TL/DR – I am now working from home and have an hour a day I don’t have to do the round trip to and from work Monday through Friday, and will have more time to focus on living life and preparing and playing games.
My company decided to close our local office because there are only three of us and have us work from home. Two other office are being closed, each with two employees, and having them work from home, saving the company over $100K a year in rent. Too bad I don’t get a piece of that. At least I get to save on gas and have an hour more each day for other things since I don’t have to drive to work. I really like avoiding driving in winter and saving money on gasoline and wear and tear on my car.
Last weekend, I packed up my office and hauled everything home except my desk. I will miss my desk. It is just too big for my house. We have three desks to get rid of. At least I got my desk chair. The cheap one I have from Wal-Mart is wearing out.
I spent five hours moving some things out of my home office to make room so I could move in my work office stuff. I got it all to fit. This inspired me to clean and organize. I already had three 5-shelf bookcases in here and a smaller bookcase. I moved in two 2-drawer file cabinets and put my shorter bookcase on top of them. I brought a five shelf bookcase from the office and a little rolling file cabinet with a “desk top” and a small drawer and a big file drawer.
This gave me storage space to make it all fit even better and a half-done job of organizing a few months ago. Of the three bookshelves I had in here to start, one is nearly organized the way I want it, the second is partially organized with two shelves in a holding pattern, and the third has three empty shelves and two for temporary holding. I have my AD&D manuals and some of my campaign notes on one shelf of the work bookcase. They say that you’re only supposed to touch each thing once, but the sorting of getting everything out is not so easy with cats and dogs and other people in the same house. It’s like one of those number puzzles where you shift the numbers in odd ways until you sort them in order. It may not be efficient, but I have found several things I have been looking for and I now have room to speed up the sorting. If you hadn’t seen it before I started, you wouldn’t think the way it looks now is an improvement.
I had my office at work mostly decluttered, but had a buildup of stuff to sort and toss. I look forward to having a place for everything and everything in its place. Soon I will have all my AD&D manuals, campaign information and other active game related materials together on one or more shelves of a bookcase for easy access. I am good at decluttering and sorting through files while on hold or if calls ever slow down.
If they will ever get the last few clients off a DOS based series of products, for which I am the main support tech, I can pitch 6 or 8 binders, or rather pitch their contents and re-purpose the binders for game materials.
I will also have room for my few board games so that I can keep all of that stuff together. If the bug bites, I might even sell off the stuff I don’t and realistically, won’t use.
Over the years, I have accumulated a lot of floppies, CDs, and odd bits of computer related tech that is old and obsolete. I can sit here and feed floppies to an old PC in the corner and determine if I need the data. If there is a market for used floppies, I can get something out of them. I would like to avoid the landfill…. I remember when a 1.44 MB 3.25 inch floppy was considered a lot of space. Now all these floppies would fit on one DVD with room to spare…..
As I look around and think about some of this stuff, there is a lot that I have not even touched since I divorced my wife four years ago. I’m finally able to get out some breakables and display them, like my great-grandfather’s pocket watch in a glass covered display stand.
My dog likes it because I don’t need to put her in her kennel while I’m at the office. I can also let her out multiple times throughout the day. If I get stuck and have to work through my lunch hour or work late, I have food here and don’t have to rush out and buy crap. There are not many choices in my village for a healthy lunch, so I won’t be spending money eating out for lunch very often, if at all. No more getting home at 5:30 or 6:00 and not having supper until 8:00 or 8:30.
Once it warms up, I can set up by wi-fi and work outside, or in the garage, or on the deck. I can lounge in my hammock on my lunch hour.
Life is good! The level of order I prefer in my life and living environment is rapidly coming together.
Now that I am past my busiest time of year at work*, my energy and enthusiasm for other things leaves brain power available to get creative. I also was busy wrapping up my hex for Tenkar’s Landing, and getting ready for Marmalade Dog 20.
I have been coming up with a lot of ideas and spreading them out to avoid having too many posts on the same day. It won’t be long until I hit post # 300! Wow! I started posting with great regularity in January, 2014 when I read that it was the 40th anniversary of D&D. March/April of 2014 was my 36th year of D&D. I started in 1978 with Holmes Blue Book Basic. So 2015 is my 37th year of gaming/RPGs.
