Five Month Check In...

Hmmm... Where to begin?

A lot has happened over the last five months, and most of it is not good, though some of it is pretty okay...

In a nutshell, and in no particular order...

• A good friend (and chairman/coordinator of the local game convention) passed away about seven weeks before the most recent convention. The convention went on with a few hiccups, and looks like it will continue on for a bit as a number of folks figure out and pick up the work that this man did. I am not as involved as I would like due to all of us trying to avoid the apperance of a conflict of interest (My wife and I own a local game store, and there were problems in the past when a local store owner (not us) had a sizable finger in the convention set-up/management), but it looks like it will continue for at least a few more years...
• My father has recently had a combination stroke/seizure that has left him unable to walk without a walker (and poorly at that) and has dampened his faculties to the point where he doesn't know where he is most of the time. This has caused some stress in the family as I see where this is going (my father moving into a nursing home equipped to deal with Alzheimer sufferers) and had had the temerity to voice this. My mother, nor my older brother like this concept, nor do they agree with me. For my brother, our father is his hero and my brother is having more than a difficult time coming to grips that the man he knows and loves is effectively no longer with us. My sibling is of the opinion that "dad will be fine once we get him home". My mother was of this opinion, as well... initially. The more she deals with the problem, the more she understands that her husband may never come home, or if he does, it won't be for long as he will require more care than she can give him. Normally, I take a bit of pride in being correct about many situations. This one? I honestly wish I am completely wrong and that my father makes a full recovery. Barring divine intervention, I don't see that happening...
• I been told to lose pretty much half of myself in weight or die...
• I've been diagnosed as "pre-diabetic", which is apparently a danger zone where one is not diabetic yet, but if they keep going down the path that they are on, they will be soon. As a result, I've been put on a low-carb diet that pretty much rules out anything I really like (pizza and Mexican food) in favor of yogurt, salad, vegetables, and meat. Okay... meat's not so bad...
• My pacemaker, after having been confirmed as working in December of 2015, apparently died in January of 2016, so that has to be replaced...
• My Feng Shui 2 game has been set aside due to rapid and frequent player turnover. Hard to run a serial game if characters and players change almost every session...
• My Champions game has been placed on hiatus for a variation of the same reason. Six players... Three consistent... One bailed due to health (he contracted cancer). He's forgiven. Another insisted on staying in the game even though his employment was screwing around with him hard enough that his attendence was consistently *VERY* late, if at all... A third one showed up more often than not, but never could be bothered to actually show any real interest in the game... I know some of these players read this blog when I infrequently post, and if what I have typed here upsets you, I apologize to a certain extent, but realize that some of what was happening was also causing me some undue frustration.
• I recently began a Deadlands: Hell on Earth Reloaded campaign (the Worms' Turn) that was going *REALLY* well for three runs... ...and then it wasn't. Part of it is my fault for the scenario of the evening, but part of it has to do with some of the rules (and my implementation of such, as written). That will get rectified soon...
• I also began a game of East Texas Univeristy in order to fulfill a promise I had made to a few people to run them through it once my schedule cleared up. One run down, thus far, and it is mostly good. A couple of snags here and there, but overall not bad. I'm sort of waiting for session number four to see if the other shoe drops...
• I will be starting a campaign of the Last Parsec (Eres Beta-V) this upcoming Sunday. We'll see how that goes as we have one player who has a dislike of Savage Worlds as a game system, but after a bit of badgering, he gave in and is willing to try..

On top of all of this, I still have the desire to run a superhero game. It just cannot be with my go-to game system for the genre (Hero System/Champions). As much as I love the system for superhero gaming, it requires far too much prep-time to be useful to me. I want to concentrate on story... not making NPCs. Unfortnately, I have a *DEEP* love of tactical combat for superhero games, and nothing does that better than Hero System. I don't really have time to create a system of my own, but I do want something that fits a few requirements...

• Tactical combat...
• A die-rolling mechanic that is related more to a bell curve rather than a single-die system that lends itself to a linear probability...
• A character system that lends itself to comic-book tropes without feeling too cartoony...

The setting for this game will have to be all-new. I have a background that I have used for a number of games, and it is good and solid, but it also tends toward the darker side of the genre, and I am trying to break away from that. Thus, I am planning a new background/setting for this as yet unrealized superhero game. I have a few ideas in my head. I just have to put them on paper. Here goes nothing...

peace... GopherDave

Heart Still Beats... Life Goes On...

