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.

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.

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.)

I have been incredibly busy this week with school, with the board gaming convention that starts today and with the RPG convention I am helping organize for this summer. I wanted to sit down and write something but things have just been too crazy.

The Idaho convention for board gamers starts today and I am running a Warmachine event at the convention. Its been completely frustrating. When we first started planning the event I really wanted to see a lot of the local people participate and wanted some out of town people to participate as well. I planned for sixteen players which is more players then we have here locally but not by much. I keep a database of all the local players, what faction they play, and their contact information. I have seventeen players on that list; granted some of those players are not very active, but my goal was to get ten to twelve local players and then get the rest from out of town. In order to get people interested from out of town we decided to provide a 50$ gift certificate to the overall winner. Its been almost two months now since I began advertising for this tournament and I have a grand total of seven people signed up. ARGGGHHHH! I have gotten absolutely zero interest from out of town and several of the people I expected to support me in making this tournament a success are refusing to participate. So what this boils down to is we spent over a hundred dollars on prize support and I don't think we are even coming close to covering our costs.

I am helping organize a Role Playing Game convention this summer as well and we wanted to have fliers and tickets for iCon (the board gaming convention). So I have been swamped the last two weeks with finding some graphic artists willing to help, delegating tasks to others, dealing with logistical issues and even creating some of the graphics myself. The gaming community here in Idaho Falls is absolutely great. People have jumped at the opportunity to help with this convention and without them it would just not be unfolding like it is. As of right now the venue is secured, the tickets are printed, the fliers have been printed, and I have a dozen events committed and being created for the con. Its been a hectic week but seeing this develop has been amazing and I am very excited to see how well the convention goes.

Even though I have been busy, things overall (other then the lack of committal warmachine players) have been great. Yesterday in the mail I received notices from my college letting me know that I have been awarded two scholarships, a total of 1500$! This was absolutely great news as I have been leaning heavily on my dad to help me with tuition costs and I feel somewhat guilty about it. I wouldn't have felt guilty ten years ago but I'm thirty now, own my own home, and have two kids; I feel as though I should be self sufficient at this point, but obviously if I was self sufficient at this point I wouldn't need more schooling. Cyclical I know, but regardless of the argument for not feeling guilty, I still do.

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.