An expanded counterpart to this week's #whatdidyouplaymondays post on Facebook...
On Wednesday, I GM'd a session of FATE on Roll20, for Brendan Riley, Edmund Metheny and Sophie Lagacé. That was a lot of fun, but to be honest my campaign is a little shaky and underdeveloped at this point. I've been having trouble finding the time to prepare to my usual outrageous standards, now that I've got a job and all. FATE is a great system, but I find that it always takes me a few sessions as GM to fine tune and get comfortable with the difficulty numbers and the fate-point economy. The first session or two never seems to meet the level of dramatic and mathematic tension that I want, but then it usually gels in session 3 or 4. So, perhaps I'll do better this week. Here's a picture of one of my screens on Roll20:
On Friday night, I played Shadows of Brimstone with Laura Mortensen and Mark Walters. We played a new mission (from Caverns of Cynder) called "Defend the Bridge". It was a short scenario, and we won easily, but it was highly enjoyable. The special rules in the mission for monster movement and targeting provided a completely new tactical challenge, and it was a neat change of pace from the usual dynamics of the game.
That's the only face-to-face gaming I've done this week, despite having booked my calendar full of games that didn't happen. In the past 7 days I've had 4 different gaming events get cancelled. I bowed out of one myself to hang with a highschool friend I hadn't seen in decades, who was only in town (and the country, actually) for a short time. That was definitely worth skipping a game. In the days following, however, two other games got cancelled by other people, and the fourth was ruined by traffic. A bus snafu made me over an hour late to a story game meetup, and there was no room left at any of the tables by the time I got there. That was a bit of a bummer.
If you count videogames it gets a little better. I played some Dungeons of Dredmor on Saturday night, and got a swashbuckling rogue build through the first three floors, so about 1/5th the way through the entire game. It's going well so far, but I'm worried that this character may run out of steam in the deeper floors. His skills have decent early-game synergy, but he doesn't really have an endgame strategy. I'll have to get at least a little lucky on equipment drops, and play really sharply on the lower floors.
Next week, I plan to return to LARPing. It's been about a decade since I last made the angsty gothic scene associated with Live Action games by White Wolf, but I'll be easing myself back in to the madness by trying a session of a Changeling LARP. If I didn't work at 6 am so often, I'd go play Vampire or Werewolf, but at least Changeling can be played in daylight without it ruining the mood. LARPing, though, for reals. In the unlikely event that I break out the eyeliner and the big tin ankh, I promise I'll post pictures.
