New Post Schedule

Scheduling games has been difficult for me, and I don't mean a little bit of a hassle. I mean full on war against multiple difficulties. Between the ever more busy weekends for my players, and demands of my own (like a last minute unannounced family visit or requests for help with taking care of nephews), I haven't gamed in a while, a month I think. Maybe more.

When I do get to run a game, the one that runs is the one that I haven't written. I'm actually running a game more or less out of the box. Yeah, there are some little tweaks to the mechanics here and there, and I'll be discussing that in the near future, but for the most part the system's not mine, and it's tried and true. The group's happy with it, and in fact asked me not to spend time redesigning it from the ground up. They'd like to just sit down and play this time.

That means I'm running out of material. Sure, I've got lots of ideas yet, but I can only progress so far on theory. At some point you need to play the game to really review and revise it. I can do some crappy alpha testing on my own, but that's all. The only playtester I have available to me is me, and I'm hardly objective or diverse. Now, I have discovered quite a few things by sitting down with some dice and a set of rules and running through some scenarios, so I'm not about to dismiss self-testing by any means. But if I've learned anything from this Shadowrun campaign it's that there's a lot that only comes out after you've sustained play for a period of time. On light contact, for example, both the resolution and combat system worked perfectly well. And they do work, but they're not quite right as is; that only came out after I got to witness a large number of combats over a myriad of situations. That's not something I can do by myself.

In light of that, I'm going to adjust the blog posting schedule. It will continue to update routinely, and it's not going away by any stretch. However, instead of a M/W/F schedule, I'm going to post on M/Th. That gives both you and me time in between to actually use the material in our games, and come up with substantial things about which to write and comment, instead of resorting to filler that doesn't do anyone much good.

So, check back on the new days and I'll continue to have material on the various RPGs I continue to tinker with, and any other projects that happen to crop up.

See you then.