No gaming this weekend, due to Father’s Day, which I spent with my wife and kids. It was a very nice day.

Last week, I spent Thursday and Friday fighting with Amazon.com over my 4e Boxed Set. My Parents had pre-ordered the Boxed Set in March, as a birthday gift for me. On the release date (June 6th), there was a message that my set would be delayed until the 12th. Annoying, but I can wait. By the 12th there was no indication my set has shipped, so that night I called customer support, where I was told that the set was ready to ship, and I should see something on the website in the morning.

I got to work, the next morning, and checked Amazon, only to find my order had been delayed until JULY 18th !!!!!! At lunchtime I called Amazon again, and after some negotiating, I had them send me the three Core books as separates, with 2-day shipping, for the same price my Parents paid for the boxed set. After all the attractive slip cover was not the reason I wanted the books.

So last night I checked UPS and my books arrived in Buffalo in the afternoon, and should be out on the truck for delivery. I have my fingers crossed.

Over the weekend, I gave some thought about my slumping productivity at work and especially at home. I have started to put some things in place to help increase my productivity. At home, I have decided that it would be best if I focused my energies on one category of tasks each night. I divided up my efforts into the following areas:

• RPG’s (my campaigns)
• RPG’s (I am playing in)
• Blogging
• Computers

I have two nights were I do gaming, so those nights are used up.  That leaves me 4 topics in 5 nights.  So the 5th night is an open night where I work on other types of tasks/projects.   My goal is that each night, I work on that night’s topic for 1 hour, no interruptions, no distractions.  This way by the end of the week, I have advanced in each of those areas.

In addition to that, I have decided to reduce my level of noise, by hiding my RSS feeds, as they have become a very easy distraction.  I have also increased my sleep, as I was getting far too little of it, making me too fatigued to do the harder work.

We will see how the changes work.

As for this week, I will be finishing up a Gnome Stew post on Wednesday, and I will try to get another post out on DNAphil this week as well.

Have a good week, and good gaming to you.

In light of the news of the passing of Erick Wujick, on Monday, I wanted to delay my weekend update post until after Monday, so the article on his passing would remain at the top of my feeds.  But so that I don’t completely forget how to write on this blog….

I had a good gaming weekend.  It was my night to run Iron Heroes, but rather than running a normal session, we changed things up a bit.  First,  a bit of back story.  At my last session of IH, it became clear that the end of the campaign was in the horizon.  We had completed most of the PC’s personal stories, and all the groundwork for the coming war had been laid.  It was decided about a month ago, that no one had the time to do a d20 Mass Combat campaign to play out the war, so we were left with a gap in the story, before the final story arc could take place.

So rather than just narrating the war as the opening to a session, I decided to enlist my players to help describe how the war went, and what events transpired before we resumed playing.  I cobbled together some quick rules, inspired by Universalis, and came up with a simple, coin driven narrative mechanic.  I got the players on board, and on Sunday night, we gathered around the table, with our stack of poker chips and began to collaboratively tell the story of how the war progressed, what happened to the players during that time, and how did they come to be on the steps of liberating Arion’s country, Kotkala.

The session was a success, and the ideas generated were excellent and far more detailed than had I sat and worked out the narrative on my own.  I captured the whole process on our campaign wiki, and am in the process of cleaning the text up.  When it is done, it will server as not only the historical account of how the War for Kotkala went, but it is seeded with ideas for things to weave into the final story arc of the campaign.

So that was Sunday, last night, Sargon and Spenser came over and we worked more on our Global Frequency rules.  Work on this had taken a back seat with the arrival of 4e (of which I have not yet received my box set Amazon!), and the launch of Sargon’s Star Wars Saga campaign.  But last night, we had time to do some work on it, so after some amazing Indian food, we headed down to the Gaming Lounge (read: Basement) and in about 90 minutes got through the material we needed to.  Now I will turn the notes on my dry erase board into some more rules, and then prepare for one more round of play testing.

One last RPG update, I finished reading Corporation just in time for the late arrival of my 4e core books.  I will post my thoughts about Corporation later, but I liked the rules well enough to buy the starter adventure, and will be running it for Sargon, Spenser, and some friends, in a few weeks.

This week, I will be writing a post for Gnome Stew, on the replay-ability of certain RPG’s.  I will also get my thoughts about Corporation up as well.  So update your RSS feeds and keep an eye out.

