Five Month Check In...

Hmmm... Where to begin?

A lot has happened over the last five months, and most of it is not good, though some of it is pretty okay...

In a nutshell, and in no particular order...

• A good friend (and chairman/coordinator of the local game convention) passed away about seven weeks before the most recent convention. The convention went on with a few hiccups, and looks like it will continue on for a bit as a number of folks figure out and pick up the work that this man did. I am not as involved as I would like due to all of us trying to avoid the apperance of a conflict of interest (My wife and I own a local game store, and there were problems in the past when a local store owner (not us) had a sizable finger in the convention set-up/management), but it looks like it will continue for at least a few more years...
• My father has recently had a combination stroke/seizure that has left him unable to walk without a walker (and poorly at that) and has dampened his faculties to the point where he doesn't know where he is most of the time. This has caused some stress in the family as I see where this is going (my father moving into a nursing home equipped to deal with Alzheimer sufferers) and had had the temerity to voice this. My mother, nor my older brother like this concept, nor do they agree with me. For my brother, our father is his hero and my brother is having more than a difficult time coming to grips that the man he knows and loves is effectively no longer with us. My sibling is of the opinion that "dad will be fine once we get him home". My mother was of this opinion, as well... initially. The more she deals with the problem, the more she understands that her husband may never come home, or if he does, it won't be for long as he will require more care than she can give him. Normally, I take a bit of pride in being correct about many situations. This one? I honestly wish I am completely wrong and that my father makes a full recovery. Barring divine intervention, I don't see that happening...
• I been told to lose pretty much half of myself in weight or die...
• I've been diagnosed as "pre-diabetic", which is apparently a danger zone where one is not diabetic yet, but if they keep going down the path that they are on, they will be soon. As a result, I've been put on a low-carb diet that pretty much rules out anything I really like (pizza and Mexican food) in favor of yogurt, salad, vegetables, and meat. Okay... meat's not so bad...
• My pacemaker, after having been confirmed as working in December of 2015, apparently died in January of 2016, so that has to be replaced...
• My Feng Shui 2 game has been set aside due to rapid and frequent player turnover. Hard to run a serial game if characters and players change almost every session...
• My Champions game has been placed on hiatus for a variation of the same reason. Six players... Three consistent... One bailed due to health (he contracted cancer). He's forgiven. Another insisted on staying in the game even though his employment was screwing around with him hard enough that his attendence was consistently *VERY* late, if at all... A third one showed up more often than not, but never could be bothered to actually show any real interest in the game... I know some of these players read this blog when I infrequently post, and if what I have typed here upsets you, I apologize to a certain extent, but realize that some of what was happening was also causing me some undue frustration.
• I recently began a Deadlands: Hell on Earth Reloaded campaign (the Worms' Turn) that was going *REALLY* well for three runs... ...and then it wasn't. Part of it is my fault for the scenario of the evening, but part of it has to do with some of the rules (and my implementation of such, as written). That will get rectified soon...
• I also began a game of East Texas Univeristy in order to fulfill a promise I had made to a few people to run them through it once my schedule cleared up. One run down, thus far, and it is mostly good. A couple of snags here and there, but overall not bad. I'm sort of waiting for session number four to see if the other shoe drops...
• I will be starting a campaign of the Last Parsec (Eres Beta-V) this upcoming Sunday. We'll see how that goes as we have one player who has a dislike of Savage Worlds as a game system, but after a bit of badgering, he gave in and is willing to try..

On top of all of this, I still have the desire to run a superhero game. It just cannot be with my go-to game system for the genre (Hero System/Champions). As much as I love the system for superhero gaming, it requires far too much prep-time to be useful to me. I want to concentrate on story... not making NPCs. Unfortnately, I have a *DEEP* love of tactical combat for superhero games, and nothing does that better than Hero System. I don't really have time to create a system of my own, but I do want something that fits a few requirements...

• Tactical combat...
• A die-rolling mechanic that is related more to a bell curve rather than a single-die system that lends itself to a linear probability...
• A character system that lends itself to comic-book tropes without feeling too cartoony...

The setting for this game will have to be all-new. I have a background that I have used for a number of games, and it is good and solid, but it also tends toward the darker side of the genre, and I am trying to break away from that. Thus, I am planning a new background/setting for this as yet unrealized superhero game. I have a few ideas in my head. I just have to put them on paper. Here goes nothing...

peace... GopherDave