Friday, December 31, 2021

2021: The Year in Review

2021 was better than 2020 overall but once we hit October it sure has flown by. My family has been blessed and we have shelter, food, creature comforts, and are in good financial shape. I'm very thankful for all of that.

I was able to play online with two friends that I don't get to see very often but my crazy schedule kept us playing roughly once a month and I kept changing the game which included CEPHEUS engine, 5E, a Western RPG game based on Dungeon Crawl Classics, and a Star Wars game using a RuneQuest 6/Mythras hack.

I played in a DnD 5E Descent to Avernus game which was really great and after my Sun Cleric died in the first session I managed to keep my Divine Soul Sorcerer, Clete, alive through the rest of the game. It was an amazing game and I am lucky to have a group with multiple talented Game Masters.

I've been running a playtest of Shadows of the Weird Wizard and we are enjoying that, although Numenera has been calling to me with its siren song.

I find that I am more interested in testing mechanics than running a campaign and I'm really trying to fix that, to move on from it. Its always been a problem and I'm sure it is connected to my Anxiety, I think my previous medication helped with it a great deal more than my current one. I'm trying to figure out how to work on it because the moment I choose a game to run, which is harder than it should be, I immediately start noticing other games I'd like to try out and instead of focusing on the campaign I keep brainstorming ways to change to another system for the campaign. Its stressful and I'm just trying to look at the problem and work on it. Our group is taking a break at Christmas and New Year's so I'm hoping to use that time to just push through it.

I did run "one-shots" of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and Hyperborea (2nd edition). I thoroughly enjoyed the adventures Death, Frost, Doom for LotFP and Rats in the Walls for Hyperborea.

In the last several years I've used modules almost exclusively and its something else I'm looking at. Until 5E I always ran adventures of my own design and I'm trying to get back to that. 

As a GM I find myself looking at fights differently than I used too and I think its mostly because of modern DnD and its "adventuring day". Since 5E is designed for multiple encounters and certain classes have a mix of short rests vs long rests I've found myself getting frustrated with X number of fights per day. I might be a fossil but I prefer meaningful fights with real stakes against Big Bads but I don't know if I can make that work with the 5E math, especially when I'm designing encounters to just drain resources. I think this is one of the reasons I daydream about running an OSR game because, in my head,  D&D editions before 3.X didn't have this requirement. Understand, this could just be me thinking the grass is greener the other side  of editions prior to 3.X

We will see what next year brings.

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