So maybe its time to pick this back up again, school made it difficult for me to post here regularly, but school is over now and I have a full time job. So maybe its time to add a few mindless comments about whats going on in my life. Currently Josh Wheeler and I are working on a book, a RPG, (much like the ones you have probably heard of, Dungeons and Dragons etc etc) and its going pretty well. I have spent a lot of time in the past working on an RPG but I would always get slowed up and slowed down and loose motivation. Its been great having someone to collaborate with because it keeps me motivated when I see him complete something towards the end goal.

We should have a workable alpha version of the book/game in another couple weeks. I'm looking forward to trying it out.

Today was my last test for finals week at school. I have one more test to take but its taken online and I can take it at my leisure. It feels good to be finished with this year of school and only have one more to go. Hopefully next year will be as good scholastically as this year has been.

I would like to thank everyone who has expressed concern and sympathy for my dog. Its been a few days now and other then his eating habits not being back to normal he is very active and quickly returning to full health. He is obviously still sore and we have to be careful with his wounds but his attitude and personality have returned. For the first couple of days if we put him in the back yard for him to relieve himself he would just stare at us like he was being punished so he had to be taken to the front yard. Now he has become more comfortable with the back yard again and is willing to walk around and explore.

Tonight is my Wednesday night gaming group and we are going to be starting something new. We finished our World of Darkness campaign a couple weeks ago and it will be missed a little. I think my players will miss it more then I will, but regardless it was a lot of fun. We played the game for several years and it covered a very broad range of events and the players went from being highly secretive government employees to highly sought after fugitives. In the player characters travels they covered most of the United States then went to places like Copenhagen, Moscow, Ulan Bator, Lhasa and finally the Himalayan mountains. The characters personalities developed significantly in that time and I think we all enjoyed the story immensely.

But now that the campaign is complete we are going to play a short campaign using the Savage Worlds game rules. It will probably only be one or two adventures long and will be centered on time travel. As I have said before in this blog I want to eventually make a time travel RPG, and this foray into the genre will give me a lot of insight into possible problems and issues I might face. In this short campaign the players will be forced to travel through time and I'm starting to wonder if that's not a better solution for a game overall. Motivation in a role playing game can make player characters do some odd things and the problem I keep returning to in a time travel sense is: If you could travel through time, would you? Ethically it brings a lot to the table. Just attempting it could destroy the universe as we know it. Would knowing that your current lives and world around you might not ever be the same again stop you from attempting to travel back in time? You may never see your loved ones again. Your interference with the past might change the course of humanity forever. (see Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder)

However if the player characters are shoved back in time without any understanding of how long they will be there or even why they are there it provides them a situation that they must deal with. It's unfortunately a bit of what some gamers like to call "railroading". However it makes for a great storytelling device and a great television show. So I am going to try it and see how it goes. If the players are trapped in the past leaping from time to time solving problems I think it will solve all of the moral issues with time travel and why in so many time travel settings there is a need for time police (although players being time travel police is also a great option for a time travel game).

Last year I started writing my own RPG. I had been toying with the idea for a while and had found myself with a lot of extra time on my hands. Since that time I have returned to school, added three additional game nights, and my wife gave birth to our second child. Because of those changes I haven't done a single thing with my RPG for a considerable amount of time. However, recently I have been listening to a new podcast called Master Plan. The podcast is centered on game design and its given me a new desire to start working on my game again.

I think part of the reason I stopped working on my game before was I really wanted to create a western RPG that dealt with the moral issue of actually killing a person. I had a lot of ideas that I had never seen used in prior western RPGs that I thought would be a really neat. Last June Kenzer and Co. released Aces and Eights. The game was a major blow to my desire to create a western and it took a lot of wind out of my sails. They had incorporated a lot of ideas that I thought were pretty original, yet my ideas were not original enough that someone else couldn't also think of them. Obviously many of the mechanics I had chosen were completely different from Aces and Eights and nothing was exactly the same idea, but a lot of ideas I wanted to put in my game were similar to game concepts in that game. No longer were my ideas novel and new, instead they were copies with a twist even though when I came up with them they were original ideas.

Fast forward a year; I find myself returning to the dice mechanics and core rules I was planning on using for my western now being transformed into another genre. Unfortunately my core theme of moral issues does not translate to the other settings/genres I'm interested in recreating in an RPG. In fact one of the settings I would like to create as an RPG doesn't even fit well with my core dice mechanic and would require a complete retooling from the ground up with absolutely nothing I used previously translating to the new setting.

Honestly I'm not sure any of these games are going to get made. I'm terribly busy as it is and creating a quality RPG is hardly an easy task. However it is a personal goal of mine and I plan on pursuing it this summer while I'm out of school.

I guess if anyone actually reads this blog they might wonder what my ideas are so at the risk of giving someone an "Aces and Eights" head start on my game and ruining my dream I will share those ideas with you. The first idea is a time travel game, I really like science fiction involving time travel. The paradoxes involved with time travel can be mind boggling but in all honesty thats what makes the whole time travel genre interesting. Its a perfect setting for amazing adventures and varied stories that can span huge arcs of situations. Plus its way easy to find campaign/adventure material for the game. There is oodles and oodles of history available to anyone willing to spend some time investigating our past. The biggest obstacle to the game can be summed up by Jeff Goldblum's character from Jurassic Park:

"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

I believe I will need to give the players incentive or empowerment to change the past, if I fail to do this one simple thing I fear that prudence will win out over curiosity with many gaming groups. They will be too afraid of causing the butterfly effect and will avoid confrontation or change. However maybe the game also needs some sort of mechanic to keep them from totally attempting the opposite which is complete change (ie going back and killing Hitler or saving Jesus from crucifixion). I will contemplate on this idea some more, obviously the rules need a framework that the players can freely adventure within.

My second idea is based on Under the Bed a small press game written by Joshua Newman. I absolutely love the idea/concept behind this game. I purchased the game and thought it was interesting. While I love the idea for the game, the execution used by Mr. Newman is a bit too abstract for me. Its very similar to a lot of story centered games that have become so chic in the independent/small press scene over the last few years. While some people enjoy this type of game I personally do not. I don't like GM-less* games, I don't like dice-less games. They are not my cup of tea.

But I love the concept of Under the Bed. So I would really like to put a more traditional set of rules and character creation to a similar setting. It would be a lot like playing Toy Story the RPG. This is the game I was referring to when I said none of the previous rules I had put to paper would fit the genre. I would have to start from scratch to make a game based on this concept. Again, I don't necessarily like rehashing a game that has already been done but with Under the Bed I feel more like I am expounding upon not competing against, and I don't think Joshua would mind me using his idea and running with it.

Anyway, I hope that some day these games might reach at least a playable state, but unless I put aside a lot of extra time, and find a lot more inner motivation then I currently have, I doubt these ideas will ever see the light of day.

(*GM-less games are roleplaying games in which all the players share equal authority over the fiction/story. With no central driving force or overarching plot but instead is a collaborative effort to create a story, plot, and conflicts.)