate.

Newborns and babies are fatiguing to say the least and require both parents’ efforts. If nothing else to gain the rest you require to function like a normal human being. When they sleep; you really should because they require 100% attention not just for their survival, but your sanity.

I did a terrible job of this with my firstborn; I ignorantly felt that I spent 12-14 hours at work and deserved a little time off when I came in the door. I failed to acknowledge my wife had spend just as much (and even more tiring effort at home.)

Man do I regret the arguments. “I spent all day working, what did you do?” Some things should never be said, especially out of ignorance. MMOs and gaming online do not help this discussion; many of the devices that make them fun to play you also cannot just just typically "walk away from." There is rarely a pause button nor can you save the game like some RTS.

Your character will always either have just entered a dungeon; started a fight with a mob or is transiting through dangerous territory. The biggest comments that make a wife sick to her stomach are probably;

     "Honey, let me just finish this fight real quick."

     "Honey, let me get back to the inn/town/city real fast"

     "Honey, I cannot walk away I just joined this group they are relying on me."

(They all start with honey... we get very loving when we stall)

I learned after the first and did much better with the second child that the wife and baby are much more important than any game. If she is asking for your help; she's asking for it NOW.

     Not in 10 minutes.

Not when she is FINALLY a priority over;

     some pixels on a screen

     some random acquaintances you have never met in real life

     something/someone who cease to exist the moment you log out .

If she could afford to wait those 10 minutes she wouldn’t ask for your help.

Game time is a lot like time during a football game you are watching on TV. The clock may say 7 minutes but the universal rule is multiply it by 3. So when you tell her, “honey Ill be off in 5 minutes I swear!” that is why she roles her eyes and gets upset.

Babies are about crisis management. They do not come with guidebooks or instruction manuals. You will be figuring out a ton of stuff together. Games can often serve as a place to shelter ourselves from our ignorance. However, babies are so much easier when figured out side by side with your spouse. It is easier on her; it is easier on you. In the end it is healthier for your marriage.

     Make her a priority always.

     Make the baby a priority always.

     Learn to type "BRB Baby" and immediately walk away.

If you can find a group of adults to game with; do so. College kids and teens do not often have the frame of reference. Youth is selfish by nature. They can ridicule you and attempt to guilt you based on how you are distracting from THEIR playtime, as though they should be on an equal level with your family. Trust me; a young man's ego feels and responds to this pressure.

There are two paths in gaming much like in your career. For an occupation, such as the military, you can choose the “Family” path or the “Career Advancement” path. For one you must sacrifice the other. There is no compromise. You simply cannot spend 3-8 hours raiding for those almighty “Purplz” or 4-5 hours tromping across Varisia because you may not get your PFS xp, without detracting from other elements of your life.

If you have a family you must be prepared to walk away; and that forces a much more casual play time.

Relatively speaking I will say it is a short period of your life. Once our children learned to communicate; and became somewhat self- sufficient. The wife did not mind indulging my hobby. Heck, she even brings me a beer or stuff to munch on nowadays while I am Frapsing the latest BETA, or spending hours on Roll20.net with the gaming crew. 

She wants me to be… well… me.

However, she wants her family to be a family and have a healthy foundation. That is what is important; and upon reflection, so did I. Learn to game only after the baby is asleep, AND when you have spent quality time with the wife.

The game will always be there; your children are only young once.

Everyone Loves Pie

So, last night, after 20 years of marriage my darling wife agrees to play
Pathfinder with her 19, 17 and 44 year old children.  The kids and I have been egging her on for the past week to get her to play with the familiar barrage of, "don't you want to spend time with the family?" type soliloqies she normally uses on us.

Submitting to the familial pressure she ends up rolling up "Jasmine" the druid to complement the family's coterie of Davian Lightbringer, human cleric of Iomedae; Micha half elf rogue; and Tirnaug Llachhammer dwarven fighter.

Apparently "Jasmine" sounds sufficiently "nature"ly.

