Month: April 2020

Self Care At Weekenders

Regardless of whether it’s your first weekender, or your twentieth, there’s bound to be some things you can do that will help you out for the long haul. Weekenders are often packed full of exciting stuff and it’s easy to neglect your basic needs in your search for more fun stuff and involvement. However your mind and body needs what it needs and if you neglect it too much, you could find yourself becoming more irritable and emotional.

NURTURING YOUR BODY

Sleep!  If you don’t get any sleep, you’ll be tired and grumpy and have an awfully hard time keeping up in fights, investigations and political scenes. Even if you handle exhaustion pretty well, if you get much less sleep than your normally should you’ll feel the pinch somewhere. Even if you don’t get much sleep, at least get a few hours. Three hours are better than none, after all.

If your game involves bunk beds, if you’re on a bottom bunk, it can sometimes help to put up a privacy screen in terms of a little sheet that you tuck under the top bunk.  Now snug in your little cave, you can sleep more cosily. Of course if you’re on the top bunk, well, you’re the king of the castle.  Take a few deep breaths and embrace it.

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Cognitive Load in Games

People’s brains can only hold so much information at any one time. This informational capacity is impacted by a low of factors including health, emotional state, hunger, stress and dehydration. Overload this, and people’s brains start to fry. Not physically, but in a confused grumpy kind of way.

Now this isn’t to say we should avoid having a high cognitive load in our games.  That would be silly.  Some people are attracted to solving puzzles and coming up with solutions or just love lore!  And some of the most popular tabletop games have entire books full of mechanics to remember (like Dungeons & Dragons).  What it does mean is to be mindful of the cognitive load requirements of your game and how they can impact on people.

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