Sunday train of thought derailed, film at 11

So its a lazy Sunday and the first Mother's Day for my wife. Yay! Marcus is being good....he's in the "learning to crawl" stage at almost 6 months, which I am led to believe is pretty decent. He's got the crawling backwards part down to a science, but he's still working on forward momentum that carries him more than a foot before face-planting. But he's very determined little kid, which is an excellent sign!

Marcus using the "move forward an inch then fall forward a foot" travel method

I was thinking about the whole Kickstarter phenomenon, when it occured to me that maybe now that Steve Jackson Games has pulled off a staggeringly successful Ogre Deluxe Anniversary Edition kickstarter, maybe they will experiment with some GURPS book hardcovers in the future (like, say, a print edition of the Dungeon Fantasy series). I'd throw some coin into a kickstarter like that.

Troll Lord Games has a kickstarter going, too, for a 5th printing of Castles & Crusades Player's Handbook with new cover art (not much changing internally though....maybe some errata, I guess?). I'm temped to do this but I've hardly gotten proper use out of my current C&C books; I might be swayed to contribute to an edition that included an optional and flexy skill system that worked like 2E proficiencies did, but I susepct that's a tall order to ask of C&C, let alone the OSR crowd in general which seems to have an allergy to skill systems. Anyway the CKG has some nice (albeit not ideal) solutions to skills.

So I want to run C&C more, but Pathfinder has a Vader-like force grip on all of my cohorts in gaming locally. Convinving them to to anything else is like trying to sway Luke to the dark side (Anakin was a pushover, of course). Speaking of which...

So my Saturday night group got a funny sort of reboot. I proposed that we pause the high level game for a change of pace (we were losing regular players and the last session we didn't even end up playing...it was quite a tragedy). Part of the reason (imo) is that as is inevitably the case the quirky and outrageous nature of high level D&D/Pathfinder gaming caught up to the fact that my scenario designs and campaigns tend to be optimally built around a level 1-10 power scale. When characters start hitting level 13-14, its hard not to feel a sort of sea change creep into play, one in which PCs can walk through most combats effortlessly, and a challenging encounter either means a painful slog as the foes are optimized to mitigate the skills and spells of the PCs, or potentially so deadly that the threat inevitably comes from who gets initiative first. When I as GM find myself experiencing each fight from two angles, being, "how can I make this challenging in a meaningful way?" or the other side of the coin, "ouch, how do I dumb or scale down the opposition a bit so that we don't see a level 14 TPK?" then I know its time to take a break again. Some players like that ridiculously high level of play.....and I used to, in 1st and 2nd edition, but it is an unpleasant book-keeping/balance clusterbomb of an experience in 3rd edition systems. It also reminds me that 4E fixed a lot of the issues with 3rd edition high level gaming (albeit at the expense of introducing new problems).

So the new game is exciting, starting at level 2 and I have returned everyone to the Realms of Chirak, in the new territory of Eredoth, first new Chirak game since late last year. I'm looking forward to where it goes, but I do think I'm once again wearing out my interest in 3.5/Pathfinder.

Actually, I'd love to try something more exotic like Legends of Anglerre, or AGE System, see how those systems work, experience something different. 4E for me, at least, was a different and new experience....and I can honestly say I don't feel I've exhausted its potential.

Snip! Edited to remove grumpy old man syndrome from infecting my blog...