Thursday, November 21, 2013

Brevity Is Not Usually My Style, But Its Been A Long Month...

Dear Blog,

Today I woke up with heat in my house.  It was a very good day...


Seriously; I could hide, like,
five bodies in there!
In all seriousness, I'm happy to report that my heating issues have been dealt with.  New furnace, new duct work, happy Darth.  There is now a good amount of  heat in my home, and just in time.  Next week is supposed to be "Damn Cold".
 
As an odd consequence to this home improvement, I discovered a "void" in my home's floor plan that would cater quite nicely to a new closet.  Some nut-job just threw up a wall, instead of making a closet.  The home has space issues to begin with, why would you wall off 48 cubic feet of usable space?! 

Talking with a carpenter to see what they think it would cost to convert into useable space. 

Three's a Charm


Anyway, games!  Just ran my third session of my Wild Cards game.  I have a standard that I live by...more of a track record, really...that if a game can make it through three sessions, then it'll go.  It'll get the momentum it needs to carry on for years.  I've had one anomaly to this in recent years, my Earthdawn game only made about a year of games before "game-fading".  It fell apart around the time that the 2012 LARP season started, as soon after I started house hunting and house packing.  My new home doesn't cater well to large groups of people, and my own attention to the campaign faltered, so it sadly is off the radar.

Could it be run online?  Eh, maybe.  I'm finding it difficult to run games entirely on my PC.  It's one thing if I'm running a game with half my PCs in the room, and the other half on Roll20.  Especially if the ones online have web-cams.  My current Wild Cards party has one person with a webcam, the rest are all still images of the players.  And even then they're about 200 pixels high.  It's hard to connect with the players, at least that's what I feel.  No visual cues, can't tell if they're engaged or looking at websites between combat actions.

It is only the third game, though...  *shrug*  Maybe it'll change.

Also, my gaming space is pretty tight.  I'm at my desk, crammed in the corner of my library.  My "table top real estate" is pretty tight.  If I try to have a book open in front of me, it doesn't work out too well as far as room to type goes.  Heaven forbid I need to have a second book open too, as that will be in my lap.

Eh, maybe it's time to figure out a new desk set up, or room layout, or something else entirely.

As far as the campaign goes, I'm having a pretty good time.  I'm going to try to keep the Wild Cards episodic for now, with every 3-4 games being one story.  Maybe the 4th "episode" will tie directly into their back story.  I figure we'll need at least three episodes to get the PCs used to each other, and with me, really.  I've got two new PCs (never before played), one PC who I've had at my table twice before (a campaign that only made it to session two), and two "hardened veterans" who will likely be able to see several plot themes coming.  The vets are the only ones who have played together in prior games, too.  I think.  Regardless, it's a real new group so it'll take time to gel.

Still, at least I'm gaming regularly again.