Things have died. I was not one of them.

It has been months, Femme Gamers, and for that, I am shamed. I wish I had an excuse — and maybe I do. Work, school, husband, new dog, novel. Those are a long list of things. But it’s not like gaming stopped for me, and thus, I should have kept up here. I mean, there’s a lot of things going here, both good and bad.

In September, the Local Anime Con – which I will not name, because I hate the club behind it and will quicker cut my own throat then give those people free press – put our lives on hold, as it does every year. Most of our gaming group is involved in this and it’s yet another reason I hate it’s very existence. Most of the group goes on an anime-infused exodus to other cons, write what they like about the other cons, and then attempt to apply it to their current local anime con that has a completely different social demographic in another state, with complete lack of success that accompanies taking the science behind bananas and attempting to apply it to pork products.

It also puts our gaming on hold for several weeks, as they apply their weekends to meetings, dinners, and the inherent drama that the con is soaked with. It’s all they talk about. It’s all they can afford to deal with. Let me tell you, gentle reader, that this fucking sucks.

During this time we had three games; Shadowrun, which my husband GM’s, Witchfire, an Iron Kingdoms campaign which my ex-boyfriend (but still pal) runs, and Murderous Hobos, another Iron Kingdoms game which a friend of ours runs. The husband and I are not involved in the con, but the ex and the pal definitely are.

Shadowrun does not go on hold. Hobos does go on hold, for the holidays. The ex puts his game on indefinite hiatus with plans to return to the game after the holidays. Life goes on – drama occurs, the con occurs, holidays occur. Games get put on brief holiday holds, but resume. Our friend has some family issues — an illness with his mother — that complicates his life, but she turns out okay (for which we are all grateful) and life goes on.

The ex never picks up his game. We merrily go along for the next few months, up until February, doing the every-other-weekend games. I game Shadowrun one Saturday, make dinner,and have a good old time. The husband goes to play in the Murderous Hobo game on the other Saturday and HE has a good old time. Good ol’ times are had.

In the interim of missing tabletop games, I play a ton of video games when I have the time; bitterness over the theft of my PS3 and all the time I invested in the games on it, now lost – Folklore, Final Fantasy XIII, Red Dead Redemption, and so forth – have made me bitter about trying to return to them, and while I have picked up each one a few times, I have not gotten near to the completion I had when the systems were stolen. I don’t think I can be blamed for this, but I know I ought to build a bridge and get over it, proverbially speaking.

However, all is not lost: I’m loving Fallout: New Vegas and I got into Mass Effect (finally) and while I watch for Dragon Age 2 with trepidation. I’m not going to be a first day buyer on that one – Mass Effect’s control scheme on PC doesn’t thrill me and I don’t really want a sword & sorcery overlay just because Bioware’s lazy and wants to cash in on their RPG epic the ‘fast and easy’ way by just producing a fantasy Mass Effect clone. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm drops and that’s a whole other post in itself, folks. Another time.

Life settle into a routine. Slowly, as it often happens, discussions crop up about starting a new Friday Game. Witchfire is never mentioned. The ex begins designing a new game sort– very skeletal, very much trying to not be ‘main stream fantasy’. (He’s quite the rebel, my ex. Ask anybody – cue eye roll, here.) He does nothing with it, but talks about running it for a while. Another player in our game goes back to talking about running another, long-dead campaign that quite frankly, nobody really wants to play. All of his games go that way, I’m sad to say, and the group keeps dodging his games – but he still occasionally puts them out as an option. He gets points for perseverance, at least.

Finally, the ex announces last week he’s going to run the ‘new’ world he’s built up– he’s going to have us make characters and let us define our characters WHOLE COUNTRIES and CULTURES and fit them into his ‘existing’ game world, with a few provisos (he has things to say about certain races — things that break them from ‘mainstream fantasy’, of course). He just wants to experiment, he says. Try something new, he says.

So, last weekend, I talk to him over IM about my feelings and thoughts on the matter; I have wanted to return to our past campaign and finish it. Our players are all happy to do so, even though he claims everyone is ‘ambiguous’ or ‘non-committal’; I know both my husband and I want to finish the game, and the others are happy so long as there is dice involved, really. He promises me that come next Friday, we’ll all get together and talk about returning to Witchfire or starting the new, so he’d know what everybody wanted.

Well, let me tell you, friends, that when I walked in on Friday night and found them all building characters for the new game – that he’d been working with the other players for a week, including my husband, on new classes and cultures to cram into the Pathfinder system, I was pretty pissed off. This is not the first time he’s lied to me about following through – there’s a reason he got dumped six years ago, and shit like this factors into it – and spend the rest of the night angry. Everybody rolls up new characters, and I beg off with lack of inspiration.

Later, my husband asks me why I can’t just go along to get along — I say I’m tired of putting up with this shit with the ex; this is part of why he got dumped and it’s tiring of having some of our social life continue to hinge on this person’s inability to commit to anything. I’m not the only one who feels this way– the guys are tired of him saying he’ll do things, but being men, they tend to simply let it roll, because half of them live with them, and none of them are particularly inclined to rock the boat. Also, it’s partially our damage and history together; I won’t lie, it’s a factor.

So, gentle readers: I know when I tell him I’m not going to join his game, there’s going to be drama. If I ‘go along to get along’ my lack of enjoyment and lack of giving a damn about this shitty idea that he’ll drop in less than two months will also cause drama. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

So, do I go full damned and let him just how hard he can fuck himself, or do I attempt some sort of politically correct, “Sorry, it’s not you, it’s me,” which is only half true. A lot of this, very much, is him. But no amount of telling him this — even dumping him over his inability to follow through on anything, including our engagement – has ever made him change, and this sure won’t either.

Damned either way.

~Amanda