After a little bit over two months, I finally had all of my players back together again for The Magical Millennium and we not only got to catch up on what one of the characters was doing in the background of every scene previously discussed by the other players, but get through the entirety of the second day of school for all of the players who couldn’t be there last time. My players also picked out their first quests, discussed their homework, and dealt with the small revelations that came from catching up the other player (and worked on catching her up on the small revelations that come from everyone else’s scenes). We also got to have a few discussions that had been put off because one of the required players wasn’t there. It was a great time, even if we started half an hour late and spent most of the session focused on catching up rather than doing something wholly new. I’d have preferred to get some completely new stuff into the game, but there were a few scenes that came up that needed time and attention for reasons I’ll be keeping to myself for now (though I’ve already revealed to one of my players that something important happened that their character only really noticed in retrospect). Fully caught up, now, I’m excited for us to continue forward with a sort of parent-teacher conference to discuss one student’s accidental spellcasting, one or more new adventures, and the eventual introduction of the first threads of the larger plot I’ve been cooking up.
Continue readingScheduling
The End Of A Game Is An Opportunity To Start A New One
After multiple months, my saga with the unfortunate sunday gaming group has come to an end. My time with the people who were part of my introduction to Pathfinder 2nd Edition has concluded. Despite my plans to give the group six full sessions to see if we could salvage the group, we only ever played five. Which probably sounds funny because I started talking about this group back in June, but we only got two more sessions in July and then one in late August due to scheduling issues, the GM catching Covid, and my grandmother’s passing. We skipped a lot of weeks, as it turns out, and apparently I wasn’t the only one who was on the verge of withdrawing for a while since I found out today, two days after I withdrew, that the whole campaign was shuttered (which saves my friend the trouble of figuring out how to gently break it to the group that they also weren’t interested in continuing to play). The GM has had some on-going health issues (which contributed to us skipping sessions) and one of the other players apparently also has some scheduling conflicts, so the GM sent my friend a message that he was shutting the whole thing down. I wish the group had been able to continue (since I know how much it sucks to lose a game because a group falls apart), but I got the strong sense that only a couple of the players were really enjoying themselves and since I’m pretty sure the GM is struggling with Long Covid, I really don’t think things could have ended any other way.
Continue readingMy Streaming Challenge Is Coming To An End, But My Streaming Will Carry On
Today is the fourth and final update on my streaming challenge: to beat The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on Master Mode while only wearing hats. I’ve cleared all the Divine Beasts, beaten all the shrines, fully expanded my inventory by collecting four hundred fourty-one Korok seeds, gotten all the memories, beaten the main plot, defeated Calamity Ganon, and only ever worn clothes when absolutely required to by the plot or circumstance (such as the one or two Korok challenges that require using the Zora armor to complete). I’m also just over halfway through the main DLC questline (which I should finish tonight), and then I’ve got a handful of shrine and side quests to find and complete. I have the Trial of the Sword quest on my to-do list, but that’s still going last since I’ve never once cleared it on Master Mode. It will be my crowning achievement on Wednesday or Thursday evening, should I complete it.
Continue readingMy Tabletop Roleplaying Game Withdrawal Is Worsening
I am still going through tabletop roleplaying game withdrawal. I went from running or playing in four different tabletop games every week to playing so infrequently that I can count the number of sessions I’ve participated in this year on a single hand. The group I ran for coworkers fell apart as we discussed what to do other than Dungeons and Dragons back in January, when it became clear that everyone just wanted to kill monsters and get loot except for the one player who was interested in storytelling that had just withdrawn from the game for personal reasons. My Sunday group hasn’t faired much better as scheduling issues, combined with a player withdrawing for personal reasons (different player and different reasons) on top of the whole Wizards of the Coast debacle basically destroyed the group. I tried to put a new one together prior to that, but it involved both of the players who had to withdraw for personal reasons so that fell apart as well. I attempted to save the disintegrating group by offering some level of player attendance flexibility using games that didn’t require the same people to play each session, but we’ve yet to meet even once since I can’t get people to commit to a session.
Continue readingGMing Withdrawal and Melancholic Musings
I haven’t run a tabletop roleplaing game of any kind in a month and a half. As of just this past weekend, I’ve gone from having three regular-ish groups (weekly or at least twice a month on average) and one occasional group (with no pattern to our sessions) to having a weekly-intential group that hasn’t successfully met and might never since we’re now down to three players and me. As far as my tabletop gaming ecosystem goes, I’ve removed one player for picking the dumb wizard game over doing the right thing (along with assigning me blame for making him feel bad about it, amongst many other issues), lost two players to family difficulties that will keep them away for an unknown number of months or years, and two entire groups have dwindled to nonexistence thanks to scheduling difficulties and general burnout. I do not know when my next TTRPG session will be and I do not know what it will look like since my groups have all shrunk or haven’t scheduled a session in two months.
Continue readingLearning From Experience At The Table
My weekly Sunday Dungeons and Dragons campaign is no longer weekly, nor is it necessarily happening on Sunday. After over a year of slowly decreasing session regularity, we’ve decided to swap from an expected-weekly game to one that is scheduled based on availability at the end of the latest session. Because of various scheduling conflicts and time constraints, we’re pretty much looking at only Saturdays, Sundays, and possible holidays. I work into the evening most days and some of my players are in different time zones, so our weeknight window is incredibly small, meaning we’d have to do two hour sessions and those really aren’t a satisfying way to play a game like D&D when you’re used to playing in four hour chunks (and can’t even trade your less frequent but longer session in for more frequent but shorter sessions since the frequency won’t change no matter what you do). Which is why we’re focusing on weekends and pushing out as far as needed to get the session schedule on a Saturday or Sunday.
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