Things have bogged down in the RPG world. This blog is bogged down, but that's not new - but my actual gaming has been a lot thinner than it has been in a while. The outside games are going fine - the Princes of the Apocalypse group has moved on to Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden - which has so far been very entertaining. The other group (overlapping with that one) is playing a heavily home brewed Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign - which is also quite entertaining. We have not yet died - though it got very close, when we took on a water elemental and three electric eels in an interdimensional space involving the plane of water - everyone going to 0 at least once, 3 characters at 0 at the crucial moment and the sorcerer alone with 1 hp fighting the elemental, and having to make strength saving throws to survive - and doing it! Then the druid rolled a 20 on a death save - the second time she did that in the encounter - yeah... that kind of game. But if you're going to have boss fights, they might as well be boss, and that one was most epic indeed. So we have been playing....
But the home games have not been going so well. We played that heist back in the winter; we played to a reasonably stable point in the Desert Campaign - which involved a massive spic battle of its own, which turned on the cleric thunderwaving a necromancer off a balcony, and the DM (me) not noticing that he had a ring of feather falling. Still: even then, it took the fighter rolling a critical hit on his action surge attack after using his last luck dice to reroll a failure - though that ended the necromancer rightly! All that stuff was quite fun - but we have barely played anything since.
I am not sure why. I have had very little inspiration to try to work up something to play. At least for D&D. We did try some Traveller - that proved very entertaining, but has been on hold lately (mostly for NaNoWriMo, to be honest, as two of us were doing that). We should be able to get back into it soon - though it's harder than it looks. It's a neat system, but it takes some effort to learn a new game, and gear up to play it - it's taking longer than it should. We made up a ton of characters - and Traveller has by far the most entertaining character creation system I have found, even if you can't die in character creation anymore - and played a few basic fights, to get the feel for it. We played one scenario - High and Dry - which was great fun, and seemed to work quite well. (And was the source for the Saltmarsh campaign I started up a couple years ago - same plot - retrieving an abandoned ship...) But that is all. Once we're through the holidays, we should get back to playing - I certainly hope so. When we do, I expect it will be Traveller.
This has been a strange lull. There haven't been a lot of external factors causing it - other than NaNoWriMo, we've been getting together regularly, playing around with things. This is more a lack of - something. The main issue is that no one has come up with anything to run - everyone's willing to play, no one knows what to run. Speaking for myself - this is odd. Some of it is that the campaigns we were playing are either at points where I have to do substantial work to get them moving again (that's the Desert Campaign, or the Waynesburg campaign, mainly) - or campaigns that were always a bit more theoretical than actual, like my Saltmarsh game. I haven't got the bug to work on these things. I don't know why.
Though playing around with Traveller might drop some hints. That was very inspirational - and tended to make D&D seem stale. I think I am just tired of D&D - in a sense. Not in the sense of not wanting to play D&D - but in the sense of wanting to do something different. I have posted here before about skill based games, and played around with less combat heavy D&D games - so this has been in my mind for a while. Traveller scratches that itch - it opens up different kinds of games and scenarios, skills, and social and investigative stuff, exploration - things that are harder in D&D. It also has systems for things that are not very well done in D& D at all - trade and travel and keeping a ship running and everything else in there. It's appealing.
The biggest problem it has is that I am not a particular science fiction fan. I like SF - but it's not as deep an enthusiasm as fantasy, or - especially - westerns, detective stories, history and wars and such are. It makes it harder to come up with what to do - and harder to build a world. Which means somewhere along the line we might have to try out Call of Cthulhu. Because the 1920s are definitely a period I am very enthusiastic about. I love the books, movies, comics of the era - everything from the Hardy Boys to Dashiell Hammett to Universal Horror films to Warner Brothers gangster films and melodramas to Terry and the Pirates and Captain Easy to Raiders fo the Lost Ark - to Lovecraft, though horror is not my favorite part of it. Which is one reason we haven't gotten into Call of Cthulhu - the horror is not the appeal. But playing the Hardy Boys? or The Continental Op? That would be cool.
Anyway. This is a mild lament over a case of burn out. Not a fatal burnout - I imagine 5hings will start moving again in the new year. But something. And as the most promising answer to it is to branch out into other games - might prove interesting in the long run.
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