So much.
You can do eet! This was at the penultimate game of a three year long campaign with ten players. A logistical headache I am not likely to repeat. The players at my table had gathered every army, mercenary, and ally they had to band together to march on the enemy Citadel and stop their universe …
I feel a New Years resolution coming on.
I tend to blame my kids for the fact that I don't have nights like that much any more, but that's sort of a cop out. Do you use the same excuse, Doyce? What's preventing it from happening?
Oh, it's definitely the kids. The oldest wouldn't be a problem, but the 3 and 1 year old make scheduling things pretty difficult. If we wait til they're in bed, we can't start til 7:30, and if we don't, then either I or my wife can't play.
I've done quite a bit of Hangouts-gaming, and don't get me wrong, I LOVE IT AND IT'S SAVED MY GAMING LIFE, but getting folks together around a big table and playing a campaign… it's pretty cool, and a tiny bit impossible at the moment.
How old is your oldest?
Have you heard of HeroKids?
I have the exact same issue. My 9 year old would even jump in and play, but the 3 and 1 year olds make it impossible. Even if people come over, it's either neglect the game or neglect the kids – neither is fun or good.
+Ryan Good I do a bit of gaming with my kids (http://random-average.com/index.php/2014/11/superhero-mini-battles-take-two/), especially my oldest and Fate/FAE (http://random-average.com/index.php/tag/supers/), but there's some stuff that I'd really rather do with the grups, or which Kaylee probably wouldn't enjoy.
This is a different conversation, but it's something I've noticed in the last few years, when I'm looking for stuff to play with Kaylee: a tremendous percentage of RPGs these days are meta in some way or another – they're calling out old classic tropes, or are responses to same, or doing the same thing in reference to another medium or genre – it's the kind of thing that's highly enjoyable if you get the joke/reference, and kind of wasted pages if you don't.
Example: Kaylee doesn't get excited about steampunk stuff at all – she doesn't have the cultural background exposure to make that kind of setting appealing. I'm working on that, obviously, but there's only so much pop culture bolus you can resort to before you make an enemy for life. (See: my life-long hatred of all things Monty Python – thank you, freshman college roommate.)
That's one example, but there are dozens more – really, any kind of genre bending/mixing loses its draw with her, because she doesn't have the baseline genres firmly established yet, and that means she and I have the most fun with really vanilla settings/set-ups, and most of the games I have available get filed under "next time I play with grups, ha ha."
A whole bunch of existing and especially newer RPG stuff (I believe) unconsciously dependent on the readers/players getting the joke.