The Gaming New Year 2026

Happy new year, gamers! I am a bit horrified to see it has been a complete year since I have posted anything here - New Year recap posts seem to be all I can manage these days. Well - I had better post a recap then.

2025 was an awful year in a lot of ways. It was not awful for my gaming life, but it was not a very good gaming year. There was a triumph of sorts - the endless Icewind Dale game I was in finally ended. It ended with a big fight against the Frost Maiden that a couple of us fought while the rest fought a couple minions of hers - an NPC turned on the party, adding a twist - but it ended. By the end, I think we were all getting tired of it - we were glad to see the end of it. It was a tough one to get through, but we got through it - there were a few times I was not sure I was going to show up in two weeks. I did though. It's done. We followed that ump with a homebrew campaign one of the players ran - that lasted to the fall, then ended, as Real Life took out the DM, and the rest of us gave up. That was a surprisingly entertaining campaign, though he definitely overcooked it. We played it with 2024 rules, the first time most of us had used them - but he home-brewed the heck out of it beyond that, creating a game with very few stakes. Combats were easy and boring/entertaining, all flash and excitement, but nothing to do with the stories - literally - most of the combat was somehow outside the story. A gladiator pit, an extra-planar puzzle, or just throwaway encounters. The main thread was a mystery, which was very enjoyable, but probably insoluble, involving time travel and wild magic and NPC backstories - but I still found it very satisfying, for D&D. Unfortunately, when he dropped out, we all broke if up - though that was the end of the year, it might get revived. But after 6 1/2 years, the group is done.

The other D&D game went as expected. When Netherdeep ended, we went back to the Saltmarsh campaign we'd played before, with a different DM. We swapped in a couple new characters, we switched to 2025 rules, we tried for a while to play on Talespire, but couldn't make it work, so it was back to Roll 20. It ended as that DM's first campaign ended, in a total party wipe, this time by sahuagin - monsters who outnumber you, get multiple attacks, and can give themselves advantage all the time are a recipe for dead PCs. This time he did not exactly kill us - we are, officially, in limbo as prisoners of the Sahuagin - but we gave up the game for something else. Specifically, Eye of Vecna (if that's what it's called) - the high level, plan hopping last blast adventure path from 2014 D&D - which should give him plenty of chances to finish us off again. Don't think I am complaining - I have said before, this is a great group, and his games have just enough of that old fashioned Better Have a Backup Ready 1983 vibe to satisfy my inner college student, while maintaining the other things possible in D&D. This one promises a lot of entertainment. Even if it is D&D - we are getting bastions!

That is about all the D&D I care about. We did play the Icespire Peak starter set at home, with 2024 characters - nice little game, though we all got initiative on the dragon, and it never even got to breathe. That game too had a very 1983 vibe - not bad, kind of empty. That DM has been making noise about running again - I hope so, I am not going to run D&D, and it is fun to scratch that itch. We'll see.

All these games have given me enough experience with 2024 D&D to offer some conclusions - what do I think? Well - honestly - I don't see the point of it. It's 5E but slower and fiddlier and full of things you have to lookup or forget that don't really add anything to the game. It's not hard to transition, and has some interest, but most good things come with side effects, and overall, it just doesn't seem to matter. At its worst, it evokes too much of 4E, with its board game system and its array of abstract powers. It has some nice stuff in there that might have made good homebrew to 2014, but there is very little point in it. Granted, I am tired of all forms of D&D - so it's hard to really care what flavor we're playing. If I cared, I might like it more - though more likely, I would be lobbying to play Shadowdark.

So that was D&D. I don't know why I keep putting that up at the top - it hasn't been at the top of my gaming year for a couple years - this will probably be the last time. So let's move on.

To my shame, though - D&D might have been the most played RPG this year. We had a Traveller campaign going at the end of last year, but that is where it stopped. That one yielded some great scenes - but that was the last we played the game. That basically leaves Call of Cthulhu, which has been the primary home game for a couple years - we played it, mostly Gaslight - a slow burn investigation campaign that has been entertaining but sometimes harder to handle than any big blowout dungeon crawl thing. It's been sitting for a month or so - we're getting to the pointy end, and since it is homebrew, I have to get the kettle on. 

Beyond that - I got a few new games: Daggerheart; we got a couple of the Outgunned books; I have the Age of Vikings game from Chaosium - there could be more. We haven't played any of them, or even made up characters - kind of unusual. 

