RPG A Day 2020: Day 18--Meet

 RPG A Day 2020: Day 18—Meet

Today’s prompt opens discussions that are more apropos than ever what with much of the world still in the throws of the Wuhan flu and/or whatever else 2020 seems to have in store for us on the daily. For those joining me today, I am an expat English teacher and for the last two years, I’ve been teaching in China, ground zero—if you will—for our pandemic woes. It’s quite the large ground zero however, and I haven’t lived in an area with very strict measures in place. The most I’ve had to do is wear a mask to grocery stores and the like. We have our temperatures taken and we’ve been using a phone app that tracks where we’ve visited, but no big deal really.

I’m in the second week of orientation at my new and we are meeting as normal. In about a week and a half the plan is to put us in face to face meetings with students just as we normally would. However, we—teachers and students alike—will be required to wear masks starting from that time due to government mandate. Students—I’m in a middle school/high school—may also need to spend their entire day in one classroom—those classes also set-up with social distance measures in mind.

We’re an international school, so a lot of teachers and even some students are still stranded overseas as they have been since the Chinese New Year break back in January/February. In those cases, the absent teacher will be broadcasting with a second face to face teacher assisting—makes for a fun situation like when I’m scheduled to assist in economics and haven’t seen hide nor hair of such in over a decade—or students receiving my broadcast as I teach the face to face students. Then there are more regulations than that that may come and go as you can imagine since we’re dealing with children. I’m hoping we don’t go on full lock down again, but this did happen in Beijing only a couple of months ago. I’m fairly sure it was said that the students were able to attend a total of two weeks last semester—a couple of weeks at the end of May—before the whole school got shut down and exclusively teaching online again. Back near my hometown in Georgia USA one school was in session for literally less than a week before going right back on lockdown. There’s no escaping this thing or at least no escaping the changes.

What does this have to do with RPGs? The problems and precautions of meeting nowadays affect everything. There may be a group who plays or wants to form, but they will probably be leery of getting together. Meeting online is an option, but for someone like myself, an additional 3hrs or more of screen time isn’t all that appealing when you’ve been spending so much time on screen as it is. Conventions have almost all been cancelled or taken online, and even production and distribution of certain product have slowed or taken even bigger hits. Can the hobby take it? Could it actually make it into a bigger thing? Will we ever get back to the way things were? It seems so overly dramatic for a virus with a 98% recovery rate, but here we are.