What followed was a combination of perhaps some of most fun and frustrating roleplaying I could have asked for.

I chose a relatively simple module, D0 - Hollow's Last Hope to serve as an introduction. 

For those unfamiliar with the story; the logging town of Falcon's Hollow has been beset by a fearsome plague called the "blackscour" which becomes lethal in days.  A local alchemist has a page out of her grandmother's tome that hints at a cure and asks the players to go into the nearby wood, Darkmoon Vale to find the 3 ingredients; Elderwood moss, pickled rat's tail (a root) and ironbloom mushrooms.

After hearing of the various locations our druid was the only person who appears to have both knowledge geography and knowledge nature but due to some horrible rolls was unable to discern any locations.  We later learned upon close observation that she chose to roll a d10 vice a d20 to check her skills; all dice look alike when they have 10 or more sides.  No worries I simply layed out her set of dice in numerical order tossing the offending 20 sided D10 over my shoulder and continued on.

With our druid unfamiliar with the small forest of darkmoon vale, the party, under the militaristic leadership of my eldest, decided to head out to one of the principle logging camps and see if they could get direction.
Seeing an armed and armored band approach; the surly lumberjacks with axes in hand rallied to drive off the brigands or worse case infected townspeople.

Then the humor set in.

Demanding, not asking for, assistance my daughter's scrappy rogue begins pulling out her blades (chaotic neutral) in preparation for a fight that her insults are bringing; My son is tossing around his best "I am the holy son of Iomedae; you dare risk the wrath of the God's humble servant" speech.  My wife's contribution to the poor treatment by the lumberjacks?

"My cat doesn't like you", Jasmine utters. (Her animal companion is a cheetah)
Everyone pauses and the first chuckle starts.

Hearing the uproar at the edge of camp, the foreman arrives (a GM fiat to prevent the unplanned melee since they were given specific recommendation to ask for him back in town; and thusly failed to do so)  Describing him as a Vitto Mortensen with a braided beard; my wife utters, "oh he's cute" and completely breaks the tension as she sais, "Do I know you?  Have we met before" winking.

My daughter completely baffled and blushing and tells her, "Mooooom, you cannot...flirt with him..." 

"Why not?  I'm 22 by my character sheet, young and he's obviously ruggedly handsome"

"I won't get any loot if we don't fight!"

"We don't want to fight, we just want answers, we're on a quest not a date!" my son intervenes the two of them.

So the foreman attempts to drive them and their "unchained beast" off into the woods;
     "You're probably infected...."
     "We don't need armed brigands in our camp..."
     "A camp is no place for wild beasts, etc, etc..."

to which my wife very sweetly utters, "If I bake you a blueberry pie, will you tell us what we need to know?"

Yes, everyone pauses mid sentence and looks at "Jasmine."

"A pie mom?" My son asks incredulously.

"You're a druid, at the edge of a dark forest, where the heck are you gonna get a pie??" queries my daughter.

"Well everyone likes pie, and if I bake him one he'll be nice and help us."

I couldn't help but let her role a diplomacy check, with a grin on my face amidst everyones laughter, in light of that sound logic and of course she lands like an 18.
The scene concluded with the foreman sketching them directions to key locations within the vale and the family bedding down at the edge of the forest for the night.
Afterwards, when the session had ended, I had to have a talk with her regarding the druids relationship to nature and the forest; and how the huge blight upon the land which was caused by the lumberjacks cutting and how the scarring of the earth would appear to her. 

"A demand of planting some trees for every so many cut down would be more in her character." I mentioned.

She ignored that part of the description read to her initially, about druids... and the whole.. "nature thing" apparently liking the picture of the cute gnome next to the leopard in the Core rule book served as the basis for her character choice.
She knitted her brows pensively and said," oh I wouldn't have baked him a pie then knowing that."  

I definitly learned one thing about roleplaying;

While there may not be a druid in the mother; you cannot take the mom out of the druid.

Oh... and everyone loves pie, apparently.