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.