Playing D&D. Soon. I Hope.

I posted a week ago about how I'm looking to get a Dungeons & Dragons game started soon. It's been taking a while. And it's not even a big game. It's purposefully a small one! First, there was fleshing out the story enough to start making plans, then finding the right group of players, and now the challenge of figure out when we can all play.

It reminds of me this very true D&D meme:



Yes, scheduling a D&D game is the hardest part of running a D&D game. Especially once you and your players all have regular lives— with jobs, families, and other activities and obligations. So frequently the discussion goes like:

"How about we do Saturdays, 7pm 'til late?"
"I'd need to be home by 10pm."
"I have another D&D game already Saturday evenings."
"What about Saturday afternoon?"
"I can't start before 2."
"I can't stay past 6, maybe even 5:30."
"How about Sunday?"
"I'm busy in the daytime."
"I'm busy in the evening."
"Oh, and I can't do the 4th, the 11th, or all of February and March."
"Could we do a weekday, like Friday night?"
"I couldn't be there until 7pm, at least.'
"I'd need to turn into a pumpkin by 10."
"I'm still out all of February and March."

Pretty quickly you start to feel like this:

Where We've Been: We Keep a Pin Map

Years ago I got the idea, "Let's make a map of all the places we've been!" I made it a simple, DIY craft project. I bought a cork bulletin board sized about 24"x36", got a folding USA roadmap from AAA, trimmed the map to fit, then stapled it into the frame. With the cork board surface beneath the paper map we could stick colored map pins into it.

At first there weren't many pins. Understand, we started this back in the mid-late 1990s after we'd moved out to California together. Most of the original pins were where we'd lived in college and where we stayed on our cross-country drive moving to California. But over the years we've added a lot more pins. Here's a pic from a few weeks ago:



Our homemade pin map has been a fixture in our house for a few decades at this point. For the first few years it'd be a ritual— no, a celebration— when we'd come home from a trip and add a new pin, or possible a few new pins, to the map. Over the years as we've filled in the map with pins in places we've wanted to visit we often come home without a new pin to add. So now it's a special celebration when we visit a new place and can add a pin!

(A note on pin meaning: We decided from the beginning that pins would only mark places we stayed overnight. If we marked every place we simply visited, some areas of the map would get extremely crowded. Plus, what counts as "visited" if not an overnight stay? Is there a minimum visit time, like it has to be over 3 hours to count? What if we just pause somewhere scenic to take pictures? We limited it to overnights to make it simple and sane.)