I am now thinking about the 2015 April A to Z challenge, and think I will sign up again this year.
My thoughts are also percolating for a possible 2015 One Page Dungeon submission.
My posting frequency will vary based on my ideas and things I want to say about RPGs. Vacations, personal issues that may arise, and work commitments can all have an effect. My hope is to keep posting a few days in advance to build up a “buffer” of posts so that my missing a day is invisible to my readers.
In addition to daily or near daily articles, and other than the April 2014 A to Z Challenge, I will write about the games I play in and run, cons I attend, and ideas I have or comments & extrapolation on the ideas of others. I will also come up with tables and other game aids as the need or inspiration strikes.
The cons I plan to attend this year originally included Gary Con, but things have changed since last year, so I will have to put that off to 2016. I will definitely be at UCon 2015 in November. I am seriously considering Con On The Cob in October, since it is within a four hour drive. I will also try to attend any online cons, if those work into my schedule.
I have ideas for an adventure based on my hex in Tenkar’s Landing, so I look forward to fleshing that out.
I may also begin posting new areas of my campaign as I develop them, but those may wait until I actually have players reach them. So far, my usual players don’t follow my blog, but if I take the plunge and begin an online game, I will want to hold onto those for later.
I look forward to the rest of gaming in 2015.
Game on!!!
*(I support payroll and accounting software. This means that December and January are crazy busy with clients trying to wrap up end of year, print W-2’s and 1099’s, and deal with various state specific reports that have a deadline.)
Adam and some of his long time friends and others joined in on my first time as a DM for a con. They were nice and didn’t get too crazy. I am thankful that they restrained themselves, for I think I would have easily been in the deep end of the pool with concrete galoshes if that’s they way they wanted it. That would not have been a bad thing. My reactions to that would have been worth the price of admission to everyone else. I am sure that I would have eventually recovered.
We had a blast in Adam’s DCC sessions, and I was reminded of the no-holds-barred craziness of the way we played in high school, oh so many decades ago. That “What is a box?/We don’t need no stinkin’ boxes.” style of play is an eleven on the dial. It’s on par with firing off a full magazine of a Thompson or a Sten gun; fun, exciting, and over way too soon!
I would gladly play in Adam’s DCC Ur-Hadad and with that crew in any other RPG.
I have been part of a weekly Wednesday night AD&D First Edition game via Roll20 and Google Hangouts since March, 2014. With the exception of the DM taking a two week vacation in the summer and two weeks off over Christmas and New Year’s we have met every week. I was late to one session because I was travelling for work and another session because I had to take something to my son at the hospital the day after my granddaughter was born. There are two other players that have been with the campaign since it started. Weather was a factor a few times with thunderstorms causing delays. A few times either Roll20 or Google Hangouts had technical issues, but we have kept at it.
Our session last week was the first time that one original player missed and only two of the current six players showed up. Several important decisions for group action were needed, so we decided not to play. That is an impressive track record for a weekly session to only have one session flop, and it was session 44.
The DM, John, just started a blog, Dwarven Automata, about his design process. He also wrote up one of the hexes in Tenkar’s Landing, featuring dwarven automata.
It is a true sandbox where the players can go and do whatever they want. There will be consequences and repercussions of actions that we can’t know. We just make what seems to be the best decision we can based on the limited information we have. A few times we have surprised John with some of our decisions, but he rolled with it. The party set off to go explore some ancient dwarven ruins, and keep getting ourselves sidetracked with other things. We keep getting involved in politics and being heroes, so we are our own worst enemies to getting to our main goal. We can’t do it all, but we sure try to do most of it. Actions taken in the first few sessions have had an impact on sessions numbered into the 30’s and 40’s. It is interesting to see it play out as the players get the information they need to tie it all together.
