Playing Your (Parental) Role...

... a tale about tobacco, coffee and mayonnaise.

I have three bad habbits I admit.  I drink a few litres of black coffee (of the not decaf variety) a day, smoke near to a pack of 30s on a daily basis, and I dip my food in spoons of mayonnaise.
And for 2014, one of those is going to get cut down on.  It will be the mayonnaise.

Now what has all that got to do with my usual ramblings?  Building further on my rants and reflections posts of the past weeks (*SPOILER* and comming weeks, building up to the new year resolution post), I would rank those habbits on an equal foot as my hobbies like this:
Where coffee is my Saint Seiya collection, tobacco is equalling my love for those small plastic bricks called Lego, and gaming in general (be it Playstation, miniatures, Magic, etc) would be the mayonnaise.

And it is the mayonnaise that will be severly lessened...

My Magic has been burning low already for a few months due to time constraints, my miniature gaming has essentially been reduced to painting only and with the Playstation Challenge about to enter it's final month, I'm playing rather occassionally these past weeks and only games I love the setting off (anime mecha, Lego and from next month, a lot of Saints).  Most of my other games have either been deleted to save up hard disc space, traded in at the local game store or placed in the Munchkin's shelves.

That all accumulated of course in the choice been made a lot easier.  And by quitting mayonnaise as well, I might even loose a few dozen pounds on top as well as an additional benefit ;-)
Funnily, or ironically, enough, this will result in an actual increase of time spend painting come january, as with a combination of factors, including increased postage rates and school in september, I will have to fund my other hobbies greatly with the models I'm quitting with.

But that doesn't mean  I won't be gaming at all anymore!  I'll just be looking to other ways and manners to do it, like back to basics role playing.  With the internet and forums, it is now perfectly feasible for those things to be PBEM'd, or more accuratelly, Played By Forum Post.  I'm currently studying everything in an existing Lego Medieval Fantasy game (same as normal, but with Lego characters to depict the scenes instead of more classic known ones like the old Ral Partha TSR range and such).  Heck, who knows I'll become a dungeon master one day, sick ideas enough in this brain to torture parties with ;-)

Another option I had been thinking over is the side of wargaming called solo gaming.  I have been reading about this on various sources like Counterfett's excellent blog, and the ideas I saw there (solo Lego based and other clickables games for one) together with the above RP I described, has caused inspiration to hit me like a train.
MAYBE I can get the Munchkin and the GF involved in some Lego roleplaying as that would be, I think, a great idea for the little guy.  It can help him further in learning some social interaction skills, as well as learning to imagine things 'outside the boxed set' and more imporatantly, express them better on what he wants to build.  The GF's role will be mainly being the sidekick to the heroic 8 year old, so that he doesn't have to play alone.  Bit of a guiding light helping the hero out where to start thinking to solve a puzzle or such.

I'm going to look into creating, both storywise and minifig wise, a small adventure of about 30 minutes to an hour, and to give it a try during the christmas school holidays. 

Kind of like Heroica, but not like it.

I'll just have to make sure to focus more on interaction and logical thinking then pure hack and slash dungeon crawling...  You see, the Munchkin is easily distracted and afraid to take on challenges, as he scares to fail.  So if I can trick him into countering those two things by using a tool he loves playing with, that is a good form of trickery in my book.

And again that brings up the issue of funding and trading...

This means I'm going to be looking through my collections to see for suitable figures and trade for other minifigs from various series and sets with some of the wargame figures I have.  I should have enough villagers and all thanks to my Castle and Pirates series I had as a kid, but for the flashier minifigs released in more recent years, I guess it'll be Miniature Trading forums and the likes.
But first I need to convince the GF of the merits of the idea and to get her on board, and fresh up my voice and storytelling skills.

And find a way to explain an 8 year old that Gandalf and Harry Potter can easily run around in the same village...

That is it for this week though, but over the next weeks I'm going to look into concrete plans of how to cut down that 'mayonnaise', the building up of other parts of someones niched, linked hobbies, and the benefits and drawbacks this can cause in one's mental state of mind.

But until then, EXCELSIOR!!!