While I’ve not had as much time lately due to all the things I have to do in Final Fantasy 14 to help settle the community and situate some kind of new normal, I do really want to get back to playing Avowed. I’ve been having a great time as a Gun Mage and enjoying the sort of build/rebuild system of leveling up that allows me to effectively tweak how I do things every time I get to a new tier of power and should probably stop using weaker spells. I mean, I still have the drain life spell because that’s part of my “ultimately sustainability” maneuver, but really mostly because I have the bonus that locks down my target. It’s nice to have a panic button, you know? Freeze whatever moster or hulking man is charging me, looking to obliterate me in one hit because I’m a weak little noodle with only brainpower and determination to see me through the day. I’ve also gotten deep enough into the story that I think I know what’s going on (and have a suspicion that I might be shaping some amount of it? But maybe that’s just good writing to make me FEEL like I have more control than I do) and have only reloaded a save once because I had made a note to go do a thing, had to deal with my FF14 free company imploding, and promptly forgot in the hubbub that I’d made a note to go do a thing until after it was too late. Which I’ll give myself without any guilt. That was a wild, exhausting few days.
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Hindsight Regrets Following A Mostly-Fun One-Shot
This past weekend, I had the opportunity to play (as a player!) in a tabletop roleplaying game for the first time in a long while (long enough that I can’t remember when that previous time was, but that might be the general fog of the last year more than a measure of a long time). It was a one-shot that a frequent player and friend of mine put together that was a sci-fi, star wars/trek game run in Dungeons and Dragons 5e–because that was the system that everyone was familiar with–but everything was given a sci-fi twist rather than a fantasy one. The GM herself admitted later on, as we talked at the end of the session, that this particular game was basically the rough draft of a concept she had for something that she’d like to run in the Star Wars 5e ruleset, but it had been a long time since she’d looked at the rules and none of us were terribly familiar with them either, so simple and straight-forward with a system we all knew already was the order of the day. I had a decent amount of fun, even if it was a bit of an RP-light session (it kinda had to be, since it was a one-shot), but I definitely oveprepared in ways that were both incredibly useful for the group and a little personally frustrating. I have a tendency to do this sort of thing since, as a forever GM, I’m always offering to fill-in wherever I’m needed and while I got to chase my preferred idea for this game, I wound up doing it in a way that was technically interesting to build and run, but not particularly satisfying or fun.
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