I’ve got a graveyard of half-built things. Dice rollers. A couple of little apps for running games online. World-building engines with tables for everything — terrain, monsters, treasure, the lot. Booklets. A YouTube channel I edited until I couldn’t face cutting another video. All gaming stuff, all started with a full head of steam, most of it shelved.
For years I’ve carried a quiet little story about that: I can’t stick at anything. I start, I get bored, I move on. Jumping from stone to stone.
I was picking at this again the other night and it finally landed that the story’s wrong. I’m not someone who can’t finish. I’m someone who always ends up making things. Give me a hobby and within a week I’m not doing the hobby, I’m building a tool for the hobby. That’s not a flaw to fix. That’s just how I’m wired. The making was never the problem.
What was the problem is what I thought the making was for.
Here’s the thing about the games. I used to run several a week. But that was during Covid, when the business was on its knees and I needed somewhere to disappear to for a few hours. Gaming was a brilliant place to hide, and I got a huge amount out of it. That need is gone now. Life’s busy and good. I don’t have a free evening a week to give, and if I’m honest I don’t even want one right now.
And yet I kept building gaming stuff. Engines and dice and booklets, all of it pointed at a game I was never going to sit down and run. Building the engine for a car I’m not going to drive. No wonder none of it ever felt finished — it was all waiting on a thing that was never coming.
The tell was on my shelf the whole time. Lately I’ve been pulling gaming books down and just reading them. Beautiful things — islands and worlds and strange little settings — knowing full well I’ll never run a single one. And loving them. Reading them the way you’d read anything good. Not prep. Just for the thing itself.
So I think I’ve had it backwards. I don’t need to finish the engine. I don’t need to run the game. I need to make the thing — a place, a world, whatever’s caught me that week — put it out somewhere, and walk away from it. Make it, share it, done. Nobody waiting on me, no group expecting me on a Tuesday. If one day the girls and Sinead have a free evening and fancy it, I’ll run something at a table. But that’s a someday, not a debt.
Until then the making is the point. Not the finishing. Not the running.
And this is the first one. I talked it out, made something of it, and put it here. That’s the whole idea.