Gary's Visit

Gary visited me last night.

Or rather, I had a dream where I went to Gary's house for the weekend. It was a shack in the woods, half a mile up a pitted dirt road. Snow had fallen overnight, losing the battle against spring's warmth. The next morning his house lay just out of the center of town, across the railroad tracks and through a park where people in Victorian finery rode horses. Maybe it exists everywhere, sort of a Gaax's Magnificent Mansion. It fits.

Dreams are dew, evaporating in the morning sun. Splinters of this one stuck with me a little longer like frost on the grass. I got up and started typing this out on my phone in the bathroom in the wee hours before dawn.

[RPGaDay 2017] Day 4: Which RPG have you played the most since August 2016?

I've mostly played Classic Traveller. I actually ran The Bospor Incident at PAX East back in March. I've got some feedback, and I need to print some more Data Point cards to give some more information to the players, but it went well. I may need to rework the stats for Mongoose Traveller and see how that works - probably pretty well.

That was an easy determination to make, because I can count on two fingers the times I've played RPGs in the past year. Lordy, that needs to change.

I typically find myself with 30-90 minutes of free time well after dark. That's not conducive to playing, in my mind. Definitely not face-to-face, anyway. I'll work on it, but the house renovation is totally capitalizing my time.

Until the morrow.

[RPGaDay 2017] Day 3: How do you find out about new RPGs?

Basically I find out about new games from three main sources:

1. Google+ - The Ploos is still my main social network. I'm on Facebook a fair amount, and Twitter occasionally. One of these days I should look into Pinterest and Instagram, too.
2. Gamer Assembly - Yep, we still chat on IRC fairly regularly. I hear about projects and upcoming releases roughly once a week.
3. Kickstarter - Since tabletop games are booming on Kickstarter, I'll occasionally browse the Tabletop Games category and look for interesting projects. There are 246 active tabletop game projects as of this writing, so there's a fair amount to browse through. There's no specific RPG category, so I always run the risk of finding interesting board games and card games. C'est la vie.

Friends and random interactions at cons and game days fill in my knowledge gaps.

Yeah, short and sweet. 'Til tomorrow, then.

[RPGaDay 2017] Day 2: What RPG would you like to see published?

I think this question wants us to think about new settings and to draw them into the thoughtspace around RPGs. I choose to interpret the question a little differently. On my first read I took it as, "What haven't you seen RPGs do that you want them to do?" So that's how I'll answer.

I would like to see a traditional RPG designed around negotiation. Personal combat has been done to death (pun intended), so let's open things up to boardrooms, diplomatic meetings, and first contact scenarios. You want the events of the game to unfold this way, everyone else at the table wants things to go differently. Is there a system where you can settle your differences as rational humans and figure out a way for the majority of players to "win" without someone reverting to violence?

[RPGaDay 2017] Day 1: What Published RPG Do You Wish You Were Playing Right Now?

Soooo.... It's August, and time for RPGaDay. Yes, this is the first year I'm even starting the daily questions. I need to write something right now, and it helps to have some structure to hang content on. So let's away!

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about and are too lazy to consult the Oracle of Google, Autocratik has a post about it. The graphic with all the questions will be at the bottom of this post, and you can follow along with the hashtags #RPGaDay and #RPGaDay2017.