So for anyone who is actually reading this on a regular basis, or if you’re one of my players, you will notice that the AD&D game is not being run at this point in time. Honestly it’s because I am suffering a little AD&D burnout. I started thinking back to figure out why, after all this campaign hadn’t been going for that long. Had it? But actually it’s been going since April of last year, so about 10 months. Before that I had about 2 months or so of our failed game with our previous roommate. And before that was the Forgotten Realms game I had run for about 3 months or so that I had ran to get reacquainted with the 2nd edition rules. So all in all I had been running AD&D in some form or another for almost a year and a half with only that three week break for Star Wars. So yeah, now I can see where burnout might be the issue. Not only that the way I had originally put the campaign together was not ultimately how I had needed to put it together so it was as cohesive as it should have been. So now I am taking a breather and a step back creatively so I can re-evaluate how I want the rest of the campaign to go.
That coupled with the recent move of one of our players and I felt that a short break (about 2 to 3 months) from AD&D would be nice. So now I will be running a new Star Wars game. New because the person who moved was integral to the original game. Two of my players will be making new versions of the characters they had played before and my new player will of course be making a new character. I may or may not have another player joining, all dependent upon her getting things in order so she can.
This Star Wars game will be set up from the beginning as a sandbox type game where the players will receive rumor tidbits and hooks but will be able to do what they want and deal with hooks or rumors as they wish, but at times events will conspire to pull them in so they will occasionally have to deal with what is thrown at them. That way I don’t have to do much prep (I just have to come up with some basic plot notes for the rumors and hooks for when or if they deal with them, and if they decide to go off on a personal tangent for some reason, I can deal with that too) and can concentrate on figuring out the rest of the AD&D campaign for when we go back to it to finish it. Once the AD&D campaign is finished, we will likely come back to this game and maybe even from time to time during the AD&D campaign if I need a week or two to finish an adventure.
I am hoping this will be a learning experience for me. I want to be able to cut down on my prep time for D&D and be able to run it on some basic notes and encounter stats. I also want to be able to run a more sandbox type D&D campaign. Both the current campaign and my last long term one (a 3.5 year-long Forgotten Realms campaign) were heavily story driven and fairly linear in design but done well (in my estimation) enough that the players still had choices. I am hoping Star Wars will be a good testing ground for me to run a sandbox game on just a few notes for each ‘mission’ (basically a mission will be any time the players decide to check out a rumor or story hook or when a major plot point happens) so I can implement the style in my next AD&D campaign. I am also hoping that this game will bring out more role-playing than our recent AD&D games have been, and then we can carry that back to the AD&D game when we get back to it.