For example, my character, Thorfus Ironhand, a dwarven fighter, thought one NPC was behind some men hired to kill the party. It turned out to be a different NPC that the party did some work for, and was involved in a major plot in the city. Because of that misunderstanding, I had the party focused on the wrong person, when we should have been focused on something else. This is much like things are in real life. We see something and make assumptions based on what is before us. This has made the campaign that much more believable and immersive.
John uses theater of the mind, so the only maps are quick sketches using the Roll20 drawing tools. As with most AD&D DMs, John makes certain rolls like moving silently or checking for traps and secret doors. These rolls occur with the sound of dice rolling on his desk with our fate unknown. This is an ominous sound. The results are only revealed when a trap springs or surprise was not gained.
We also disable video so that we have the maximum bandwidth possible.
The ages of players range from a high school senior to me, and old grognard of 50, with various ages in between. We have been mostly male, with one female player for a few sessions who played a male character, making all the characters, so far, male. One player lives in England, so our 8:00 PM to Midnight EST sessions make it in the very wee hours for him. He is one of the three original players still going strong.
John gives us XP for session write-ups. These help him to know what happened, and gets the players more involved. We also get XP for writing up descriptions of NPCs and places. This helps expand our known universe and makes it easier for new players to come in and get up to speed.
We started off using weapon speeds and individual initiative rolls, but over time we dropped weapon speed and went to one roll for each side in initiative. John does it differently in that each “side” rolls for the other. That is, players roll for the monsters, and the DM rolls for the players. This is an interesting way to do it.
Other rules have changed or been clarified as we go involving a decision by John as the DM, or by discussion and mutual consensus. These changes tend towards streamlining of play.
Our two dwarven fighters are both fourth level and at the halfway point to reaching fifth level. We had one big treasure haul, but as per AD&D, we can’t go past the halfway point of the next level. We have managed to not find the big treasures that will give us more experience quickly, but are always just around the corner from a big haul, when we do something or miss something that will give us the prize and watch is fall through our fingers. The hook has been set and we are thoroughly enjoying our adventures and learning about this world. I look forward to many more sessions of play.
Here are the main points from a comment I posted to his blog:
I enjoy seeing a bit behind the curtain to explain how you reached your design decisions. I have enjoyed playing in this weekly campaign since it started. We have narrowly avoided several TPKs and only had one character die. Your level of preparation shows as you make it all seem very seamless and manage to have things planned out for us when we take the bait for something that wasn’t bait. I can’t wait to see more of your ideas. Your random generators intrigue me. You explained a bit about the level of detail you have allowed yourself in one of our recent sessions. I had the impression you had these cities mapped out and NPCs detailed down to the last beggar, but you fooled us all. Well done!
When Adam and I were talking the topic of random tables and drop tables and all the dice tables came up. I mentioned that I am slowly crafting an all the dice type table to help me generate area of an ancient “abandoned” city for houses, building, and other features. Adam pointed me to a display at Roy’s booth for Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad, Winter 2014, Issue #1. Pages 10 and 11 have a neighborhood generator, and pages 12 and 13 have a gang generator. The neighborhood generator has a lot of ideas that I am looking for so I bought it.
No one signed up for my slot, so I played in Adam Muszkiewicz’sKickassistan session. Roy, Pete, Andrew Moss [G+ deleted before 2/11/2019], Jared Randall, and Laura Williams all joined in. I had never played DCC and it was great! Adam had an interesting concept. Our character sheets where blank 3×5 index cards. We rolled for random professions, and birth portents. We did not roll any stat until we needed it. Each character was first level, so we got to pick a class. Adam had different players make up why we were their based on our known information. If we were rolling for our main ability for our class we got two re-rolls, but had to put the rolls on another stat. This was with 3d6.
This was the first cooperative role playing session I had ever played. Normal roll playing is cooperative, but this was a few notches up. It gets all the players involved in making an interesting story. After the game, I talked to Adam and we were on the same wavelength and agreed that it either had to be a rules system that the GM had total mastery, or something so simple to make mastery trivial. We both agreed that Delving Deeper would be a good one. Adam had a rough idea of what he wanted to do and greatly encouraged us to come up with something creative, even if it was off the wall. The most hilarious thing was that Roy Snyder invented the Minotaur Class. It would take too long to recount all the hi-jinks the Minotaur got up to. I can’t wait to see the write up for that.
