I'm falling behind on keeping this blog up to date. I said when I started it that I wanted to post three times a week. I'm falling down to the one and a half range, but posting that much is an improvement to my previous attempts at doing this. Sometimes I sit down and stare at the computer screen and think "I should really put something on the blog... but what would I write?" and I end up not writing anything.

*5 minutes pass*

Ok so I have typed about ten different sentences then removed them. Apparently talking about writers block creates writers block, much like yawning causes more yawning.

I have been up to a lot of things lately. I have been running a campaign for the local Warmachine/Hordes guys which entails creating scenarios to play, writing the plot line, and playing in it myself. I have been playing lots of other games just to get practiced up for the tournament on June 14th. Tonight I played two games and gave a demo of the game to two kids. As I lamented earlier on this blog I was having a serious loosing streak and that streak did not end after my personal pity party. I went 0-4 last week giving me seven straight losses and making me wonder why I even play the game. Fortunately for my bruised ego I won the two games I played today. It's a good thing too, I was about to break out the balloons and confetti and have an uber pity party.

My Wednesday night gaming group has finished all of our current campaigns and we are going to be playing a Savage Worlds game so that I can better learn the rules for the gaming convention in July. I have decided, and my players agreed, that the game should be set in the Thundarr the Barbarian setting. This is really only a temporary campaign until we move on to the game I had originally planned, but the concept of a post-apocalyptic earth with some weird science, mutants and magic is pretty darn cool. It's a complete wonder to me that the cartoon ever got canceled! It was only on for a couple years but it was easily my favorite Saturday morning cartoon while it was on. Anyway, we are suppose to be making characters for this short campaign tomorrow and I haven't even started figuring out the special rules for the playable character races in the setting. Who knows when I'm going to get around to doing that, but I better start soon considering I need to have it done by tomorrow evening.

My Saturday night group has completed Something Rotten in Kislev of The Enemy Within campaign and are now moving on to Empire at War (a fan made replacement for Empire in Flames). So sometime between now and then I need to read a quite a bit of back story and plot and prepare for four hours of gaming for Saturday night. This is coming on such a crappy week I have no clue when I am going to do this prep work. However, it's somewhat comforting to see a light at the end of the tunnel and know that the campaign will be coming to a close soon. It feels really good to finish a long term campaign and have it feel like it was a success and the players who played through it all enjoyed it. So while I will miss the campaign, when its finished and we have moved on to the next game, it will still feel pretty good to have completed it.

In my spare time I have been working on a gunstock for a Ruger 77/17 that I purchased from my dad probably two years ago. I rebarreled it with a Clark Customs barrel and then purchased an unfinished stock from Richard's Microfit Gunstocks. The stock is made of grade A claro walnut with a rosewood tip and cap; its a pretty piece of wood. Anyway it's been a labor of love for a long time and if I had known how much work it was going to be to fix the inletting, sand it, and finish the stock I probably would have skipped the whole deal. Yet it's strangely satisfying to creating something with your own hands out of wood that is so beautiful you just enjoy looking at it. So as soon as I have completed it I will definitely be posting some pictures of the gun here. Maybe you won't feel it's as neat as I do, but to me its pretty spiffy.

I run a Warhammer Fantasy RPG on Saturday nights, its been a lot of fun but sometimes its too much work for the constant complaining and criticism I get in return. I believe that constructive criticism is an important part of any group function. Any time you have a group working together to accomplish something (in our case, fun) everyones input is important. However, this group is very different from all of the other groups of gamers I play with. The other groups generally consist of a group of friends who do other things together besides playing an RPG together. The Saturday night group while made up of some of the same people also has members who do nothing with the group other then play on with us on Saturday night. This inconsistency creates a different group vision of how the game should be played making the criticism of my game mastering style varied and the complaining varied. This is quite literally a case of not being able to please all of the people all of the time.

