Andy, R+1,459

 

"Once I retired… I realised that nobody cared. Nobody was keeping track of what I did! There was no big prize at the end for people like me who followed all the rules and did what we were supposed to do with our lives." - Susan Hayes

It's four years since I retired now, or it will be in a couple of days. Wow. It's weird being the same age as old people.

In theory, I should have a lot more time now to play games and blog about them. In practice, it doesn't feel like that. Partly my wife and I are travelling a lot while we still can; partly I'm not feeling very motivated at the moment. I've been playing RPGs for almost 50 years now, and there are days I feel I've exhausted the possibilities and should hang up my dice. That will probably pass. It always has before.

Progress Towards Objectives

This year I made some New Year's resolutions, which I don't normally do, since it's depressing when I break them. (It stings less if you think of them as experimental observations rather than targets.) Achievements to date:

• Intentionality. No impulse buys; joining new games is within parameters. On track.
• Play with 15 different people: So far it's 14. Ahead of target. The Friendly Local Gaming Shop did ask for someone to run "anything you like", but that turned out to mean "any official D&D 5th Edition campaign you like", and the one available player slot is also for 5E.
• No campaign reboots. This one will fail, as I'm using moving the blog from Wordpress to Blogger as an excuse to reboot my solo SF game.
• Play 300 hours in 100 sessions: To date I've played 96 hours in 30 sessions, so I'm ahead of target. The breakdown is All Things Zombie two sessions and 0.7 hours; Cepheus Engine one session and 4 hours; FATE 3 sessions and 6 hours; Mongoose Traveller one session and 2.25 hours; and SWADE 23 sessions and 83 hours. That puts SWADE in the lead by a long way, at 77% of sessions and 87% of hours played.
• Read 50 books, 5 in Italian: I've read 19 in English, and I'm halfway through the second one in Italian. On track.
• Videogaming: I'm a decade late to the party on this one, but I am absolutely blown away by Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. My 'two games this year' could morph into 'two playthroughs of Skyrim this year', it's that good.

I also added a new goal, boycotting companies which support people and causes that I disagree with; voting and protesting haven't changed anything, but if enough of us reduce their revenue maybe that'll work. Due to existing commitments, it will take me another two years to make all the necessary changes, but I feel better for starting on it.

Finally, I need to figure out how best to use the new blogging platform; likes, comments, and whatnot. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Campaigns

As a GM, I was very pleased with The Pirates of Drinax, The Dracula Dossier, and the various solo games I played over the previous four years or so, but I feel the current batch are not going as well. I thought at the time that Pirates and Dracula would be tough acts to follow.

• 28 Months Later is bulletproof; I never get dissatisfied with the setting, probably because it doesn’t really have a setting, the rules slip on like comfortable old gloves, and none of the characters survive long enough for me to lose interest in them.
• The Aslan Route is tripping over too much stuff from the earlier Pirates of Drinax game; using Charted Space still looks like a good shout, but I should’ve picked a subsector we haven’t used before, maybe moved into a new sector entirely. Going forward, I think each campaign should be limited to a single subsector, probably a different one each time.
• There were good reasons I moved away from the Dark Nebula before, and they’re still valid. Although I'd dabbled in solo SF gaming earlier, I didn't get serious about it until 2008, and that was using a Savage Worlds/Classic Traveller mashup. I've tried a lot of other systems since, but I think that is overall the best combination for what I want to do, and it's a solo game so I may as well do what I like; as Ms Hayes says, there's no big prize at the end of your life for doing what you were supposed to.
• It’s good that I got Hayastan out of my system, as I’ve been meaning to use it for years now; but for the moment Skyrim meets all my solo fantasy needs, and when that changes, I think Gold & Glory and Ruins of the Undercity would be worthwhile experiments – setting-free dungeon crawls are where I started in 1976, and though they have drifted out of fashion, I still miss them.

As a player, the lion’s share of my time is going to Deadlands, and I enjoy it immensely; it turns out I like to play SWADE as much as I like to run it. It's early days for Leaves of Chiaroscuro, but I suspect it is going to focus too much on narrative for me; I like a certain amount of crunch in my games, and FATE steers away from that.

Where Next?

By this point, I have a pretty good handle on what my players enjoy, and the Aslan Route should continue to provide it for a while yet.

It seems logical, then, to use my solo games to explore aspects of gaming which I enjoy and my players don’t. That list includes survival horror, combat, magic and psionic powers, and dungeon crawls. I'm also tempted by the Nimble 5E-adjacent RPG, and might pick that up later in the year.

Adding new rules to my group games needs to be done sparingly, and on the GM’s side of the screen.