Friday, January 1, 2016

2016 Crystal Ball and Happy New Year

Welshey!!!!! NOOOOOOO!!!!!!

2016 will be the year of catch-up. In looking at the New Year I realize that I have a ton of gaming content left over from last year that I'd like to explore in depth....and last year did not give me nearly enough time to do so. So to that end I expect I'll still be messing around with a lot of my 2015 discoveries....especially Fantasy AGE, which I want to run a campaign with, and Beyond the Wall and Other Tales which I am eager to explore. I also just received my Kickstarter copy of Primeval Thule for D&D 5E and it looks really cool (more on that later).

For computer gaming...ah, it's so hard to predict on this, but I can say that I currently have enough content in this domain that I could not buy a single new computer game for PC or console in 2016 and I would neither be lacking for content to play nor new content, since I have the season passes for Star Wars Battlefront, Fallout 4, Call of Duty Black Ops 3 and Halo 5: Guardians already in the can, and I just added the season pass for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. All of these games are releasing DLC throughout the year, which honestly means that --especially for FPS/shooters-- the biggest competition in 2016 will be last year's releases. Never mind the fact that at the rate I play I'll still be trying to reach level cap in Guild Wars 2 and The Elder Scrolls Online by close of 2016!

I am tempted, I admit, to actually limit my PC and console gaming as much as I can this year, snagging maybe only 2-3 actual new titles, the ones I don't think I can resist, such as Far Cry: Primal, which really has me intrigued, and Resident Evil 0 HD Remake, which is sort of a "duh" for a Resident Evil fan like myself. But beyond those two titles, there's a lot of new stuff coming out I might be interested in, but have zero incentive to pick up before they are all $20 bargains at the start of 2017.

Getting back to tabletop, I spent all of 2015 running a combination of D&D 5E and Pathfinder. I got exactly one Call of Cthulhu one-shot in, and I seem to recall running some Savage Worlds but I could be hallucinating. I know I played in a bit of SW that my wife runs, though. I played a bit of AD&D 2E right before it converted to Pathfinder, and subsequently got to play in one of the Pathfinder games before it went on holiday hiatus....still, a year in which I think I was an actual player 4-5 game sessions is kind of amazing for me; contrast that with approximately 45-50 weekly Wednesday sessions and about 20 Saturday sessions as GM and you can see what I mean.

For 2016 I'm going to try harder to be present at games I can be a player in, and I will continue to run D&D 5E and Pathfinder....but after the 5E game reaches a decent pause point I'm going to see if my Wednesday group would be willing to try a 5-8 session Fantasy AGE campaign for a change of pace. I'm not sure where to fit in Beyond the Wall and Other Tales yet, but I think I'll see if maybe an occasional weekend game can be squeezed in, to include my wife, or maybe my Pathfinder gang will be willing to try out a 1-2 session event as a break from Pathfinder sometime down the road. Outside of that.....maybe an occasional Savage Worlds one-shot can be slotted in somewhere. Amidst all of this I plan to do a 5E adaptation of Red and Pleasant Land for certain. I may even actually run Out of the Abyss, too.

The rest? Well, that depends a lot on what happens, and what gets released next year......I see more D&D 5E content, bothf rom WotC and 3PP holding my interests (i.e. Tome of Beasts, more Frog God stuff). I am curious what Pathfinder will get up to in 2017. I hope Zak S. has been working on something that will make Red and Pleasant Land pale in comparison.

The truth is....I want to focus more on my own writing this year. I think it's time to get serious and knock out that 5E edition of Realms of Chirak I've been working on for forever now. All of my current tomes online are getting long in the tooth (except the OSR books which remain timeless). Another good excuse to cut down on the video games, which are themselves insane time sinks when it comes to a writer's productivity.

I might even try to get back to fiction writing. That's going to require some effort on my part, but these days being an aspiring author has fewer obstacles than ever before, so I really have no excuse not to try. We'll see, though....the balance in life to do this has a tough initial learning curve.


...anyway, Happy New Year!

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