It's fall -- students are back on campus at the college where I work, the Pennsylvania air is starting to turn cooler and crisper, and Jordan is getting ready to start preschool.

Preschool … wow. Jordan's gone from being this tiny little baby that I spent hours walking with in order to sooth her crying to a little girl -- sorry, big girl -- who's potty trained, amazingly creative and alternatively fiercely independent or exceedingly needy.

Running role-playing games online is a kind of hell. Be it by blog, forum, e-mail or some sort of real-time hookup, sustaining a game can be near impossible. While I have no hard data on this, my guess would be that only 1 in 10 online games succeed, and that's probably wildly optimistic -- the real number's probably closer to 1 in 50.

The problems are legion, but mostly come down to a question of time: players not having enough time to post, game masters not having enough time to respond, and everyone having a sense that the game is moving a glacial speeds. This fractured time warp leads to disinterest and apathy, which leads to the dissolution (or more likely, outright abandonment) of the game.