What a busy weekend.  I was charged with watching my son for the weekend, which was quite a handful.  But I did manage to get some gaming in.  On Saturday night, I got together with Sargon, Spenser, and Dr. J and played some more 4e demo material.  This time, Spenser was able to get from the guys on ENworld a cobbled together Dragonborn Warlord for me to try.  It’s an interesting character class, that somewhat reminds me of the Hunter character class from Iron Heroes. The session was fun, and we got into some good combats and got to try out some of the Warlord combats.

I also spent part of the weekend writing my post for the launch of Gnome Stew.  It was a fun post to write, and I liked the way it came out.  So go and check it out.

This week, I have an article on my progress with my Global Frequency homemade rules.  That post is actually written and in the queue, so expect to see that later this week.  This is my writing week so we will see if I can get another article written this week.  My session notes for this upcoming session were about 75% written a few weeks ago, before my session got canceled.  So there may be some time for some additional writing later this week.

So come around and see whats cooking on the site.

Hello all.

Big geek weekend this past weekend. Friday was a bit slow, worked on some notes for my upcoming Global Frequency game. Saturday I made it out, with a number of the guys from my gaming group to see Iron Man. Excellent film, and a another quality piece for Marvel’s stable of movies. I would have to say that this ranks above X-men 3, and on par with X-man 2.

On Sunday, our gaming group got together to discuss the state of gaming within our group. The talk was very productive and we came up with a number of updates to our social contract. Some of which include:

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Another week…another cancled game. This time it was Spenser with a chest cold, that took down Sargon’s Cyberpunk game. It was not a big surprise, as Spenser was kind enough to give us warning as early as Wednesday of last week.

So with no game to play, Sargon and I hung out and chatted outside, while my Son ran around and played in the back yard. As we talked we both came to understand that we had been seeing some of the same trends in our gaming group, an erosion of our Social Contract. We had a lot of cancled games, though many of them were unavoidable real-life problems, we have had a decrease in intensity at the table, and we are having some issues on email ettiquette, and the role of the GM in organizing their game.

We came to the conclusion that the best thing to do, was to have all the players, from our three overlapping (by player) games come in and talk about the issues that have been cropping up, and what do we want to do about them going forward. So this morning I sent out a message to our group inviting everyone over next weekend to discuss the above issues as well as any issues they may have.

In the evening, after my Son was in bed, Sargon indulged me in a little rules construction, and helped me work on my current pet project: an RPG version of the Global Frequency comic book. We both agreed that the Conspiracy X 1.0 rules would be perfect for the core of the game. We then came up with a set of rules for invoking the Global Frequency to assist with figuring out problems, pulling strings, and coming up with equipment. In about two hours and five different colored dry-erase markers, the Global Frequency rules are scratched onto the dry erase board in my game room.

Tomorrow, Sargon, Spenser and I will get together. The two of them will start to create some Global Frequency characters, and I will start to type the rules into our game wiki. Next Tuesday, The Global Frequency will go live, and we will start testing our new rules.

That is about it on the gaming front. Wish my luck this weekend, at the gamer meeting, and hopefully this will inject some energy into our group and get our momentum going again.

Well, if you have seen the past few posts, you know that the cornerstone of the weekend was GenCon Registration. It was not a pretty experience, but then again it has never been a pretty experience. In the end, I got tickets to all the events I wanted to get into, but was unable to secure extra tickets for other events to attend with friends.

Overall I think the Green Shirts did well. Pawz, had a pretty easy run on the registration system and was able to get out with a bunch of tickets for his events. Spenser was able to get some tickets for some events as well. So overall, while the experience was pretty unsatisfying overall, we did ok.

On Sunday, we had a Dresden game scheduled, but a player cancellation killed it, an hour before game time. Lucky for us, Spenser, had his demo 4e material on hand, and we were able to play some more 4e. This time our party of 8, 1st level adventurers (Ranger, Cleric, Wizard, Warlock, Fighter, Paladin) faced off against a young black dragon. It looked pretty ugly for a while. I personally was rolling terrible, and the Ranger, who in previous encounter had rolled two natural 20’s and dealt the killing shot to several creatures, was totally ineffective. But in the end, we managed to leverage all the 4e crunch and kill the dragon.

This has been the 4th time I have played the 4e demo material, and while we do not have all the rules of the game, I have to say that 4e combat, is IMHO, a lot more fun and exciting compared to 3e combat. There are so many combat options, per character, and great ways to combine them to really encourage teamwork. Also the At Will abilities make every member of the party useful at all times.

As for this week, I am working on an article on the different skills of GMing, and how this process lead to how I can improve as a GM. I am also going to do my first mini-adventure for Qin, on Tuesday Night, so I will post some notes on how that went as well.

Enjoy your week, and stop on by to check out the new material.