Removing Hurdles

I love TTRPGs. Pathfinder 2e and then Daggerheart have been the vehicles through which my partner and I have been telling our Skies Over Aefala story. However, there's been a sneaky little tax that has kept us from playing consistently in recent months, an insurmountable hurdle that slams like a shutting gate on us when our energy is lowest. I call it the "setup tax."

Used to, when we had a full group of players, I controlled Cael, and the two others controlled their characters, Brod and Flink. When they stepped away from the game, that was when my partner and I switched from Pathfinder 2e to Daggerheart. A more narrative-focused game worked better for us as a storytelling medium, and the transition created an opportunity to create other characters to help with balancing out the party. As much as I love Cael's and Kosris' dynamic, having only two main adventurers would have 1) made balancing combat encounters more difficult and 2) shifted the focus of the story more toward their deepening relationship, perhaps not by much, but noticeable nonetheless. The last label I want is that of a romantasy storyteller.

So, I created Lynn and She Who Threads the Needle (nicknamed Knit...eventually), a naga and spider faerie respectively, and my partner created Raelor, a minotaur. It's, uh, it's quite an eclectic group now. Which is great! But the consequence of playing 3 characters is that instead of being able to rely on the beautiful unofficial Pathbuilder app to keep everything organized and accounted for, we use the physical Daggerheart cards. I've shown the setup before, but here are a couple refresher photos.

Unbeknownst to me when I created the characters was how much space everything would require...and how much time it would take to complete the setup each and every week. As you can see, not only did I use our kotatsu table but also the sofa cushion next to me on my right. My dice box and other miscellaneous items rested on the end table to my left, boxing me in. Altogether, I spent ~45 minutes each week laying out all the cards, all the tokens, all the dice, etc., and since we played in the late afternoon, that meant starting the process during the mid-afternoon slump when my energy was at its lowest.

Owning cats complicated the process, because I couldn't start organizing everything into their proper places while the cats could trample over everything, and I wasn't about to keep them locked up in separate rooms all day. My partner and I could have started playing sooner in the day, but if we did, he would have to take a break partway through to take his afternoon nap.

So, we began canceling sessions more and more in favor of using the day off as a rest day. He would want the session day off because work from the previous week was tiring; I would want the rescheduled day off because of allergies or my own tiredness. This cycle continued for months, with occasional sessions scattered in here and there when the stars and moons and planets aligned.

The dark side of taking those weeks off surfaced as anxiety toward the day of an actual session. Something about the weeks of gaps between sessions ratchets up my anxiety toward playing again, whereas weekly consistency calms it to mere nervousness and excitement. Will I inhabit my characters well enough and do them justice? Will I remember the rules? Will I remember what cards do what?

The session always goes well when we play, but the buildup can be intolerable.

A sign I take it all too seriously? Perhaps, but if I do, it's only because I care deeply about the story and am invested in my characters' parts to play, and unlike writing where you can go back and edit pieces of the story that don't fit, once the event happens, it's canon. Oh, sure, I can always shape how I tell the story when I decide to do so, but telling the story through this medium creates a limitation, similar to what an author such as Brandon Sanderson might place when building the magical systems for his fantasy worlds.

As you may have intuited by now, the source of anxiety and the lack of motivation wasn't because of burnout. My excitement to play and to experience the story remained strong, had even grown since finishing Teyr'loch Delter Pach. I was having dreams about Cael's struggle against Maryn's vast political influence, and I've never been one fortunate enough to have dreams about characters, no matter how much I wished for it back in the day. That was an ability I always envied about my best friend in high school. So, it wasn't a lack of desire to continue. It was just the tedium of positioning everything where it needed to go. It was the setup tax.

We needed a solution, and we needed one soon if we were ever going to continue the story.

So, as a reward for paying off another one of our loans, my partner and I invested in this beauty.

It doesn't look like much at first glance, does it? Well, prepare to be amazed~

I know, I know, you may have already guessed that the top came off, but look at how nice and wide it is!

We've been wanting a gaming table for years, and while it's not necessarily the dream table, it's a good compromise. It wasn't supposed to arrive until today (Thursday), but as our luck would have it, it arrived on Tuesday, and so, of course, I had to christen it with my permanent setup.

The full arrangement, my friends, in this table, from cards to tokens to dice. My partner said that if I needed more room, too, he could keep the book, his dice box, etc. elsewhere, since it won't take him as long to get situated. (He hasn't felt the weight of the full setup tax like I have.) My half is a little tight, so I might take him up on that offer, but having everything already spread out like this lightens the burden on my shoulders significantly. No more setup tax for me~

What's Your Setup Tax?

 Most of the time when I think about the hurdles I need to overcome in regards to accomplishing what I want, it's from the lens of a skill I want to develop or a habit I want to build and making the entry point as smooth as possible to lessen the initial onboarding friction. Very rarely do I think about the hurdles that prevent me from indulging my hobbies, disregarding for the moment that this particular hobby acts as a launching pad for some of my work.

This got me thinking, how many of us have hobbies we love that we haven't visited in a while simply because the "setup tax," or barrier of entry, prevents us from engaging with an activity that otherwise brings us joy, and how (in)visible can that hurdle be?

What's a hobby you haven't touched in a while? What's your perceived reason for setting it aside, and could the reason actually be because of a setup tax you were unaware of until now?

Bonus

 A game of Wingspan is how my partner decided to break the table in for himself.

Summary of Notable Accomplishments:

• I started reading Ultralearning recently and have been taking notes. I haven't dialed in on my "project" yet, but I've been circling an idea for weeks now

• Completed quite a list of wawfuls

• Finished rereading "The Golden Compass" by Philip Pullman

  • Was unaware until today that they changed the name of the first book for the North American release and that elsewhere it's called, "Northern Lights". The more you know.

This Week's Obligatory Cat Pic: Mura

I think he likes the new placement of the tower.