Okay. I lied. But I knew there was a strong possibility of that. I never got the D&D character bios up, and I didn’t put up a “our adventures so far” sort of thing like I said. I also didn’t get to work on Altered Realities at all. BUT! There’s a good reason for all of that. It’s been a very busy Summer, and it’s been a short one as well. The wife didn’t finish actually working until two weeks into June, and she starts work again next week, the second week of August. This is because she actually got a full-time classroom of her very own! So good things are happening! We might actually have some spare money to pick up more gaming stuff in the near future, and that has me excited. In other news one of my other players also found work, so his attendance will become somewhat sporadic as well, but we got a new car so picking up the other player(s) won’t be as a big of an issue now.
Due to all of this I have decided that after tonight’s game to suspend the D&D campaign possibly until next summer. The reasons for this are as follows – D&D, at least the way I run it, needs a decent amount of play time. We need time for exploration, role-playing, and especially for encounters as I do not make things easy for the players. Things are on sort of a set schedule and I like to get through a specific amount of “content” each session. This can only happen if we have a decent amount of time to play – around 7-8 hours.
Well since the player who was providing rides may be sporadic in attendance and my wife is starting work again soon, which means we can’t go as late on our games due to them being on Sundays – it creates a perfect storm of making my D&D games untenable. Here’s why – on the days that our ride-providing player misses we will have to pick the other player(s) up and take him/them home. This takes a total of about an hour out of our game time due to us living outside of town. So we don’t get back until around 2 with our player(s), and we will have until 7 or 7:30 if we push it before we have to take them back so that we can eat dinner, unwind and for the wife to get enough sleep for work the next day. That’s 5 to 5 and half hours. Not enough time for the way I run my D&D games.
And that’s fine. I was getting a little burned out on D&D anyway. So starting next week I will go back to running Star Wars which has no such time restraints and the way I run it allows the players to proceed at their own pace rather than the pace I need it to run at to get through a specified amount of “content”. The reason is that I tend to run it more free-form and sand-box based. D&D needs to be planned out (encounters with stats ready to go, treasures rolled up, traps placed, dungeons drawn up etc etc), and honestly Star Wars doesn’t. That’s the biggest difference.
I will sometime within the next two weeks post a “our adventure so far” in the D&D section, with the bios I originally promised, all for posterity. It will be a record of things so that I can come back to it and check it before we start up the D&D campaign again and so I can use it to remind the players of what happened last and what was going on currently.
So next week will be a fun change of pace as I can free-form run Star Wars with no pre-set plan and just have fun. Once the D&D bios and such are up I will attempt to find time to get Star Wars bios up and maybe post a brief synopsis of our Star Wars game as it happens from time to time. So it is that we go back to a galaxy far far away…
Oh and an astute reader will note the inclusion of potentially multiple players that we will have to go pick up for game – that’s because the player that moved to Colorado (and ended up in South Dakota I think it was?) is coming back for several months and potentially staying, so he will be back with us at the table.