jkahane 🙂awake

Listens: Jethro Tull - "A Christmas Song"

RPG Thought for the New Year

One of the things that I plan to do this New Year is to alter some of my roleplaying game habits.

I want to run a minimum number of roleplaying games this year, for a variety of reasons. First off, and this one is the primary one, I'm not as young as I used to be, and the memory for game rules and the like is not what it was. (And that's aside from the fact that I suffer from Mind Like A Sieve (MLAS (tm)) as it is.) The less game systems I have to deal with, the easier it is on my poor memory for stuff. Second, I discovered that this past December, where I didn't look at roleplaying games at all (other than a minor incident because I had to work with spross on his new Desolation character), was one of the most enjoyable months I've had in a while. Because I wasn't working on rpgs and prepping games and so forth, I was actually able to do other stuff - such as my writing, my reading, and a few pet projects - that I wouldn't otherwise have had time to engage in. The third reason is the best one of them all. I want to minimize the number of rpgs that I run, simply because I want to run a game long enough to actually have it feel like a "campaign", where a) the players do something long-term and develop their characters a bit, and b) I feel like the game world is actually moving along because of the length of the game campaign.

When all is said and done, I want to run just a few rpgs this year...

1. Desolation
2. The Laundry (based on the Charles Stross works)
3. Some Shadow, Sword & Spell, and
4. The new Primeval roleplaying game (when it eventually comes out)

Note that these are not in the order or in the priority that I am placing on the games themselves, just the systems that I want to run this year. I would have liked to run an actual science fiction rpg this year, but this just doesn't seem to fit the bill for me, as I've not really found an sf rpg that I can run without having to do all manner of work on it to run the game. I ran the Universe SF RPG for 20+ years, so did that, and didn't get the t-shirt. And I'm just not as young as I used to be in order to do stuff like that any more. The creativity is there, but the body's just not willing.