The Farce is strong in this one...

So in an attempt to "bring my A game" to the gaming table, I find myself revisiting some rpg's I hadn't finished reading. Or have read, but needed alot more reread to get my head around certain mechanics.

Shadowrun 4e for instance.
Love the setting and premise. The rules throw me off a bit. It's not that they're hard, they just have a ton of stats. And as I've gotten older, I like fewer stats in my ... uh... stat block.
I bring up Shadowrun not to bash it's lengthy stat blocks, but to fufill a promise I made to myself to finish reading certain rpg's, and run them. In the very least, read them enough to understand how to run them.

One of the games is Bash Ultimate Edition. A superhero game with a pretty easy game mechanic. But it's reeeeaaaalll loose in some of it's rules, which on one hand is great, on another... I'm struggling with it. I love openess in gaming. I love Fate, Fudge, and a few other systems that have rules but encourage alot of gray area.
Bash in it's simplistic nature also becomes deep quick.

Point in fact, my daughter Brianna who's such a wanna be gamer. Let me rephrase that, is a gamer-in-waiting. She wants to play this game. She took the rules and made up a character. She got the basics down really well, but we found out that in the process of creating her character how complicated these simple rules could become.

Not complicated in understanding them, but complicated in that we could take so many roads to get the kind of character she wanted to run. And that... was and is blowing my mind.

And due to her High School scheduling of things and my work has completely been a stumbling of us getting to play. And thus my reading of the entire book and running has fallen on its face.
But hope springs eternal. The new cartoon series Young Justice has recently respawned our interest in playing this. I've picked it back up, started sketching out a couple of adventures and written down villians. This could happen.

I'm rambling now.

So my Gaming ADD is building up strongly. And I don't know how to combat it. Because we live in a world of accessibility, too many outside influences seem to catch my attention and I think "OOooo I can run this doing X".

Oy. I need help.

Don't watch twitvid's without knowing what they're about

So in a search for something unrelated... I stumbled across an interview with Jim Butcher, author of the Dresden Files from late last year. He's chopped off all his hair(much like me) and shaved down his beard(not like me-I don't have one).



Because he's one of my favorite author's, I watched. Only to find out the spoilers from the book Changes, which I hadn't read yet.

Oy!!!

While I normally don't mind spoilers, because I'm the kind of person who enjoy's the journey of a story and can appreciate it not matter how I find out. This was a kick in the stomach.
I can appreciate the interviewer plugging his upcoming short stories book, but really? Really? The ending of Changes.

Now I have to step up my reading to finish the series. Not that I needed much arm twisting, it's just that I've got soooo much stuff on my plate I can barely keep up with my other interests and read for fun too.

At least I know there's more Dresden Files coming...

A new year, and yet again... a new attempt

Like many bloggers, and people in general this time of year, I'm restarting my blog.
Mostly so I can post on the interwebz, and get my thoughts out. Not that I don't on a regular basis, because I tend to lurk and post on rpg.net so getting my opinion out is something I do often...

I plan to post at least once a week, more often if I get a chance.



I'm currently working on upping my Game Master skills. I'm trying to reinvent the way I approach my games. Due to time restraints and real-world conflicts, I've been running a a campaign using a lot of published adventures which I've tied to my home game. Mostly with good success, but from my point of view I'm still lacking. I've got a straw man plot that I'm trying to reinforce as we further our game along.

So I'm trying to increase my skills. I've started rethinking how I do things and really start practicing more of things I preach. "Say yes or roll dice".



I'm running a 4th Edition DnD game at the moment. And it's been the longest game I've run in quite sometime. Alittle over 2 years. Wow... I've been good about keeping my GM-ADD under control, but it's starting to buckle. With such great games as the Dresden Files, Legends of Anglerre, Strands of Fate, Gamma World 4e, Bash UE, Icons, Shadow, Sword and Spell, Legend of the Five Rings 4e, and waaaay too many more to list all calling to me to run. Ugh.

Anywho... I can run those. But it all works the same, I gotta bring my game up. I gotta take my GM skills to the next level.

And I will.

The Moooooving Finger

Ok, what's worse than having a big ol' sinus infection? Having one with a newly broken finger. Blah.

Hard as all out to type, but managing.
If I can figure out how to transfer the file over to an image, I'll post my x-rays.

I'm not dead... yet

Ok just a quick "hullo".
Been a busy beaver the last couple of weeks and haven't gamed once.

However, got a game on Thursday with my so-called adult friends. :D
And then possibly a game on Sunday with my kids. It's my son's 14th birthday and I think he wants to play. (or rather... he's asked me, are we gonna play on my Birthday?)

So full game week. Yay.
A-Kon is coming up and I'm sure I'll have some nifty things to post about that.

Gaming with new players, in this case, my kids.

So I've started a bi-weekly 4e DnD game with my son (13) and my daughter (17).

They've been wanting to play for awhile, but their school schedules and my own work schedule has been conflict.
We started a couple of weeks ago, and I had invited a couple of my regular players to join. While teaching new players isn't all the hard, they can stay in their "shell" not knowing what is ok and what isn't. That's where an experienced player can help.
My friend Craig was the only one who could make it and I'm glad he did.