We did, however, play a zombie apocalypse one shot for Halloween, using the Alien system, though with the science fiction stripped out. It was very effective - it is a great horror game, and adapts well even to high action ideas like zombies. We maintained its atmosphere of regular joes in trouble, scrambling for weapons and trying to stay alive and functional - this one featured a contractor truck, with machetes and hammers and power tools and screwdrivers and even a blowtorch - then a general store with an infected shopkeeper with a shotgun, various weapons locked up behind the counter, and a chain saw - and, well, swarms of zombies, including a few old friends. It was a blast. Most of the PCs went insane and were out of action, so the party was basically saved by a 12 year old on a bike, who found the cop's pistol (the cop was curled up in a fetal position whimpering) and took out a zombie or two. Happy times!

But as you can see - I didn't play any new RPGs, and the only way I can claim we hit four total again is by making up Traveller characters. And all games? that's better - I am pretty sure I hit 5 new ones (Wingpan, Flame Craft, Boss Monster, Age of Comics - and some kind of cat lady game, I can't remember the name of), and definitely played 10 over all - the RPGs and those, plus the usual suspects - Catan, Ticket to Rude (at least three variations), Carcasonne, Terraforming Mars, Hearts, Poker, dominoes, Aggravation, Clue - plenty. 

And for the coming year? same as the last couple - get to five RPGs if I can; play at least some new ones. Play five new games total and at least 10 over all - should make it. I have to get my Gaslight campaign in playing shape; I have an idea for t Traveller scenario to run, which I should be able to do; hopefully someone will run those games, and something else - we might get another D&D game in. Should make it.

That answer post once in a while. Once in a while, not once in a year. You would think.

Have a good one, folks! May your crits be spectacular and your fumbles be funny!

 

Gaming Review and Preview

Happy new year - a couple weeks into the year, but that's all right. As I have done the last couple years, here's a kind of state of the games post to get things rolling. Hopefully not the last post of the year - but I say that every year. So - 2024:

Start with what I played. The two D&D campaigns I was in last year went all this year a well - Icewind Dale and Call of the Netherdeep. The latter, at least, wrapped up in the end - Icewind Dale is stil on, and doesn't look like it will ever end. Though to be fair - one character is dying of a Slaad bite, one has a cursed crown and in comatose, another is brand new (after the previous character went over the to Frostmaiden, and failed to save vs petrification, and the player got tired of playing an NPC) and the other two are both cursed and impatient and as likely to blow it all up as not. So there could be an end. The Netherdeep campaign did end though - that one - I found the campaign itself very underwhelming. Lots of things to gripe about, including spending the whole thing in an overt metaphor. On the other hand, it was a very good group, playing interesting characters and it built to a nice conclusion. There's a lot of good in there. But I still won't miss it - though I do miss the characters. It was a cool party. I was playing a tabaxi bladesinger - it was pretty cool.

That group is now returning to our previous Saltmarsh campaign, with a couple new characters, and the 2024 rules - on Talespire, also new. It could have some teething troubles, but again - cool characters, and a good group. It should be fun - though it has been a hard group to schedule regularly.

That is about all the D&D we've played - a few episodes with the 2024 rules, including one of the scenarios in Keys From the Golden Vault, played with 2024 rules. The rules are appealing - I don't know how they will work out in action. We will find out when we go into the Sahuagin lair in Saltmarsh. The heist scenario might not have been the best test of the new rules - most of the game, you could have played with any system, we barely had to roll at all. It definitely felt more like Call of Cthulhu than D&D. There was a bit of a fight at the end, but again, any system would have worked. That is probably a point in favor of the scenario - it's well done, and works no matter what - but didn't really give us much to do with the 2024 rules.

Other than D&D - we did get some Cthulhu in, maybe not as much as some years. Genius Loci from Doors into Darkness, a fantastic one shot. Then a couple somewhat loose Pulp adventures - I ran something in the South Seas, somewhat inspired by Tales of the Gold Monkey - complete with a forced seaplane landing in a storm, and a fight with pirates. That yielded more classic moments per game session than you could imagine. A tommy gun doing 57 points of damage to a goon; 2 of 3 PCs having to use their miraculous escape pulp ability to survive; someone rolling a crit success to wing walk in a tempest to repair the engine; and - a crit fail for the ages. A character - with only 1 or 2 hit points left - beset by a couple of those pirates, decided to throw a stick of dynamite out of the plane into their boat. He didn't need much - a good throw roll would take them out easily; a bad one was only going to do some collateral damage to the plane or the other characters. Instead, he rolled a 00. So - obviously he dropped it. Blew himself up, the plane, the boat, the pirates - total bloodbath! And a story likely to be retold through the ages. We also played a home brew thing in the Amazon, with more planes, pre-war jeep equivalents driving off cliffs, another miraculous escape (on the only character to get hit in the fight), zombies, Nazis and a dirigible. Good stuff. All of it has stalled out a bit, but Cthulhu is, at this point, pretty much the go to game - we'll be back to it. Gaslight looks like a ton of fun - we'll get there.