This whole feeling of not being able to make everyone happy is quite foreign to me in the context of game mastering. I realize its unrealistic to please everyone all of the time but within a smaller group of 5-8 people I believe it's attainable. I have ran this exact same campaign for a previous group and failed to please everyone in that group as well. A wife of one of my friends quit coming to our gaming group; she never said anything, just quit showing interest. I believe that her lack of interest was largely my fault because I imposed some relatively harsh rules about character creation making it difficult for her to get a character that she was happy with. I used the same rules for this new group that plays on Saturday nights and it was not an issue with any of them and we have been playing for probably six or seven months now.

I guess my point is that oddly, in many years of running games for friends, these are the only two instances that immediately come to mind that I have had disgruntled players. (I guess there were some disgruntled players when I was a teenager but my games have matured a lot since then.) I want the players to be enjoying the game; I want them to be having fun. I probably should not try to carry the full weight of that responsibility on my shoulders. I regularly listen to the Sons of Kryos a podcast about role playing, and they spend a significant amount of time discussing the various ways to create an enjoyable experience at the gaming table. One of the things they strongly condemn is a game master taking the entertainment of the entire group solely on his own shoulders. I agree with there assessment of how the gaming table should work, however I find that in reality thats not how it works; especially in my Saturday night group. They are gamers, of various stages and various dispositions, that cannot come to a consensus of what they want from the game (and to be blatantly honest, I'm not sure if they did come to a consensus, that the consensus would be the type of game I want to run).

The easy answer would be to walk away from the group, find a different group that can come to an agreement of how they want the game to be played and relieve my stress with some great games (or just enjoy my Saturday night with my wife instead of trying to entertain them). But the fact is: I want the game to go well, I want to complete this campaign, and I do have fun when people aren't complaining that something isn't fair or the game is going slowly. I don't think I could walk away without completing the campaign.

On Wednesday nights I run a world of darkness game that has a healthy dose of call of cthulhu in it. I have been running this current campaign for I believe close to two years. It's been a lot of fun, but I'm running out of steam. Unfortunately I have two personal pet peeves in table top role playing, the first pet peeve is campaigns that don't last very long, and the second pet peeve is lack of diversity in my gaming. I know... I know... it's a horrible combination, just when the gaming group has some stability in it and things are going great my mind starts to wander to a new system or a new plot line. However I have been able to stomach running the same plot lines, characters and system now for what I consider a sizable amount of time for me. The plot lines are all coming to an end the game is closing and we are reaching the climax. Its energizing me to continue and finish this campaign with a bang.

So what do I have planned for my next campaign/game? A epic storyline that takes the player characters from the age of five to the age of fifty! I seriously love the epic stories, I love the games where players get plenty of time to develop their characters personalities and build up a serious repertoire of stories. I don't know how I am going to keep my energy going for the long epic type of campaign I have planned and the type I love while suppressing the desire to switch to something else and start something new. I am going to be running this new campaign using the silhouette core rules from dream pod 9 because it fits the setting I want to run the game in and I really like the core mechanics of the silhouette rules.

I think part of my problem is my Wednesday night gaming group gets sidetracked easily, they get on conversational tangents, and we don't get a lot of role playing done. I think we all have a lot of fun, but sitting behind the game masters screen puts a different perspective on the game. I know what the plot is, I know what the clues mean, and I have a decent idea of where the game is probably going to be heading. Honestly the part that makes the game fun for me is the pace of the story and the action. Sure many times my players will do unexpected things and the story will be derailed for several hours and I enjoy those times more then the more mundane adventures, but when I'm really having the greatest fun is when the pace is moving at a good clip and the story is feeling very cinematic. However my players are generally the reason we slow down, I give them a great deal of freedom and sometimes they cannot come to a consensus decision or they start talking about other things while I'm trying make them decide what their next move is. I'm not sure how to rid them of these habits short of constantly interrupting their off topic discussion. Somehow I must figure out a way to keep them focused so that over the long haul I will remain interested and focused.