Game Night!

So, amidst all of my philosophical blatherings I thought I would take a minute and let you know what else I am up to. It's summer of course, which means I am not at school fulfilling my adventurous role as vice principal. I have one college class this summer, and am 3 credits and my thesis away from finishing my masters. That will be nice to have out of the way! I work as a biological field technician during the summer for a mosquito control district, but that's actually quite a nice break from the normal school year for me. I was contacted by a gamer new to the area who was interested in getting a game going. So, I figured my schedule was good enough now to at least allow me a game night every other week, This is our second meeting, but our GM is unavailable tonight due to some things that came up at work.

We decided last week after some deliberation to let our newest addition GM. He is most comfortable with Pathfinder, and was more than willing to give it a go. So we decided we would start with PF as the quickest route to move ahead. My schedule is still not free enough to allow me to do justice to running a campaign right now, but my masters program is almost over and that will free me up considerably. We are finalizing our PF characters and going to run through the Curse of the Crimson Throne. After that we may shift gears to another more preferred system.

There is some interest in Hackmaster among several us, but we are all a tad intimidated by it. So since our regular GM is out tonight, we are planning on running a HM playtest session. I'll GM the Training Dungeon, which is a free download from the Kenzerco which we'll play with the HM PreGens that come with the Basic Download. Personally I want to get a feel for HM combat and see if it is something I am comfortable with. But I am also interested to playtest a 5e / D&D Next session, as my brother is playing it and feels like it has some old school feel to it. We'll see. The plus for both of these, in fact PF too is that the basic system or SRD is available online. Not to digress too much back into my running essay on "my" game--that's a big plus for any game you're going to regularly play.

So we'll see how HM and maybe 5e shakes out. But I'm sort of thinking as far as my DMing goes, I'm going to settle into a system (as referenced in my recent posts) and start creating my own campaign and writing my adventures for that system. And if I DM I will choose to run that before anything else. Of course, gaming is gaming and gaming friends and the stories we tell make the fun. I have had fun with just about every system I've played in, yes even 4e for quite some time. But we all have our druthers, our gaming "home" if you will and that is what my other posts have been about. My children are also involved in a sporadic game I GM when their cousins come over. We play generally Castles & Crusades in that game, as it is easy to grasp and comfortable for me. We have run a modified C&C adventure called Dark Journey which I have modified to include a Chronomancer. We which led to the DCC adventure Doom of the Savage Kings. We play that about the equivalent of once a month--the next session of which should run mid August.

So, yeah :-) Gaming continues! I am very excited to have a regular group which I can commit to now. I sure have appreciated their patience with me and my crazy schedule! I'll post a review of our experience with Hackmaster combat maybe tomorrow after I finish homework. So that's what this Hobbit Magic User has been up to of late. Hope your gaming is going well too.