At the end of the year, we managed to play a bunch of Traveller - specifically, BT-SHT 365, which Seth Skorkowsky reviewed some years back. That's been fun too; we're still in the middle of it. It's a $2.00 scenario, and it shows some time - there's a lot of work necessary to make it make any sense - but it also features some really great pulp settings and situations. It's been a lot of fun - and yielded another classic crit fail. (Same player, by the way!) This time, the characters were raiding an Oghman Raider camp - they had mostly gotten themselves into position to finish the job. An NPC in a Toyota Hilux (surely, they must still exist and run 5000 years in the future) had run down a couple of the villains; now the PC got the idea of running down another one with his grav bike. Snake eyes! He and his passenger were flung across the landscape, only surviving due to some nice armor. Yeah. Good stuff.

Finally, some playing around. We ran a couple fights in Cyberpunk - we played around with Tales of the Valiant - I wish we'd gotten to more, especially Alien or Blade Runner - still, not too bad. I also got to play a number of new board games - Boss Monster, Reincarnate, Cat Ladies of Maple Street, as well as Terraforming Mars and Wingspan, from earlier int he year. All the usual suspects of course from Boggle and Racko to Catan and Ticket to Ride to Code Names and Hearts.

This year? I intend to finish up BT-SHT 365; I am not sure after that - we might go back to some of the open Cthulhu games, or play a one shot or two. We might try some other games - or even D&D if anyone commits to running it. Eventually I want to run something in Cthulhu by Gaslight - I may love the 20s and 30s as a setting more than anything else on earth - but the 1890s is going to run a close second. The inspirations - Sherlock Holmes! HG Wells! Robert Louis Stevenson! Dracula! Allen Quartermain! Steampunk! it is a rich vein and I look forward to getting to play in it.

Like last year - I hope I can fit in 5 TTRPGs (hit 4 this year - D&D, Traveller, Cthulhu and Cyberpunk - though 2 versions of D&D); 5 new games of any kind; and 10 games of any kind. Did all right last year; same principals - play the faves, and try out some new games. Should work out.

And try to blog more often. Not hard. given how little I write here. But it's a worthy aspiration and one of these years I do it.

On With the Games!

Hello world. I have been idle here for a long time - I am going to try to change that, but I promise myself that every year, so we shall have to wait and see. Lewt us look back at 2023 and forward to 2024 and games, games games games!

This has been an eventful year in the wider gaming world. Hasbro/WOTC have dominated the news, almost all for the worst. They started the year with that OGL Debacle - got smacked around hard, so backed off. Everybody won, right? Anyway, they did not stop with that. They held a "creator summit" in the spring and pissed off everyone they did not invite and then pissed off the people they did invite. Nothing much has come of that since. They sent Pinkertons after someone who accidentally received some magic cards. They published AI art in at least one book. They laid off hundreds of people across the company, both from the unprofitable Hasbro parts and the money making WOTC parts. They alienated a lot of people. There were better moments - the D&D Movie came out, made enough money to let anyone read anything they wanted into the results, but generally seemed to please the fans. Then Baldur's Gate 3 came out, was a smash success - though that was not WOTC, directly. But they will take it, I imagine. Meanwhile, they have a new version coming out - which isn't really a new version - I don't know. I don't know - that started all right, but got less interesting with every release, and after the OGL crap, I stopped caring. Does anyone care anymore? I don't see people talking about it all that much - though that may have more to do with YouTube's algorithms than whatever people are talking about. But it does not seem there is a lot of excitement for this thing.

Other things, however - maybe. Matt Colville's MCDM company has a game coming sometime, which is raking in the dough at its crowd funding site. Kobold Press has a game coming, Tales of the Valiant, which made money at Kickstarter and might show up sometime. The Critical Role people have a game coming - Daggerheart - a 2d12 game! They put another game out this year, Candela Obscura, a kind of Victorian to WWI horror game, that was not received with open arms. Paizo has been active, making up their own version of an open gaming license, then revising Pathfinder to get rid of all traces of the OGL. Can any of these actually knock D&D down a peg? None fo them will probably be able to do as much harm to WITC as WOTC can. Time will tell. But people do seem willing to try other things. 

