Where To Next?

 Hello again, world! Whoever happens to read this. It has been a while, hasn't it - another rather shocking break in this blog. And I thought I  was going to start updating more - folly! 

I should have been. I have been thinking a lot about the theories of gaming - that should be ideal fodder for a blog. But those thoughts have tended to spread out, big unwieldy accumulations of ideas, that I can't wrangle into a postable form. Too bad. It doesn't help that gaming has been on a down stretch as well - the big games, the Icewind Dale game, the Saltmarsh game, have been chugging along - the Tomb of Annihilation game has even gotten back on a fairly regular schedule, after a couple spotty years. But the home games have all been pretty well dead in the water. We've tried playing Traveller - enjoyed it - but it's been hard to get it started, and to keep campaigns going. That is probably my own fault for being such a habitual home-brewer. I keep trying to make up my own adventures and campaigns, and doing this with a new system is not easy. 

So what do you suppose we have found as a possible solution? We've started playing around with Call of Cthulhu! At least, we rolled up a bunch of characters and ran them through some shenanigans - that was a blast, and promises more. And - well - this is going to steer me back into an essay, maybe getting some use out of the philosophizing I have been trying to do. 

I suppose this starts with D&D. It is a fact - I have been rather dissatisfied with D&D for a while now. Why? Well - combat, mainly - though not combat as such (which works very well in D&D 5 at least). It's more the way the game's focus on combat tends to squeeze out other ways of playing. I could go on about this a while - I have, and might still get around to posting some of that stuff - but lately, I have been thinking there might be a simpler answer. My complaints about D&D aren't so much about D&D as they are about settings. That D&D is fine in a high fantasy setting, in a dungeon call - but starts to fall apart when you try to play in a town. If you try to play social or political situations - even if you try to run something like a heist, instead of a raid. And the reason I complain about D&D is that I would rather play in a different setting.

And that brings us to Call of Cthulhu. You can see from a couple of the games we ran in the last couple years (the heist last year, the stuff we did two years ago), I've been trying to come up with more urban settings and games. Those worked all right - but using Call of Cthulhu brings us to the 20th century - and those kinds of settings really take off. That is one of the things that has always been appealing about Call of Cthulhu - the possibility of setting games in the 1920s and 30s - Hardy Boys and Sam Spade, Terry and the Pirates and Indiana Jones. Yes: that inspires me! It resonates - like fantasy stories, Robin Hood and Treasure Island, history and westerns resonated with me, and with what you could do with D&D when I started playing it. It's a world I want to play in.

This is also, maybe, the reason Traveller has been harder to get started with than it should be. I love Traveller's system - it feels so right, simple and fun - but I have never been a huge science fiction fan, especially not a space opera fan. I like that stuff - but it doesn't resonate the same way. Which makes inventing situations in that setting harder. While inventing situations in 1930 Bayport is second nature.

All right. I will stop here. I might try to post some of my thoughts on how these systems work, what they do well and less well, and what I like about them, some day - maybe. I might try to post some more on the joys of these other games - and on how we are likely to play them. For instance, I am not sure how much horror we want to play with Call of Cthulhu. A weird thing to say, for a horror game - but it's the investigative stuff, the pulpy stuff that interests me, and I think that stuff might work just fine without any eldritch abominations. We'll see. I want to find out.