Saturday, August 28, 2010

Gaming ADHD

I opened Blogger today fully intending to write some more about Gencon. Maybe I could talk about the DC Adventures core book I picked up and love? Maybe I could start looking at my Monsters and Other Childish Things Pocket Edition? I picked up an old James Bond boxset at the Gencon Auction for four bucks, maybe it'd be fun to do a review of that? The problem is, and here's some real behind-the-scenes stuff for you - after about three weeks of articles about Gencon from interviews to picture posts to reviews of our awesome Gencon loot, I need a bit of a break.

For three weeks I've been working on stuff for Gencon but also working on general stuff for our home games, but I haven't had the chance to talk about any of the latter, so I present to you everything that I'm thinking about and don't have any time for (which, incidentally is kind of the purpose for the blog in the first place - I'm Hopelessly outnumbered by all these great games!). Keep Reading to see what has captured my attention.

Pathfinder

We've never played a game of D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder in our lives, but we were looking for something to play with Mr. Dan Houser (artist for Icons and general art master) next week. We're in a rare spot of having lots to play but not quite ready to pull the trigger on an actual game, and Dan suggested we give Paizo's Pathfinder a shot. I've loved the art of Pathfinder from the very beginning (in fact the first picture is from the Advanced Player's Guide).

It looks like we'll be playing the free RPG day adventure with Dan sometime this week to give it a shot, and I'm pretty excited as we're kind of in the dark when it comes to the entire d20 generation that happened before Star Wars Saga edition (so pretty much all of it). I'll be trying my hand at Alain, the Human Cavalier who looks like he might be kind of a self-centered douchebag. Perfect for a tank!





Savage Worlds

We're getting to the point where I'll be able to run my next session of Day After Ragnarok, and I'm trying to plan something fun and dynamic that really changes the direction of the game a bit. I've tried the Battlestar Galactica thing, and it seems like it's just not clicking quite yet.

Things will be changing for my players, and I'm trying to do them justice. My last game, which was at least a month but probably much longer ago, was what the old-timey folk would call a talky. It was probably the biggest miscalculation I've made while GM'ing. We played for four hours and combat didn't break out until the last hour, when everyone was dead tired and my planned encounter was insanely convoluted.

No more! In the spirit of not revealing too much as TheBro is a player in the game and I know my other players check the blog from time-to-time, this next session, whenever it is, is going to be quite a bit more traditional. I've thought of several ways to remove the boatload of NPC's and bring the focus back to the players.


D&D 4th Edition Tomb of Horrors

Now we move from my campaign to TheBro's D&D 4th edition game. He's been working for a long time on creating a 3-d dungeon from the entire thing, and we played our first game a couple of Friday's ago. We all created level 9 characters, and I decided to give the Barbarian class a shot. My character, Abraxas the Axe, a Half-Orc Rageblood Barbarian is awesome, but not necessarily the brightest bulb in the golden cursed chandelier and is not a whole lot of help in solving puzzles.

I'm really looking forward to playing the next batch of rooms to try to not horribly, horribly mess up the party's efforts.

Star Wars Saga Edition

Ever since Wizards announced that the Saga Edition line was ending I began to fancy the idea of completing my collection. I only had five of the thirteen books at that point, but I figured as long as I'm patient I should be able to slowly pick them all up. I do have Starships of the Galaxy, but the other ridiculously expensive book, Knights of the Old Republic, may just have to elude my grip forever. At Gencon I was keeping my eye open for clearance prices on these books and managed to snag both the Jedi book, the Jedi Academy Training Manual and the Soldier book, Galaxy at War for a palty $12.50 each.

Honestly, I'm not sure if I'll ever run a Saga game again (I think I will), but I find the books in the line to just be addictive to read from the point of view of a general Star Wars fan. I started reading the Jedi book and am a flush with all these new ideas. Hopeless.

As always, there's more running around in my head, but that's all I've got - I gotta get back to my homework!

3 comments:

  1. Add my recent release to your list, buddy.

    www.synapserpg.com/download

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  2. I really like the Jedi book, but I'm biased as one of the authors. ;)

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  3. Greg: The Gamer Wife started to check out Synapse and is really intrigued by it - she really loves how you break down your system to the building blocks, let the players build their own toys with it, and finish it off by giving tons and tons and TONS of examples of what you can do with it. Very neat!

    RLW: Fantastic work overall on the Jedi Academy Training Manual! If you don't mind me asking, which parts did you work on specifically?

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