My memories of the Rules Cyclopedia from my teenage years are of hours being spent drawing maps (hand drawn, using photocopies of the hex grid in the back of the book) with colored pencils, writing out long backstories for adventures, and creating a huge world that my players only ever saw a tenth of.
All of those hours were spent at the expense of other activities like homework and normal socialization. Now, twenty years later, I don't have that kind of time. And that is the unfortunate reality a lot of adult age category gamers face. There just isn't enough time to devote to preparing a campaign "properly."
So, you face a choice of whether to play with a barely prepared, seat of your pants improv style, or not play at all. I don't have the game rules practically memorized the way I used to so my improv skills are woefully inadequate. And thus, the long-winded point of this blog is that we didn't play this week.
Luckily, reality won't be quite so needy and clingy this week (I hope) and so we should be playing our first real session sometime soon.
