Game ideas, a short hiatus, etc

I put our Traveller campaign on hiatus until June. Just a short two month hold. I’m just so tired of being at my computer, in my home office, all the time these days I need a break. The idea of spending 3 or 4 hours pretty much “working” for fun at GM was making me sort of anxious. I love being the game master (or Referee in Traveller), but let’s face it. GMing is intense. It is performance. You have to really be “on”, and to do a good job you have to not only be prepared with your game materials, but you have to be physically and emotionally geared up as well. The last 14 months have taken their toll. I just need a short break. I’m glad my gaming group is all so cool and understanding. It helps that we’ve known each other since we were kids.

Image credit: ESA/Garrelt Mellema (Leiden University, the Netherlands) – Hubble Image

This break, however, is giving me a good chance to write new material for our campaign. I’m trying to spend 30 minutes to an hour a day working on stuff. I find that for each session I come up with an idea, and then over the course of development it changes tremendously. The team is currently on an ice planet, exploring a wrecked freighter, waaaaaay out in unexplored space. How did it get there? What happened to the crew? How long has it been there? So many questions to be answered. I watched a really interesting documentary last week. After we play the session I’ll discuss the documentary here and how it has influenced the session, but tonight I came up with what I think will be a very fun, super weird trajectory for this next session to take, all based on stuff from this documentary. Had nothing to do with space.  I’m enjoying coming up with the rest of this stuff.

A challenge for me, now, is to make sure the session has things for each PC to really be engaged in during the session. It can’t all be about “my great idea.” That idea is to provide the challenges for the players, so I need to make sure each PC has a chance to shine. Since players are unpredictable, I need to make sure I have two or three chances for each PC to do his thing and have his time of greatness!

Tomorrow, officially, is Mayday!, a special day in the life of Traveller players. This year Jeff (my podcasting partner on SAFCOcast) and I are playing in an online game as part of the online Traveller celebration organized by Virtual Traveller, Cyborg Prime, and Two Brothers Gaming. Beside the games, there are online talks and interviews all day. Looking forward to all of it!

Speaking of SAFCOcast, yes, Jeff and I will be creating a new episode after this game. We’ll be reporting on the online Mayday activities, and of course will have some internet finds and other Traveller talk. With the pause in our campaign, and each of us starting new jobs, we’ve been a bit preoccupied with “life” recently, but rest assured the podcast shall go on. We both love doing it.

I’ve been fantasizing about running two groups in our campaign. Christopher Rice, GURPS-master and Lord of Ravens N’ Pennies, does that. There are other people I really want to have in the game. My old college roommate for one. He’s the best GM ever, and he needs to be in our game. Since we went virtual it’s totally possible now. And there are a couple more players I’d like to involve. The problem is once a group gets over three or four players I don’t feel like I can give each PC the attention they deserve. I really like to shine the spotlight on each player, during each game, and once I pass four players in a session it gets tough. Right now we have 5 players in the came, and one occasional player. That’s about as many as I can handle. So running teams A and B would be really fun. The reality is that it will be tough to do that until I’m retired. I just can’t put enough time into gaming right now to make this happen. But…I might try anyway. Having teams A and B would open up some really fascinating possibilities to see how each’s actions might affect the other. Would they ever meet? Would they be allies? I need to do this.

Finally, I bought more 99 cent one-page adventures by Michael Brown. I love his work. So, so good.

 

Lone Star Game Expo 2019: Day 2

Jeff and I will be discussing our entire experience of the 2019 Lone Star Game Expo on an upcoming episode of SAFCOcast. We were going to record yesterday, but things got a bit hectic on one end and we had to postpone.

For now, I’ll just do a quick report. Friday was the day I ran Traveller in the afternoon. I met some great players, and they were very patient with me (three of the players are way more experienced Traveller GMs than I am). I’ve written about this in a previous post. It was great.

Saturday Jeff and I rode out to Grapevine together and played Dungeon Crawl Classics with a new friend, Jonny Daylett. We’d never played this before, and it was a crazy good time. Each player started with four zero-level characters. By the end a lot of PCs had died. Mucho fun. Thank, Jonny!

