The past four days I have been puttering around with my hobby, playing alone with a favoured old game. It’s a prototypically English thing to putter and I heartily recommend it.

For the longest time, I would worry about my roleplaying games. The worlds were not detailed enough, the prep I did was not thorough enough, and the sessions themselves lacked pace. This worry eventually stopped me from playing.

I’m a deep fan of theory about these games too. This can lead to paralysis as you spend more time thinking than doing. You worry about the competing opinions of luminaries who dare to publish and speak, trying to discern what works for your own table.

But puttering frees you from all this. Puttering is to do things in a relaxed way, without rushing or trying very hard. It is to simply begin to mess around with these games and see where things take you. It’s how I played alone in my room as a teen.

One time I began with a chosen old game that I had longed to play with and rolled up a character. Then I rolled up another character of a different type. I imagined a couple of scenes and wrote up the happenings by hand with a pencil in a nice notebook.

This past couple of days I’ve found myself digging out a deeply difficult area of my hobby – that of the solo game – and indulged in simply starting to play. There was not much of an imagined World, just another couple of characters rolled up and an imagined situation.

To begin with, I have allowed myself to follow the suggestions of the solo oracle and the rules of the chosen game. The imagination is freed up to picture, smell, hear, taste, and touch the imagined World as you explore it. It took me into an unexpected place.

Each time that worry about this or that “right” or “better” way of doing things has arisen, I have shrugged it off and gone right back to the puttering. It doesn’t much matter because this is doing things in a relaxed and unhurried way. It’s rolling the dice and making stuff up on the fly.

I would recommend making time to putter around in your hobby. It could be the innocence of a quick character creation, or the excitement of a short battle fought between whomever lies to hand. It could just as easily be a dialogue, or the exploration of some place you imagine.

Do things in a relaxed way, without rushing or trying very hard. It’s more enjoyable than worrying about getting it “right” or testing someone else’s theory. You, a chosen game, an imagined moment, and some dice.

Game on!