Wednesday, April 13, 2016

The "Gamer Who Has Too Much Stuff" Problem

Warning! First World Problems Ahead!

Every now and then I get myself trapped in a weird corner, where I'm faced with too many choices. This is my own fault...I could, y'know, show a little restraint and maybe try to keep focused....but as a long-time sufferer of Gamer ADD this can be a hard thing!

Thus it is that I find myself trying to figure out how to accomplish all of the following --somehow-- this year:

LIST ONE: the Goals I Think I can Actually Achieve:
1. Keep chugging on with my ongoing D&D 5E Realms of Chirak campaign (chance of success: 100%--this is the default no-brainer. I will always have a Chirak game going somewhere and 5E is a great fit)
2. somehow get a new 13th Age campaign going to take advantage of all the cool stuff that has accumulated in the last year (chance of success: was about 65% but Classic Fantasy might have knocked that chance down a bit; still, there's a lot of cool 13th Age stuff out there, and I have quite a few players interested in playing it again)
3. work Mythras and Classic Fantasy in there somewhere (chance of success: 95%; I've even gone on to print out a working copy to hold me over until June, and am busily planning to do some mass conversions of my Pergerron Campaign now)
4. Get season 2 of the White Star campaign up and running (chance of success 90%)
5. Run Curse of Strahd like I promised (this would be on list 2 but I am determined to actually run it) (chance of success: 50%)
6. Barring that, run a 5E version of Red and Pleasant Land (I suppose I could adapt this to any of the above, actually....hmmmm.....)(chance of success: 51% as this book engages with me a bit more than the Curse of Strahd, which is cool and all, but still just the same basic Ravenloft I've known for three decades now).
7. ADDED: Run Deluxe Tunnels & Trolls using the Dungeon of the Bear (chance of success 75% believe it or not....I use T&T as a backup game for odd nights when we have no specific game, are missing players, or whatever....so all I have to do is convince the regulars to try it for a few sessions in a row!)

And there's the secondary goals....these are ones I'll spend time on even though I doubt they will come to fruition:

LIST TWO: The Stuff I Love Imagining I Can Accomplish But Never Get Around To:
1. Finish prepping a campaign for Mutant Year Zero (chance of success 50%)
2. Finish reading Fragged Empire with plans to run a campaign (chance of success 45%)
3. Figure out if I can find time to run a campaign for superheroes powered by Mutants & Marvels 2E or FASERIP (this is a very tough choice, both great retroclone experiences) (chance of success 30% but mostly because no one wants to play supehero genre stuff in my area)
4. Run White Lies (chance of success 50%)
5. Run Warriors of the Red Planet (chance of success 25%)
6. Run Skyscrapers & Sorcery (chance of success 20%)
7. Convince my wife to read and run Amethyst: Quintessence for D&D 5E (chance of success 10%)
8. Get a weekly horror game using CoC 7E or Chill 3rd running (chance of success 50%)
9. Get back to Savage Space and/or The Last Parsec with Savage Worlds (chance of success: 70% actually pretty good....group wants more....but White Star is competing for that space HARD)

Then there's the pipe dreams....these are the things I'd love to do but know are effectively impossible:

LIST THREE: PIPE DREAMS
1. Run a Primeval Thule D&D 5E campaign for fun (might be more doable but the truth is I have a hard time caring about "official" settings as the time to prep for them is far more onerous and less fun to me than simply using my own stuff) (chance of success: 25%)
2. Run that revival of the Mythic Rome campaign using A Cool and Appropriate System (TBD) (chance of success 20%)
3. Run Mythic Britain for Mythras (in principle a great objective, but the time it would take to do this right is too much for me to do and get all the easier stuff done in the lists above) (chance of success 5%)
4. Absorb Mutant Chronicles and run it (this sort of game seemed easier to figure out twenty years ago) (chance of success 15%)
5. Run any single campaign book ever put out by Frog God Games (not gonna happen, Too Much Man!)(chance of success .05%)
6. convince spouse to produce 2-3 more progeny so we will have a functional family gaming group in ten-twelve years. (chance of success: 8-Ball says future uncertain!)

....Yeahhhhhh. Not gonna happen! Maybe 4 from list 1, 2 from list two, and 1 from list three.....maybe by the end of 2017 if I'm lucky!

Let's not speak of what will end up sucking half my time away, anyway (hint: they rhyme with bideo frames...)

My nostalgic memories of the 80's and 90's was of all that free time I had, and also that slightly less onerous demand for my attention from such a severe saturation of media. Sigh.....




13 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. She's decided to defy my expectations by taking it up and reading it so my prognostication may be way off. I think all the fey races caught her attention!

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  2. Your list and mine loik very much the same.

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  3. 1. You need More Savage Worlds ;)
    2. Did you look at Shadow of the Demon Lord at any point? ;)

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    1. I'm still waiting to see if I can get a physical copy of SotDL but the last time I visited the main page it's still in preorder. It looks interesting though.

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    2. Oh, they're here: http://schwalb-entertainment.myshopify.com/collections/shadow-of-the-demon-lord
      And I can tell you it completely blew my mind and made me collect all the stuff obsessively, pulling me away from BRP, SW and 5e (which has never happened before). Sincerely recommended.

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  4. Did I miss dT&T on one of those lists? ;)

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    1. Cripes! I forgot I do have a DT&T action planned....specifically I want to convince one or the other group to do a complete Dungeon of the Bear run so they can see how DT&T plays. I'd actually put this one on list #1.

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    2. If I pull it off it will be the fourth time I have run Dungeon of the Bear. I may also dust off Rat on a Stick and convert it to DT&T if everyone likes DotB.

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    3. I, too, have run DotB numerous times. I'm running something I call Mandrake Castle right now - some of my own stuff and the rest culled from several sources, one of which is Rat on a Stick. Just last week the PCs were fleeing a large horde of black hobbits and by pure luck they fled into a franchise location. Mercifully, I decided to make the "restaurants" neutral ground so that the monsters wouldn't attack them there. Good stuff.

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  5. LOL, I have the same problem. And now you've got me thinking I need to check out RQ6/Classic Fantasy.

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