OK, theRPGSite. Lend me your wisdom.

I am "officially" in 5 RPG groups right now. The online/PbP group is the only one that has actually played in the month of October. The last physical game I could participate in was in August.*

What do you do to keep yourself happy and engaged with the hobby when the spirit is willing but the body has bags full of Cheetos and no one to share them with?

* For the record, this is significantly my fault: I was physically useless for most of September.

Focus on the game that had shown the most activity.  Sorry that is all I got with the amount of info you gave.  I mean I don't know the average frequency of times you play.  For all I know you could be a rough spot which I suspect as you said that September was a bad month for physical games.

EDIT: As for time between games?  Make your own campaign world for later games.  Make up new monsters.  I don't know just be creative.  Emulate God himself and create worlds with a abundance of life on it.

Best use of time is prepping resources for later games. Some things I did in 'downtime' that worked out really well included mapping a sandbox, seeding it with adventures, *reading* those adventures... buying and/or painting minis for use in sandbox. Reading the rules for game I'm interested in running. Reading variety of other stuff.

These days I'd recommend watching Youtube videos on topics of interest, generally NOT gaming videos. I get more from:
Scholagladiatoria - weapons
Shadiversity - weapons, castles, dragons, etc etc
Lindybeige - history, weapons, culture, etc etc
PBS Spacetime - space, astrophysics
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur - what it says
John-Michael Godier - space
Dr Becky (admittedly her cuteness may be a big factor) - space
PBS Eons (though it's pretty lowbrow compared to Spacetime) - evolution/paleontology
Overly Sarcastic Productions - history, mythology, tropes

Find a good mix of "Do the RPG prep stuff I always wanted to do, but takes a bloc of time I never had," with "Things somewhat related but not RPGs to recharge the batteries."

For me, that translate to a mix of doing game design and (re)reading fantasy novels.  Then I'll throw in knocking some other things out of the way, so that they don't interfere with plans later.  (There's always something to fix in my house, for example, that doesn't need to be done right now, but does need to be done in the next year or so.)   Reading and game design are like the opening score in a movie:  They get me pumped for the game when it comes around.

Quote from: insubordinate polyhedral;1111338OK, theRPGSite. Lend me your wisdom.

I am "officially" in 5 RPG groups right now. The online/PbP group is the only one that has actually played in the month of October. The last physical game I could participate in was in August.*

What do you do to keep yourself happy and engaged with the hobby when the spirit is willing but the body has bags full of Cheetos and no one to share them with?

* For the record, this is significantly my fault: I was physically useless for most of September.

I don't know. I never have this problem.

FWIW, since the thread's bumped anyway, I took the suggestions upthread and worked on some RPG-related writing projects (writing some monsters), and reading more adventures and rules systems. That worked pretty well, though an awesome group is hard to substitute.

S'mon, thanks for all the YouTube suggestions!

Now my gaming cadence is picking back up, so it's all good.

Thanks everyone