Outside of that, Amanda and I are settling in nicely in the house. It’s still a half-mess, which is why we haven’t had a housewarming yet. That’ll be something hopefully in the early new year when we might be able to afford to install more floors. We’ll see about that, I guess. There’s also a wedding to pay for, and planning for that is going buttery smooth. Everything about it has been easy and quick, so far.

We watched all of the Battlestar remake and loved it. Since then, we’ve mostly just been playing a lot of games. We finished Gears of War 3 co-op, which was fun and a nice way to cap the series. I played through all of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and it was amazing. Might even be my game of the year. Of course, it’s up against stiff competition from Skyrim, which Amanda and I have been playing. I finished the main quest and am now just dawdling about: exploring, doing sidequests, and killing random dragons. The game is awesome, and makes me want to run a D&D game again, which I’d like to in the new year. Skyrim was interrupted briefly by Skyward Sword, which was great fun. It’s an odd mix of some new ideas for the Zelda series as well as some antiquated stuff that Nintendo does that just boggles the mind compared to so many other games these days. Still, great fun, and probably one of my favourite Zeldas overall.

Outside of videogaming, we recently finished a Ghostbusters campaign. The old original WEG D6 game, and it was fantastic. It’s interesting how the old adage of “everything old is new again” applies to this game, as it almost feels like so many of the indie games we’ve been trying lately, even though it was written in 1986. After Halloween, we ran out of steam for the game, being that the season was over, so I’ve started up Mouse Guard again. I recently bought the new boxed set for it, and the game is great as always. After this I’ve got a bunch of ideas for various games to run: a Chronica Feudalis viking myth game (read: Rune), a return to the Dresden Files RPG, and I’ve still got a pile of indie games that I’ve not yet tried that I’d love to dig into. In that pile is Dogs in the Vineyard, The One Ring (I even listened to The Hobbit audiobook for this one), Blood and Honor, Kingdom of Nothing, Lady Blackbird, and Cartoon Action Hour Season 2; to name a few. After that, as I’d mentioned before, I’d like to return to D&D. Maybe even return to the Mossmantle campaign. Although, if everyone’s available, there’s also the Demonwar reboot we started last year that would be fun to resume. All of this is just conjecture at this point, of course. We’ll see what people want to play after Mouse Guard is done again.

I’m very much enjoying trying all these different games, though. Especially considering so many of them focus on mechanics that support roleplaying. Not the least of which is my absolute favourite: aspects. So much so that I think it might be fun to include them in D&D in some way. A few lines that describe your character that you can tap into for bonuses or something, or that the DM can compel so you can earn more action points, or something. Still formulating the idea, really. Overall, I think I’ve learned a lot as a DM from trying these other games, and I think the group as a whole has learned a lot. As such, I’m hoping that when we do eventually return to D&D, we can bring some of those skills with us and get a better game overall out of it. One thing that started to bother me about D&D 4e is how much focus is on what your character can do in battle and little else. Sure, roleplaying doesn’t require system support and you can roleplay playing Monopoly if you wanted. But if so much of the system focuses on combat and battle, and you progress that much faster through battle alone, then it becomes hard to focus on characterization and roleplay. I love combat in D&D, and it does it awesomely (if a bit slower than I’d like it to), but it started to feel like playing a tabletop wargame with fantasy trappings, and that’s not what I want out of my games right now.

One of the main things I’ve learned as a DM is how to deal with failure. Mouse Guard is awesome for this because if you fail something, you fail it. But failure is never just: “well, you failed and that’s that, try again?”, it’s always a bit more detailed than that. If you fail, something different happens. Something has to happen instead. If you fail to pick the lock, it’s not just that you didn’t pick it and move on. It could be that the failure is something unrelated: maybe a guard walks around the corner, maybe a trap goes off, maybe in your haste you drop something, it takes longer than you wanted and you get frustrated and for the rest of the day it colours your interactions, etc. Hell, it could be something almost completely unrelated. Sure, you unlock the door and get inside, but what you needed in the room isn’t there as you’d hoped.

Well, WALL OF TEXT. tl;dr: Playing some indie games is awesome and I think I’ve learned a few things that made me a better DM.

World of Kung Fu Panda…

It gave me the urge to play WoW again for about half a second, then I came back to my senses…

Fun little video. And that explains where the “Everyday I’m shufflin’” meme came from: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/everyday-im-shufflin#.ToXfcewmSuI

http://rpghub.com/2011/07/heroica-like-heroquest-with-lego/