One shot

Revecca on vacation, which is what I'm cheekily calling this, even though it's really Revecca cosplaying as somewhere between Aladdin and Jasmine from the Disney movie. As I said with the earlier version, the image came from someone else, but since the face looked almost exactly the same as my Revecca, I thought I'd adopt it, load it and ask for longer hair. I should have also asked for the removal of the arm tattoo, but I forgot. Maybe I can still do that today before I run out of images. Anyway, this is just for fun; no big deal. 

This, on the other hand, is a conversion of one of my old Hero Forge images to AI, done for a one-shot character that I played last night. I imaged him as kind of a late 60s or early 70s Clint Eastwood character; a combination of Dirty Harry and The Man With No Name. In reality, my voice probably sounded more like the recentish interpretation of Batman. I created him as a half-orc barbarian (and come to think of it, I never even thought to rage...) but I couldn't help thinking about how I'd rather have had him be a Pathfinder character class like Slayer or even the Freebooter focused on class abilities from the old Assassin class. Although I'd probably have changed his weapon to a longsword or even rapier if the latter. Or maybe a saw-toothed scimitar. 

OSR folks often talk about how it's really hard to die in 5e, but in this 5e one shot (admittedly, only 2nd level, but still) we had one of three characters die outright and we were only a one or two unlucky rolls away from a TPK. That doesn't mean that I like 5e; I still don't love it, but it's not really exactly what everyone says that it is either, especially at lower level. It was a pretty fun game. I kind of wish I could play this character again, but I doubt that I will. 

I also found out that this other big group, which I've run a little bit for, but am mostly a fringe associate of, is losing their DM. He's moving out of state, and apparently rather rapidly. So, there may—and in fact almost certainly will be—some significant changes in our gaming group. I think the group is thinking that they can keep their current campaign going online with the current GM running it online for them. And maybe they can. They started during the covid lockdowns online, after all. However, there are a lot of reasons why I don't think this will be as successful as they think it will be 

• The DM is moving two time zones to the west. 7:30 PM start time on a weeknight might be great for people here in the Carolinas, but someone in the Rockies would have to start at 5:30, which is tricky. Or, if they use his schedule, they have to run until very late. If they split the difference, it might not be a very feasible spot for anyone.
• Moving is complicated. At a bare minimum, there's going to be a short term miss while he's too busy moving to run. He's starting a new job. Chances are that even if everything works well, the frequency of play will drop, which may leave folks with an appetite for more gaming than they're able to get.
• Just because they did online before doesn't mean that they'll want to again. They've been playing normally for years now. Downgrading to online just may not be satisfying enough to keep it going.

One of the players, who knows that I've DMed before, and even has recruited me to run some one-shots, made an offhand comment about asking me to pick up his campaign and finish it for them. I didn't say so at the time, but I was very skeptical about this. The more I thought about it, the more sure that I can't do it, or at least am not willing to.

• Their campaign is one of the 5e ones about the Dungeon of the Mad Mage, which is a dungeon-crawling game. I have no interest in running a dungeon-crawl.
• They're at 10th level, which is already higher than I like, and they expect to go all the way to 20. I have no interest in running a 10-20 level game.
• The DM has homebrewed a lot of stuff around the written campaign. I obviously have no idea what any of it is, but I doubt that it's the kind of stuff that I would have any interest in. It sounds like a big portion of it is a Harry Potter-esque magical boarding school. No thanks.
• The characters are obviously halfway through their trajectory, but I don't know jack squat about them.
• The group is, I hear, terrible about making decisions, and frequently takes half an hour to get through a single round of combat. Part of this is the cumbersome nature of 5e combat, the cumbersome nature of higher level combat, but part of it is the lack of engagement, for whatever reason, of the players. 
• The tone and whatnot of the campaign doesn't sound like anything that I'm interested in.

No, if I end up running something for this group, it'll be, as probably expected:

• A low level campaign that starts at level 1 and goes to maybe level 6-7 before encountering a planned ending.
• A darker themed campaign, where the silliness comes from the absurd actions of the players, not from silly whimsy built in before it even starts. As near as I can tell, these group is kind of the Muppets with bird people, dragon people, and all kinds of other weird races and classes built in. That's a hard thing for me to grapple with, honestly.
• Probably not closely based at all on anything written by WotC, although a very loosely adapted Carrion Crown Adventure Path (CULT OF UNDEATH), a very loosely adapted Freeport trilogy+ (CURSE OF THE CORSAIR COAST) or a sorta Hangover-inspired game (MIND-WIZARDS OF THE DAEMON WASTES—or in a pinch, of some other location maybe) are the pitches that I'll probably make to them. 

Why not something based on DARKNESS IN THE HILL COUNTRY adapted to 5e? After all, that's the most developed, right? Yeah... but I don't want to. I want to preserve that one for my own game, not adapt it hodge-podge to 5e.

In addition, I'm going to have a Session Double Zero (00) before the Season 0 (which I think is a necessity in complicated games like anything based on d20, inluding 5e) where I do a character funnel. They won't be obligated to convert any of their funnel characters into PCs, but they will have the option to, plus it will foreshadow stuff in game. I guess it's like a twist on my "kill some randos who look like the Scooby gang" before introducing the PCs gambit. Plus, it'll be a fun exercise (I think) in its own right. Honestly, though, it's entirely possible that some of the people in this group will not be a good fit for the kind of game that I could successfully run. I can't just run anything, at least not happily or very successfully, and I don't want to try. I've gotten old, and I've got my way of running; any game that doesn't fit that better be a one-shor or super short mini-campaign before I get frustrated with it. 

Ideally, it wouldn't be 5e at all, but I think that that ship has sailed. Anyway, if some of them are not a good fit for my game, that's no big deal. It's a big group; I honestly don't think I'd mind shedding a few if they're going to be not really on board. We can do something else with them some other time. Ideally, I'd like to have two or three concurrent campaigns, because our frequency of play isn't great anyway.