That can serve as our transition! MY year in gaming! What did I play?

The same two D&D campaigns from last year - Icewind Dale and Call of the Netherdeep. The first continues to hit its biweekly schedule, the latter continues to start and stop maddeningly. The first has occasionally become unbearable this year, though I grin and bear it; the latter is a boring campaign, but an excellent table. That is all the D&D I have touched this year, unless you could making up Tales of the Valiant characters. 

At home, we have managed to get in quite a bit of Call of Cthulhu. A good run on an Egyptian tomb raider inspired game. A few sessions (mostly a haunted house) in our Ghosts of Bayport campaign. And a one shot from Nameless Horrors - which was itself a blast. The party outdid itself, setting fire to the town hall, a scientists house, a church, two cars and a couple houses near the cars, while somehow surviving (at one point, one character was in a coma, two others had 1 hp left, and they were all still trying to cross town to escape, and could not roll a stealth check to - literally - save their lives.) 

We also managed to get in a couple Traveller sessions - character creations, about half of the High and Dry scenario. Not as much as we would have wanted, but we got it in.

Finally, I got to play the Alien RPG - and then got it under the Christmas tree. So more of that coming. That is a great game, I have to say - probably ideal for one shots like I played - but very cool.

And we played around with the Marvel RPG, with Tales of the Valiant and Basic Role Playing, though none of those were full sessions. Still - that's a nice haul of games.

All right. 2024 is here. I think I will wrap this up while I still have things I want to say - maybe I wil come back to say them later! And I think I am going to make some resolutions, foolish though that might be. Still - here you go.

1) Play five different RPGs. I got 4 this year - D&D, Cthulhu, Traveller and Alien; I wiull surely play D&D and Cthulhu this year; Traveller is mostly a matter of getting a scenario together; I will definitely run Alien as soon as I can. One more: what will it be? Most likely Basic Role Playing - though that strikes me as most useful as a supplement for Pulp Cthulhu, which is my preferred game. Still - I have options: I picked up a bunch: Rivers of London, Pendragon starter set, Vaesen, Righteous Blood, Rithless Blades - I have Paranoia, Blades in the Dark, Monster of the Week, Cyberpunk Red sitting there, waiting. I think I can hit this mark.

2) Play a total of five new games - thought his can be any game, and I'd be freer with what counts as "playing." Last year I hit Alien, the Marvel game, Tales of the Valiant, BRP - plus Terraforming Mars, Mysterium - that's 6 I can think of. I think I can do that this year - just making up characters in a couple of the games on the shelf, maybe buying a couple new board games - should be easy!

3) And finally - post here on this damned blog! I say this almost every year and don't do it - the last time I hit a post a month was 2015 (ouch.) The last time I almost hit it was 2018 - thanks to 5 posts in January about an upcoming campaign. Ouch. Still - I am optimistic - foolishly? We'll see. Some of this comes down to playing those other games,a nd writing about those experiences - so - put it down, and see where we get to. I have another post in my head at this very moment! will I post it this month? We shall see! Good night and have a happy new year!

 

State of Playing

Ladies and Gentlemen, here we are, 2023. Another year in the books, and time, I suppose, to cast an eye backwards, regarding the games played and posts written and all else game related. Which this year I suppose should start with lamentations re lack of posts - I mean - 2? That is sad. I have things to say! Heavens.

All right. State of play from 2022:

We participated in 4 ongoing campaigns. The Icewind Dale game continues apace, every Thursday, the group now has maintained that schedule since 2018; we'll hit 5 years soon. We kept it up through the pandemic (online) and have survived a good deal of turnover, and are still at it. For all that, I can't say it has been an unqualified success - some of those WOTC adventure paths are troublesome. Wander in the wilderness for 5 levels, then catch the train to the end - or don't catch the train, and wander pointlessly - yeah. Blame WOTC. Add in some murder hoboing and things can go sideways. But it goes. It managed to generate some decided high points - a wild mage rolling the 01 and surging for a minute straight in the middle of a fight; two of us dimension dooring on top of a dragon to attack it; in a later fight, the same two dimension dooring into a bucket with a mad Duergar, who we then dumped into his own forge. Also, using rust monsters as blowtorches to get through an iron door - and the wild mage summoning a unicorn. It's had its moments. 