The way this worked is if one was a fighter, they rolled their strength and other associated scores when there was combat or some other reason to know that score. For wizards, we got to pick two spells and toll for two. My character rolled a secondary profession of a sage with a dagger, quill pen, and piece of parchment. Based on this, I though a wizard made sense. I rolled intelligence and it was a 13 so it gets a +1. There is a table in DCC for Mercurial Magic effects. Also there is the concept of point burns, where one can use a point of a physical ability to boost the chance of success. This point burn is temporary. So the first time I cast a spell, charm person, I elected to burn two points of strength, then I had to roll my strength, and I rolled a 4. Thankfully, I did not say I used 4 points of strength, because when an ability hits 0, you are dead. The mercurial magic effect for that spell was then rolled, and it requires spells to be cast with point burn or suffer corruption. There were two other spells that I used and found out their effect. For Flaming Hands, the effect is gender bender that lasts an hour. Finally, Color Spray had the effect of memories of a dying god. I had to roll a d20 to determine the effect. If I rolled low, the dying god would take over my body, if I rolled moderately well, I would avoid the worst, but still have to roll every time. I rolled a natural 20! Adam was amazed. By rolling a 20 this meant that I had mastered the dying god’s memories and a new one would be revealed each time I cast the spell. Plus, it supercharged my casting and I always roll a d24 instead of a d20! Each time I cast Color Spray, Adam asked different players what the specific memories were of the dying god, and it was quite entertaining. I don’t yet know what happens if I use Magic Missile or Spider Climb. I also never took a hit, so I don’t know how many hit points I have.
I like the magic system. It is simple, but requires tables to determine effects. Each spell has its own table. If one does not like fire and forget Vancian Magic, the DCC system or similar is easy to mimic. The wizard can cast their spells at will and just roll a d20 for effect. The point burn mentioned above can give a boost to help insure success. The bonuses to the roll without point burn is +1 per level and and pluses for abilities over 12. One can add another plus for each point burned from physical abilities, Strength, Stamina, and Agility. If the roll is bad, but close to success, one can burn luck points, but those don’t regenerate, but GMs can award luck points.
The only complication to playing DCC, besides needing a new set of rules, is the need for non-standard dice and in the all the dice tables in the issue of Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad, i.e. d3, d5, d7, d14, d16, and d24. I finally got a d30 this past summer at GenCon, but need the others. By the time I decided I needed to buy more dice, the vendor selling dice had already packed up and left before the end of the night Saturday. It is easy to simulate the d3, d5, d16, and d24 using other dice. I am tired and not thinking how I would simulate the d7 and d14. If you had either a d7 or a d14 you can easily simulate the other. So, an online search for more dice may be in order.
After the game on Friday, we went to a bar and closed it. I only had one beer, since I had to drive 15 miles back home. I had not closed a bar in a long time, but we sat around talking about various RPG related topics, from systems to genres, to play, to Kickstarters, and more. It was a lot of fun!
In the first slot on Saturday I played in the DCC funnel ran by Mike Carlson. All four of my characters leveled to 1st level and survived until the last roll of the adventure. We had to make a luck roll, below our luck. One of my characters started with a 16 luck and had burned one, so I had to roll a 15 or lower and rolled a 20. Two of the remaining three characters also failed. One player had non of her four survive. The other three players had two of their characters survive. Mike made a stamp for dead characters. It had a skull and crossbones on the handle and he used red ink to stamp the dead characters as dead. We had a blast.
Dead Characters
In Saturdays’ second slot, two other GMs did not have full tables, so I had 8 players for Hommlett. So as my first time running a convention game, this was the first time for only two of the players at a convention game, but they were experienced role players. It was fun to see how Adam and friends, and Pete and Roy made this their own thing. They made it to the dungeon under the keep when we ran out of time. Everyone had fun, and I asked for any advice for me. Adam and others agreed that I should have gotten them to the keep sooner for a convention game. They all agreed that I ran it well for normal play.