As we are not regular con-goers, we had not signed up for any other games that day. There wasn’t anything else I was that interested in playing, and I didn’t know if I could do 8-10 hours of gaming in a day. One 4-hour game seemed like enough. I’m sure if there had been a Gamma World or Champions game, or another Traveller game, or whatever, I’d have been up for it anyway. As it was, we went for some lunch, then spent the rest of the afternoon in some GMing seminars led by a fellow by the name of Raccoon. We got to his first session a bit late, which neither of us really likes to do, but time got away from us. We’ll discuss the seminars on the podcast next week. The essential are — 1)We were not 100% sure when we walked in how they would be. Raccoon was having some tech issues. He got the issues sorted, but as it turned out we didn’t really miss that much do to the confusion. 2)The rest of the seminars were informative, interactive, and fun. It’s just fun to talk with other people who are into gaming.  Again, we’ll get into this on the podcast. In the end I guess we did three of these seminars by Raccoon, and I enjoyed them.

We once again ventured out for food, returning in time to do the 7pm-9pm talk and Q&A by Marc Miller, of Far Future Enterprises/Game Designers Workshop/Traveller fame. As Traveller nuts, we’d been looking forward to this all day. Marc came in early and just started chatting with everyone about gaming and Traveller.  The room filled up. It was kind of funny to have Marc there, considering I was the only person who ran a Traveller game, but turnout was considerable for his talk so there is a lot of interest. Everyone knew this talk was going to happen,  but the time was not filled in on the schedule until a day or two before the con, so I suspect a lot of people were involved in games at that time as well. I know one of my players was going to run Traveller, but didn’t want it to coincide with Marc’s talk. Turns out Marc did a talk on Friday night as well, which I didn’t discover until Saturday morning, and I’d been checking the schedule daily.

More on the Marc talk – you guessed it – on the podcast. I’ll just say it was cool. We’ll post our notes on the podcast page as well.

We were both pretty wiped out after a 9am-9pm con day, so we bailed on the morning game we had schedule to play on Sunday. Note to self: maybe Sundays are not the best day to have games scheduled if you want your players to turn up.

Traveller at NTRPG Con

This morning and early afternoon I played in Mike Kelly’s “Millennium Girl” game of classic Traveller. I won’t blow any surprises or details of this game, since I feel sure Mike will be running it again in the future. I’ll just say it was really fun. Mike’s obviously been running classic Traveller for a long time. It was a very unique adventure, at least in my experience.

Our group consisted of me, another guy my age (middle aged dude), an adult woman, a young woman just graduated from highschool, and a young woman I’d say about 14 years old, and a young man about 15 years old. By far the most diverse group I’ve ever gamed with. Really fun. A lot of fun to see how people outside my usual gaming group approach roleplaying.

Anyway, tons of fun. Play in one of Mike’s games if you get the chance.

CyberTex at North Texas RPG Con

Just a quick note. I ran a session at North Texas RPG Con today, based on the first three CyberTex sessions. I’d never run at a Con before, and was actually a bit nervous. Turned out I had four really good players. Outgoing, fun, great people, who really got into the roleplaying and were frankly quite awesome. So Sasha, Sara, Dom, and Mike – thank you for a great first con GMing experience. Hope to see y’all again sometime soon.

This was the only GURPS session at the con. I was glad I did this.

North Texas RPG Con

I’ve signed up to attend the North Texas RPG Con in June. I had not really planned on going to this, as I though I was going to be involved in family stuff that weekend, but things changed, and what the hell.

It has been years since I’ve been to a gaming con. I’m also going to be running a GURPS Cyberpunk (CyberTex) session on Friday afternoon of the con. I’ve never run a game at a con before, but I have lots of source material to draw from in my campaign. I have four players signed up already, so I’m excited that someone thought it sounded cool enough to play! Looking forward to it.

I’ve also signed up to play two sessions of Call of Cthulhu, once session of Villains & Vigilantes, and one session of classic Traveller. So that’s a lot of gaming. I may still sign up for another Traveller session on the last morning of the con (Sunday). Depends on if I want to drive back out there again. Sunday morning should be nice and easy traffic though.

Trying to get my own gaming group together. Not easy. Hopefully we can play a bit.