Not a lot of people get Juneteenth off yet, but I did, by funny coincidence. My company added it as an extra holiday just a couple of months ago, no doubt because someone in HR demanded that the should. While I really don't need another holiday between Memorial day and Independence day, given how close those are already, I'll always take a free day off without much complaint. I had some reasonably big plans for my hobby space, since my wife was working and I thought I'd have the whole day to do my own thing quietly.
By big plans, I meant merely that I was going to take a few hours to walk to the library and print out my ruleset, since my attempt to print it here at home ended up as a big fail and I wasted a lot of ink and some paper. I was also going to draw my much delayed campaign specific map, with updates and more details of the Hill Country region of the Three Realms, which is the part featured in the first campaign 5x5. Unfortunately, I wasn't successful in either of these tasks either. I did walk to the library. It was a beautiful, sunny, but not very hot day, and it was an enjoyable walk. However, to print, I needed a copy card, and you can only buy them with cash from an automatic dispenser, and I didn't bring cash, nor did I anticipate that. I came home, a little chagrined, but not overly non-plussed since it was a nice walk and I enjoyed being outside and our unseasonably sunny summer. My wife had to go run an errand for work, and said she had some cash, so invited me to come with her, and we'd stop by the library on the way back. That took the better part of an hour and a half, and when we got the library, it turned out that she only had a few bucks on her, not anticipating that I'd need 6-7; ten cents a page for 51 pages, plus a dollar for a copy card. So, once again, we went home after having spent a fair bit of time, and not getting a printout.
Afterwards, I didn't do the map for various reasons, nor did I make any progress on my physical book read-through of The Lord of the Rings. I did read some of Death on the Reik on pdf, and I also bought and read Shadowdark all in one afternoon. I guess that wasn't a total failure, but it kind of looks like it if you consider my progress towards specific goals that I made for the day, as well as lack of progress in getting my game readier to run. I feel like taking these final steps over the finish line has been extraordinarily difficult for some reason, but mostly that's because I'm not as motivated as I should be, and I'm distracted by real life too much (again, if any wealthy patron swings by and wants to fund my slightly bougie middle-class lifestyle so I can quit worrying about work and stuff and spend more time on road trip videos across the American West and Southwest as well as finish my game planning and actually run the game via a liveplay video podcast on YouTube, and novelize my campaign outlines with my iconic characters, you know how to reach me! Otherwise, progress will happen... when it happens.)
I'll have to do this on the evenings, when I can—although my evenings aren't a guarantee now that I have a job where I often have evening meetings with Asian colleagues. My weekends are a joke in terms of getting hobby things done, because my wife has embarked on a different hobby with me and possibly over-planned them. We'll be spending five of the next six weekends, we just realized, out of town. Sigh.
Curiously, my best bet in the near term may be when I go to Orlando for my nephew's wedding in a few weeks. Everyone else but me and my son-in-law will be spending a fair bit of time in the Disney theme parks. I not only have no interest in doing that, but I also don't want to spend my vacation on it either, so I'll work during the day remotely from the house that we're staying in, which I'll have to myself mostly, and then in the evenings I'll have time to do whatever I want. I can only sit in the pool so many hours before getting tired of that, so maybe if I haven't drawn the map by then, that's when I'll do it. But I hope to get it done before that. I doubt it'll be this week or weekend, but next week looks relatively open, unless that changes between now and then.
Anyway, I did—like I said—buy and read Shadowdark yesterday. I've also backed the Knave 2e campaign, and although I've only skimmed the draft made available to backers, I'll read the full thing when it's done. I'm impressed that both seem to be very similar mechanically to my own game. So much so that the three of them are somewhat redundant. Much like how in the earliest 80s, while playing we'd probably slip in and out of Holmes basic rules, Moldvay/Cook basic/expert rules and AD&D rules without really thinking about it much, or even necessarily being aware of it, I think all three of these games are sufficiently similar that they tread very similar ground. Although my own game obviously has different races, and is classless (like Knave), the classes in Shadowdark are pretty modest, and I wouldn't have any problem using them. The magic casting system is also similar; maybe mine is slightly more punishing because of the brief rules-light sanity mechanic I've added, but they are otherwise very alike. One thing that both Shadowdark and Knave have as core conceits, however, is the removal of the importance of the character; they are meant to be much more randomized in their generation, and you're not supposed to worry about that because their lifespan is supposed to be very short, and they're borderline disposable. Another core conceit is that the games are very much about exploration and resource management, i.e., dungeoneering, as almost the whole of what you are doing. These are at odds with my own game, where I prefer a more Call of Cthulhu like paradigm of what your characters are actually doing in game, and while the risk of PC lethality is important, the actual lethality on the ground is probably not like the old meatgrinder dungeons of ye olden days.
I suspect that in actual play, most people will tend to gravitate back towards more generous stat methods introduced in AD&D, and picking elements that they want rather than randomizing them. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe what people really want is not only rules that are somewhat old school, and a playstyle that's somewhat old school, but actually a playstyle that's very strongly old school, and those are the customers for this game. But I think what people really want from both Shadowdark and Knave is a rules-light somewhat old school alternative to 5e and the new developments in the industry from WotC. But it's curious that these significantly different playstyles can be facilitated with rules that are almost interchangeable. Of course, I've long said that playstyle trumps the actual mechanics in terms of what your experience at the table will be like, even though certain playstyles will lend themselves to certain mechanics and vice versa. But I find that the mechanics changes to accommodate different playstyles are much more modest than most give credit for, unless you're doing something really quite radical. "D&D" can facilitate very different playstyles with only a few simple houserules, at least D&D back when it was sufficiently rules light to begin with. That I could confidently suggest to anyone that they use Knave 2e or Shadowdark as an alternate, even though my game is meant to be investigation heavy and horror-themed (although still pretty action oriented) and those games are very sandbox, exploration and dungeoneering focused.
Anyway, I'm starting to beat a dead horse, so I'll quit while I'm "ahead." Here's some highwaymen I made in Hero Forge as a coda, just in case you need such. I think using Raymond Chandler's "when in doubt have a man come through the door with a gun" (I'm "quoting" that from memory, so I might have the wording slightly off) advice is always good advice for gaming, so having highwaymen ready to roll at a moment's notice is always important.
No comments:
Post a Comment