This is our dilemma. We meet several times a year, mostly around major holidays, and make time to play D&D. But our imaginations are fired every day of the year to get involved with the game. That is the dilemma… how to make the best use of the down time.
This past week as I muttered again about the lack of anything on the official D&D website, this question came back to me. What is the best way to make use of the down time between game sessions? We've talked about this over and over. We understand it is an issue, but we can't seem to come up with a viable way to make the time productive. I realized this was the greatest failure of the official site. The game seems very well designed, and will generate a great deal of interest, but the website is static. The books are supposed to hold that role. The website should be dynamic. That is the place for them to constantly produce information. Frankly, it would make a more than adequate replacement for their discontinued magazines, Dungeon and Dragon. To date, they haven't made that use of their resources.
This is an attempt to address the void by providing a daily comment on the game with an eye toward developing a means to channel creative energies into a focused output. Personally, I get home from work each day fired up to do something with the game. My trouble is that I have limited time and energy, and am not always able to fully explore what I want to with the time I have.
The most obvious answer to the question is to produce maps, create campaigns and adventures, etc. This is true. But building even a simple encounter can require hours of thought and bookwork. I don't often have time available like that in convenient blocks. So I waffle and think: should I draw a map; should I work on environments and terrain; should I think about politics; should I make up another character? In the end, time slips away an little gets done.
I think a daily forum, set up like a devotional, would help organize everything into a productive framework. Set up one idea to focus on for that day, and (ideally) add an activity that will allow development of that idea into a concrete game element. The catch is that nothing like this exists, so creating it, while useful and hopefully effective, prevents me from productive moments of my own. I'm confident the two aren't mutually exclusive, and that starting the process will allow an effective distillation of it from theory into practice.
