I’ve been role-playing with a group for a little over two years now. We started off as a group of four, but have added a few players in the past year to get us up to the typical on and off eight. Since more players have gotten involved, we’ve had some issues trying to coordinate game times around everyone’s schedules, so I took some time to cook up a little scheduling application. We’ve not been using it, for various reasons that have been bugging me.
Firstly, I should say that it’s fully functional. It takes everything that we were doing before with tons of email and phone calls, and puts it in a single, easily-configured system. It’s not yet an improvement on what we were already doing except that it’s now possible to keep it all organized and expand on what we had.
For example, the system still lets you send email to all the players to schedule the next game. But now if we want to, we can add on the ability to keep our character sheets online, or publish anything else related to the game. This is apparently not enough, though.
For reasons I can’t understand, Bob, the guy who hosts our games (and therefore has the most say over scheduling) has decided that we shouldn’t use the system. Not because it’s bad or incapable of what we were doing before, but mostly, it seems, because it doesn’t look good and doesn’t already have those additional features. Ok, fine, but what really gets me is his take on what we should do next.
Understand that I enlisted the help of a couple of the other guys in the game group to help put this together. We were out one evening and I said, “You know, let’s stop talking about this thing we’re always saying we should do. Chris, you throw together a quick design and help with the forms. Paul, help me put some of our story archives online. I’m going to set up the site and write the scheduler to send out the email. Let’s do this right now.” So we did, with me coordinating everyone’s efforts. Even though it wasn’t everything we might eventually want it to be, it was at least as much as what we had - a good starting point.
The problem, and it’s not so much a problem as it is an affront to my successful effort to get the project off the ground, is that Bob didn’t just say that the project was insufficient. Apparently, it is not only insufficient, but I did a poor enough job getting it to its level of sufficiency that he’s told Paul to take charge of handling the changes. Moreover, at our last game session, he made this decision at my suggestion that we finally start using the system.
I’ve since received an email from Paul talking about getting the site up and running. Although he says I need to be involved in that, I’ve been given an almost insignificant fraction of work to do, and it’s obvious that I won’t be coordinating any part of it, like what had gotten the thing as far as it is.
I don’t know. Maybe Bob isn’t aware of my part in the process. Maybe he’s really unhappy with the system and would rather not tell me. Maybe he thinks I’m too busy otherwise to work on this site for our gaming group (which is often the case). Maybe he just wanted to give Paul an excuse to stop pestering him about it. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks I did a decent job getting everyone to collaborate on what is there. Really, I’m not sure what the deal is.
Anyway, I’m not sure what stage of the Kübler-Ross model I’m in, but I’ll just do what I’m told at this point. If my further involvement is required, I’ll do what I can. Nonetheless, my enthusiasm for our game group’s scheduling system has died, and that’s a shame since it seems like such a cool project.