We had a blast.

I created characters for them based off of what they wanted to play. The reasoning was that while creating a character is not too terribly hard to do, they could play these characters and decide whether or not they truly enjoyed playing.
And you know what, they did. It was all they talked about the next week.
My daughter played a human fighter, Gwen and my son played a Dragonborn Warlord, Ximnar.
They both had moments where they felt in the spotlight and that is what it should be like.
We played Into the Shadowhaunt. It was, from what I am told, the module used at the first 4e DnDXP day.

I modified it to the core setting of the Nentir Vale, and off we went.
Couple of highlights: Ximnar used his breathweapon on the hobgoblins hiding behind the oil-filled coffins and blooding him. He also intimidated the necromancer Helvec off of his 10-foot high dais where he was casting an evil ritual.

Gwen cleaved an animated statue in-two, destroying it and prior to that she had been atop the dais fighting the necromancer. But when the animated statue arrived, she took a running leap off the dais to attack it.

Pretty sweet.

The paradigm of defender and leader worked great for this first adventure.
The second adventure... not so much. I ran them through the first adventure in the Dungeon Delve book, Coppernight Hold.

Alot of it had to do with my son not wanting or not understanding how to use his powers for most of the game. He stuck with basic attacks instead of using his powers to take on threats and positioning or amplifying Gwen. It was frustrating for me to watch. I continued to ask are you going to use a power, "no, just attack." I don't know how much of it was he was afraid to take the risk of his character, he's a Bravura Warlord. Which means he leads from the fight or in the middle of the fight, and often places himself in harms way to gain the advantage for his team.
So for two encounters he got the snot beat out of him and his sister because he didn't use his powers.

But in the final encounter when they faced a room full of kobolds and white dragon wyrmling.
At first it look bad for them. His breath weapon failed to kill most of the minions, and they initial attack of the minions had left both of them almost bloodied.
And the dragon hadn't even moved up to attack.
But it started working out as they took care of the minions, and faced the dragon.
By now both were bloodied, Gwen had been twice!
The dragon had hardly been hit. Then out of the blow, Gwen crits it almost blooding the beast.
It attacks and almost puts Ximnar out.

On the next turn, Gwen hurts it more beyond bloodied. It had about 38hp left at this point.
And finally. Finally, Ximnar started using his powers. He used his daily, an action point and an encounter power(don't remember off the top of my head),, and the encounter power set it up for its ultimate demise. The power was worded so that he granted the dragon combat advantage against him, but if the dragon attacked him both he and any ally that was adjacent to the target(dragon) could get a free opportunity attack. And that was all she wrote.
The dragon went last in the round lunging at Ximnar with a defiant snarl, only to hammered down by attack from Gwen and Ximnar in retaliation.

Very cool.

So all this week it has been, "I can't believe we killed a dragon. Are all dragons that easy, Dad?"
"Nope I replied. They are all dangerous."
"Good." he says with a smile. "I can't wait to fight another one."

They've been trying to recruit a few of my daughters High School friends, with not much luck. One made the remark, "I watch a game before, it seemed boring."
The keyword I told him was watch. Had you played you would have a much different experience.
Anywho... rambling now.
So this is a win-win for me.
One, I get to play the hobby I love with my kids.
Two, they love it.
Three, this version of DnD allows me to do something I hadn't in the past. Be spontaneous with encounters and be able to play the next time they hit me up with, "Dad can we play tonight?" Which usually meant, right now. With just about any other game we've tried, I've had to plan and research. But with this, I can just pick it up and go.
I look forward to the near future where I can add a couple of other games to that list of pick up games.

BASH, Mouse Guard, Savage Worlds and anything with FATE; I'm look at those to teach my kids over the summer so we can start having more fun.

Allergies and Benadryl

So the last couple of weeks have been brutal for my allergies. And up until a couple of days ago, I just dealt with it.
Watched what I ate, tried to keep hydrated and waited for rain.

But my wife convinced me to take some benadryl before bed to help me sleep.
I have and it's been great, however... my dreams are often, clear and just plain bizarre.

Case in point, last night I had a very brutal nightmare. I say brutal because it involved the death of my son. I didn't see it(in the dream), but as dreams go, I knew it.

I was in another room, I heard shots(which in real world terms-turns out to be thunder) ran into the room he was and in, found a gun and knew he had shot himself. The sheer amount of grief I felt is still felt as I write this, and he's sitting on the couch right now playing the Wii. Trying to figure out the meaning behind it or if it's just some perverse worry I have about him. I don't even own a hand gun and my ammunition for my rifles are locked up.
But the vividness of my dreams, and the fact that I've been remembering them because of the benadryl makes me think that I'm not sleeping well prior to taking this.
Not saying I want to continue taking this beyond the help with allergies, but man... the trade off: good sleep vs. bizarro dreams.

Anywho... it's Saturday(yahoo) and we've got a ultra-non-planned day. Should be good, at least better than my dreams.