The Saltmarsh game reached an interesting stopping point, a massive fight that promised total party wipe but did not deliver, and then the DM decided he wanted to play, so we are playing Call of the Netherdeep now. The group is a good one, but the game is a slog, and I can't bring myself to care about Critical Role and its offshoots. And Sundays are harder to keep clear than Thursdays - this one is very hard to keep on a schedule. If Sundays are hard, Saturdays are even worse, so though the Tomb of Annihilation game has had some good stretches again this year, it has also disappeared for 6 months at a time. We have been playing that adventure path since 2018 - we've gotten through about 2/3 of that one book. Yikes. Still - the Saltmarsh game gave us an epic battle with a water elemental that we survived from the sorcerer making three straight strength saves and the druid rolling a 20 on her death save. That was fun.

And that is all the D&D we have played, other than poking the play tests. This year has been given to other games. We played Traveller a lot at the beginning of the year, learning it, and a bunch of the elements that can go into it - but then got interested in Call of Cthulhu. We started that one playing some impromptu scenarios, but found some cool characters and a scenario, and ran a decent campaign for a few weeks. More Hardy Boys than Lovecraft so far, but very entertaining, with some great characters, some nifty situations, and a string of torched cars. (In this game and others we have in fact managed to ignite a stalled truck, a wrecked car, another wrecked car, after someone tried to run us off the road and succeeded and running everyone off the road. We probably should stop trying to push drive auto rolls and mechanical repairs.) his went along fine, until One D&D came out - that interrupted us, and since a lot of it was improvised, kind of stalled it out completely. Still: we've played a couple other scenarios and are about to set forth on a tomb-raiding adventure in Egypt (very Pulp Cthulhu, I have to say), so this is going well.

And? We played around with Cyberpunk Red, making characters anyway, and looked over a few other games (Monster of the Week, for instance.) But haven't played them.

Okay. So back to the monster in the room, D&D, One D&D, WOTC and Hasbro ha ha! Well - it's the monster in the world; here, not so much. We are playing those ongoing campaigns - but those are mostly outside the house. At home, we have barely touched D&D. We played a couple fights, and when the playtests started, we dove in. But their returns have diminished. The first one, we downloaded and rad and argued about and made up characters and played them through two or three scenes, and hashed out the results and waited desperately for the survey and filled it out and waited for the next batch of rules - and waited - and waited. When they finally came out, we downloaded, read, argued, played, analyzed and when the survey came out, filled it in - and got more and more annoyed at the whole process. Way too long between rules releases, surveys that left out major rules changes, and just general drabness about the whole affair.

In the wider world, it seems people have stopped caring all that much about the rules and are more interested in arguing about the OGL and the prospect that Hasbro might want to make money on the game. And how they might try to make money on the game. That is a subject I could have opinions about, but I don't know if I do. What I have seen doesn't seem all that awful - a new OGL that charges for anyone making above a certain amount on their derivative products - that's not angst inducing. On the other hand, WOTC's reassurances that the OGL doesn't cover things like Roll20 are not as reassuring as they sound. That means Roll20 has its own license, one that can be revoked, presumably - right? So even if the OGL remains, there's no guarantee that you will be able to play D&D online anywhere other than D&D Beyond. That seems like madness, but who knows? 

None of it is likely to matter to me, not for a while. At the moment, I am not keen on playing D&D at all. When I am, I have all these old books and can play them to my heart's content. If those outside games don't switch, I guess I won't switch. 

Still... let me end on a more positive note. At the core of One D&D is in fact a new system. And so far, as far as I can see, it is fine. Will it be backward compatible? WOTC likes to say it will - probably in the end, it will diverge enough that people will likely choose between them. Right now, though, the new version looks like a collection of house rules - some better, some worse than what exists now, nothing to either force you to change or make you refuse to change. I don't know if that will last - or if it can last. WOTC will need people to buy new books to make this worth while. They will need to give you a reason to play the new game, to spend money on new stuff, and a bunch of somewhat more extreme versions of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything might not do it. But when the new stuff comes I don't think it is going to ruin the game. Even the digital stuff is not likely to ruin everything - Hasbro will find ways to make more money, and if there is money to be made, they will get it, and if other companies can get it too, they will pay their licensing fees, and everyone will - do what they will do.

As for me? This year, I expect to play mostly Pulp Cthulhu - at least to run Pulp Cthulhu. I'll keep playing the D&D I am playing now, maybe less enthusiastically, but it's still fine. And if anything interesting comes along from WOTC, I might give it a try. But right now, I think I need to work on some ancient Egyptian horrors for the crew to run into. 

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.

Getting Things Moving

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.