And Now for Something Completely Different

It had to happen eventually. I haven't run a session of Shadowrun in about a month, maybe six weeks. We're in that long rear view that makes specific dates a little hazy. On top of that we're now into November, which means holiday season. Between now and sometime after New Years, my group won't have a single weekend available to them. I think we're at a point where we won't be laid up until after Valentine's Day, though that used to happen too.

I can tinker with Shadowitz more, but I've already played around with a lot of fundamentals of the game. I've adjusted target thresholds, wound penalties, and healing rates. I've also expanded the rules associated with the heal spell, for all the use that'll get. After I tossed out my take on technomancers and physical mages I started running dry on ideas. At this point I can't realistically revise the system without playing it, and for that I need a group. I won't have a group for another 3 months at the earliest.

That doesn't mean I haven't been gaming, however. It just means I haven't been running Shadowrun. I'm actually running a pair of games at the moment. Shadowrun meets on weekends, when it does, and the other game meets every Wednesday after work. We play for 3 hours, then go home. The sessions are short, but they're frequent, which lets us make progress. It's less tolerant of messing around because of the short game time, which means that sometimes the group doesn't make any appreciable progress, but by and large they chug along just fine. It's a schedule that's worked out a whole lot better than meeting on weekends. I might be kissing the idea of a weekend game goodbye next year and only run something on weeknights (one game at a time though; I've got limits).

What this means is that I've been running a 7th Sea game pretty consistently for the past several months. In fact, it's seen a ton more action than Shadowrun has, by a lot. I didn't redesign this system from the ground up like I did with Shadowrun. I have made a few adjustments to the rules, but we all went into this game thinking the rules worked just fine. They were, after all, designed by the esteemed Mr. Wick, and our group tends to like his mechanics (even if they'll rib me about saying so).

While I don't have a ton of material to post about modifications to the mechanics of this game, I figure it's worth posting about, given that it's most of what I'm doing in gaming these days. So, the next few posts will involve the tweaks we've made to that system and why.