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).

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.