So, it's been two and a half months since my last post... What's been up? Oh... just about everything...

There's a lot, so I'm going to sum up in as small a chunks as I can...

BUSINESS: We lost a competitor here in town, making us the oldest active (8+ years) game store now. Things have been interesting, as we absorb some extra customers and work out game schedules so "everybody gets to play". It's kept us hopping. We've also been offered a game store to buy that's just over an hour away, we've been offered space (when it's ready) for a second location about 25 minutes away, and have heard about yet a third prospect that may be ready for the buying as their ship is not currently stable. Opportunities abound, but I'm not certain what path (if any) to take at this point.

GAMING: The Champions game continues to get better, though it is not without its fits of drama. If the drama with fully within the game, it'd be no issue, but it's not. One player feels picked on by a few of the others, and while he's not entirely incorrect, given what he's established his character's history to be, the way the player is playing it, the player is drawing legit aggro. The player in question does not read, nor has he ever really read, superhero comic books. He's a fine player, but he's come with a character with an extesive written history that if it gets tampered with in any way, he loses his nut. The last time he had a semi-meltdown, I told him that if he wants to write a story that he has complete control over, then he should go write a book. Within an RPG, it's cooperative storytelling and improvisational theater, and he needs to be flexible as the story unfolds during play. We'll see how it goes...

The Feng Shui 2 game is actually going fairly well. Almost lost two characters last run as the group gets thrust further into the Secret War. I have the PDF of the upcoming book, and while there are a number of questionable bits in the way of typos and little mistakes, the overall feel of the updated system is solid. I, at some level, wish they had done away with the shot cost/initiative/turn system in favor of something a little more "fair", but it still works and doesn't really slow the game down.

LIFE: Still married to a wonderful woman... still have two great kids (one of whom is now engaged)... and have increased the number of dogs in the household from one to two... and that's been a struggle. The new dog is fine. The old dog is not... He's nine years old and is pretty much the pulling the whole canine version of "get off my lawn, you punk" with the new dog. They are both absolutely sweet dogs alone, and the new one stays sweet when they are together, but the old guy is a furball of aggression. It's slowly getting better, but we have a ways to go...

MUSIC: Been seeing a few shows lately and buying music here and there. The only concise things I can say is...

FAITH NO MORE: SOL INVICTUS: BUY IT!!!
ONE-EYED DOLL: WITCHES: BUY IT!!!
PSYCHOSTICK: If you have the chance to, see them in concert!!!

That's it for now, as my sleep-deprived brain kind of wanders off to another place...

peace... GopherDave

PING...

Just a signal to let folks know that I still exist...

Let's just say that things have been... interesting... in the intervening time, and leave it at that.

As far as this blog goes, I'm not certain how often I will post here, even if I get back up to semi-regular writing. The original purpose of the place has sort of come and gone, and I am at an impasse on what to write about anymore.

Most of my gaming projects are at a lag, and while I have been steadily acquiring music, writing about it just seems to take some of the fun away. Ehhh... who knows...

I will leave with this comic-related tidbit, though... If you are not reading the current iteration of the Inhumans (titled "INHUMAN"), you are cheating yourself out of a damn fine read...

-- GopherDave

In Sickness and In Health...

Work has been delayed due to a combination of MtG: Khans of Tarkir pre-release events and my getting heinously ill for a week plus soon afterward...

The KTK pre-release events did go well, though, and were our best events of that type in two years. The set is slow, but good, with a fair chunk of value within, thus insuring that sales will be steady for the coming period.

As for the sickness, in a day I went from having an annoying sore throat for the day to having my sinuses take a surprise dump into my lungs at the end of it. Drippy, draining, coughing misery followed... yay.

I am finally on the upswing. Still sick, but doing well enough to catch up on work. I've been reading through the contract that HERO Games sent me for all of this. It's pretty standard, though I am finding little bits that are apparently outdated according to their head honcho. That basically means once I parse it all out, we begin the contract back-and-forth and get things situated on that end. By the time that happens, I should have the Asylum done, the Gateway Guardians up and started, plus outlines for one of the other (now three) projects that are on the burner at least sketched out. Yeah, contract issues can take that long to work out to both parties' satisfaction.

I figured folks would like an update, and I wish I had more to provide, but extra-curricular work moves slower than pace of real life...

peace... GopherDave