Thursday night gaming

Well, I'm running this substitute Thursday Night one-shot this week. I've decided to adapt 1) the first "scene" of "Burnt Offerings" from the first Paizo adventure path, except converting the "swallowtail festival" to a Christmas festival, and Sandpoint to Snowpoint or something. The goblins will be furry little gremlins or frostlings or something like that. They will be leaving plague around too; so after the frostling attack, I will migrate to an adaption of "Hollow's Last Hope" except the "worg" lair will be Krampus instead, Santa's rival. Some of the players have expressed a keen interest in some Christmas theming. One player wants to adapt a gnome to be one of Santa's elves, and another player wants to use a warlock with cold-themed spells to be Jack Frost. 

I've kinda shrugged and said sure to everything here. This is just a one-shot. I don't care that much. I want it to be fun, in fact, I want it to be fun enough that there's some interest in me possibly running a "real" campaign at some point in the future. But in that case, I will not go with the anything goes stuff. What I can tolerate in a one-shot and what I can run in a campaign are two very different things. For a campaign, I want to set the tone and have limits on stuff in the setting. There are a bunch of really goofy ideas in 5e and even more in 5.5e that I wouldn't want people playing, because they're dumb—or at least, they wouldn't fit the tone of any campaign that I'd be willing to run.

Anyway, this is just a quick short update. I'll probably not post another one until after I run it. Then I'd like to post one more time over the weekend before heading out of town for the holidays, during which I don't intend to post anything at all, because I'll be too busy and don't want to try and post from my phone because that'd be terrible. 

I did, however, finish the actual adventure of "Seven Days to the Grave." I haven't finished the whole book, although I likely will tonight, but I did finish the adventure, which is of course by far the biggest chunk of the book. And I started packing up a few physical books to take with me this weekend when I leave. I'd like to finish the novel I'm reading before I go, though, and take another one instead. 

I also binge-watched Wednesday, which has two seasons as of right now. What a surprise and delight show that ended up being! I didn't really expect to like it, but in fact, I very much did after all. Too bad season two just dropped a few months ago; it'll be at least another year or two before season 3 will be available, I'm sure. I think I needed a break from reading. I don't want to slip back into frittering away all my time on line, but I needed a break after all the crap going on at work, and this ended up working out perfectly.

UPDATE: I got some intel on the characters that I'm expecting. Blegh. But it's just a one-shot. Whatever.

• Holly, the Christmas elf bard (stand-in race: gnome)
• Dragonheart a "mark of warding" dwarf fighter, whatever a mark of warding dwarf is, exactly. (ed. looks like it's an Eberron specific thing, which makes sense. I don't know why someone is using Eberron rules for this, but again, I specifically said I don't care, so I have to not care now.) The name is going to make me think of that cheesy Dennis Quaid movie from the 90s with the dragon who's soundtrack was used for a bazillion trailers in the later 90s and 00s.
• Brock Timbers, a forest gnome ranger.
• Reiner, a goliath wizard who bilked a circus and embezzled their funds when he ran away.
• Saul Adal, a wood elf monk who... actually comes from a Buddhist temple?!
• Frispira, a copper dragonborn druid
• ...and name TBD, a warlock who's built to be an ersatz Jack Frost with a lot of ice and cold powers. Of course, since the game will be set up north... that's not necessarily the most effective. Everything is adapted to the cold. (Update: Name is Pukkasakka, apparently "the Finnish Jack Frost" or something.)

I don't even know who all of these players are. Two are from my regular gaming group, another is someone that I know reasonably well but don't game with, and a fourth is someone that I know a little bit but not well, and I also don't game with. Two of them I've never met, and the last is... I'm not sure who it is, actually. Might be a third guy from my current gaming group that I don't know very well. I think, actually, that it is. But it might be another person that I've met briefly once but don't really know. Or maybe it's someone else entirely. The name "John" is all I've got, and because John is such a common name that I don't know if it's the John that I think it is. If it is, then he's a guy that I currently game with, but he's kind of a cypher, and I don't feel like I know him very well. I'm not even 100% sure that his name is John, lol.

Personally, I think a tongue-in-cheek Santa themed adventure is kind of silly. But like I said, for a one-shot? I'll give anything a try. If I don't like it, well, it's not like I'm coming back to it. If I get talked into running a mini-campaign after this, I've been specifically and discretely told that there's probably two people (and I think I know who they are) that I'd do better not to invite. And I'd also start with nothing beyond the PHB in terms of races or classes. And a few other things here and there, but let's cross that bridge when—or if—I come to it.

The problem, of course, is that I don't really like 5e very much. I greatly dislike the idea (which was also true for 3e and 4e especially) that combat is like a separate tactical boardgame that you have to stop your RPG to play, and I greatly dislike that the implied setting, as delineated by the rules, is about half The Avengers and half The Muppets. What I really want is an immersive singular experience that is like reading a book in a setting that's more like a somewhat more grounded and grittier Lord of the Rings or pulp fantasy story, of course. That doesn't seem like an odd ask. But more and more, D&D specifically has drifted away from it. It never was super good at that, but at least it started out on the same page as that's what it was trying to do, I think. Now, it's just somewhere else altogether.