At first glance our ordinary lives do not appear to be full of triumph. At least not in the grand and dramatic type. We don’t blow up the death star, or save the princess, or jump the Grand Canyon. Real life can be kind of drab and boring. Not very thrilling.

Role playing games can offer us a different experience where impossible victories and dramatic derring-do are par for the course. Very often those mischievous plastic devils that we call dice are responsible for those moments of triumph. Other times those victories can come as a result of our own skill, or of immersive role-play where the characters can engage in moments of triumphant nobility.

But this blog post isn’t about that…

Back to real life. At the end of the day, in spite of all of the wonderful fiction we create, we are real human beings engaging in a hobby that takes place in the real world.

There are many obstacles to be overcome. Life gets busy. The demands on our time and on our attention are Legion. Learning a new game can seem daunting. Finding a group of fellow gamers that we really connect with can often be a challenge. Coordinating logistical matters with a group Of gamers can be like herding cats.

Sometimes we need to have uncomfortable conversations when we bump up against differences in expectations. Maybe there is a particular genre that we really just have a hard time running or playing and we keep running into the same frustrations despite our desire to do it justice. Maybe the prospect of being a new game master seems overwhelming, or perhaps it’s just being a game master of that new game where we still have trouble internalizing & mastering the system.

It could be that the prospect of learning a new setting or perhaps a time period in our actual history appears to be a Herculean task. Perhaps it’s the challenge of learning new streaming software now that YouTube has discontinued using Hangouts as a streaming option for your online game. Sometimes the list of challenges seems endless.

Every time that we persevere and overcome one of these obstacles, be they real or imagined, is a moment of triumph. We run our first game. That new game that we were nervous about turned out to be received much better than we thought. We start to find the right people. We meet that online kindred spirit in person. We become more comfortable with the new system or new genre. What once seemed impossibly hard or confusing now becomes second nature.

We need to remember to take time to celebrate these victories. After all, real life is full of triumphs. We just have to open our eyes to see them.