First Session Player’s View
First Session DM’s View
In the third slot of Saturday, I played again in Adam’s Kickassistan session, and brought my character from yesterday. It was great! I still don’t know my HP…. We had most of the players from the day before and some new ones and had a blast! Shane Harsch didn’t have anyone for his 5th edition session, so he joined in. His wizard character, mine, and another were planning great things!
Adam demonstrating how he flosses. 😉
Sunday, there is one slot and I ran Hommlet again. I did not have anyone signed up for my session and Pete did not have anyone for his session. Eric Piper got called into work, so his full Castles & Crusades session was cancelled and I ended up with 7 players for Hommlet. I felt that I ran it much smoother and even though Pete knew what was there from the day before, he did not meta game. This group avoided some of the trouble of yesterday’s group, but the cleric of this group went down the secret passage while the others were doing other things, and they found him dead. They rested until morning and went back to town, and I let them equip with the other cleric I had rolled. They only had one character in their group get knocked down. They got a lot farther in the lower level. It was fun and I see how I would run it differently still in a convention setting. Most of the players in this group turned out to be from the town where I lived, and we did not know each other, although two of them know my oldest son.
Second Session Hommlet
My analysis of running a module at a convention is that initially, I thought it would be easier, since it was all planned out. However, I did not know it as well as if I had put something together on my own. I was way over prepared. I wish I had put that much time into my own campaign, and I would have had a whole new area planned out. I am now able to run Hommlet any time with a quick review of the rules. There was talk from my first session crew of trying to finish it. I would like that, or if the second session crew wanted to keep going. Perhaps next year or at another con.
All of us who signed up to run a session are interested in meeting up for Marmalade Dog 21. If that group is there every year, I will be glad to go and run sessions and play.
Several of us also plan to go to UCon in November. I can’t wait!
I ordered a couple of t-shirts to help me as the owner of this blog, to advertise it. I wore it to the first day of Marmalade Dog and got a lot of compliments about it.
I have some ideas for t-shirts others can get to advertise my blog. Those ideas will be shared, if I ever make them a reality.
The front of my t-shirt:
Front
The Back of my t-shirt (It is so much better to have this on the back.):
I had the idea and volunteered to put it together. It is a one page, front & back listing of the GM’s for the OSR track and what games and rules systems they used, plus a listing of the websites for those rule systems and other OSR related information.
This page will be the home of that handout with a QR Code to send you here for the PDF with the clickable links.
I will also have a few handouts available at the con, with enough for each of the 6 slots in the 3 sessions I am running, plus two for each GM. The QR code should minimize the need for most to need a physical copy.
I am doing my final prep to run my first convention game, Village of Hommlet, at Marmalade Dog 20, as part of the OSR track [link to OSR track broken: http://www.marmaladedog.org/osr.php].
I think I am more nervous than I would be if I were to run a game in my home with a bunch of new players. At least in the case of in my home, I could have had some interaction with them before hand. At a con game you never know what you’re going to get. I guess it’s a box of chocolates.
I have read the module, made notes of what information I need to gather, generated a selection of player characters, and have pencils, note paper, and graph paper for the players.
I have had the original module since the 80’s, but have never ran it or played it. I bought the PDF and copied all of the text and printed it out in bigger print so that I can mark it up and highlight, and make notes without marring my original.
My notes are of all the monsters, spells, and magic items so that I have all the stats that will be needed to avoid picking up a manual. I will still take my manuals and have player’s handbooks available to the players. I’m also reviewing rules on things that could come up, such as grenade like missiles, grappling, etc. It’s a four hour session, so I’ll set a timer on my cell for two hours so we can have a break.
I’m not a fan of football, so I will spend my day on these final preparations.
My plan is to get as much sleep as possible in the days leading up to the con so that I have the energy and clarity of thought to deal with the unexpected in the most constructive way.
I also volunteered to put together an OSR handout, and just sent my first draft to the other OSR track GM’s. I will share that list here and with OSR related G+ communities. Perhaps it will develop into a generic OSR handout that can be used at other conventions, FLGS’s, etc.
