View From the Bushes

While I was at GenCon, I realized I needed to start DM'ing again. There were a few reasons: first off, I missed it; secondly, I thought it would be something to take my mind of the pressures of running a business while still being useful to that business; and finally because I felt like I was losing my edge, i.e. my rules knowledge, my sense of what was balanced, my ability to kill characters without remorse, etc. The problem was, I still am very short on free time, so I wanted to try a format with less of a time commitment. Eventually I decided to try a play by post campaign set in the world of Midnight. So far, we're still in the character creation phase of the campaign, though I've set Labor Day evening as the time the campaign will kick off. You're welcome to check out the campaign -- I'm hosting it in the same forums as General Discussion forum.

I had two ideas going into the PbP campaign. The first was that, as a format, it could handle more people. So rather than going with six people I decided to initially invite twelve. Second: that it would be easier to split the party up. There's an old saying in D&D that you should never split the party up. It's not that it's a bad idea, it's more that the other players (and the DM for that matter) get very restless when one or two players take two hours of a session to go out on their own while everyone else sits and twiddles their thumbs. I haven't really had a chance to test out either of these two ideas, but I can tell you that trying to get 12 people to generate characters is like herding cats.

ENWorld, as with most things of this sort, is a Mecca of PbP gaming, and I've read the FAQ and tried to follow some of the other campaigns to get a feel for the "genre." In general, it's made me more excited to start running, because it's obvious that there's a fair amount of fantasy writing involved, which is another thing that I haven't been able to do for quite awhile. I've mentioned it before in the blog, but I actually got about 100 pages into a fantasy novel at one point, and for many years I dreamed of nothing else than being the next Tolkien, but alas, I had no talent. Fortunately PDF publishing seems custom made for the talentless so I was able to find a home. In any case the big project I've been working on at my real job seems to finally be oozing its way towards a conclusion so maybe I'll finally have the energy to start playing Neverwinter Nights.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross