Year in Review

 I was sure on the blog a lot more this year than I have been in recent years! And without going through all my old posts for the year, here are my gaming related remembrances from 2020.

Started off the year high on The Mandalorian and running some WEG d6 Star Wars along with my ongoing Classic D&D West Marches game. Both games are still going. West Marches is pretty regular, Star Wars is pretty irregular, but the players are enthusiastic whenever we play it. Need to get the next SW adventure prepped...

As a player, Dean and Jeremy ran a few games here and there, but the big game for me as a player was Nate's (one of my West Marches players) 5E Lost Mines of Phandelver game. He got a bunch of WotC's free giveaway stuff, and decided to run this online for us. And while I have my dislikes about the 5E system, this was a really fun game to play in. Especially challenging was that I purposefully chose only one weak cantrip that could cause damage for my Conjurer Wizard character (infestation, 1d6 poison damage), although by the end I had cast a fireball from a scroll and had a wand of magic missiles. Still, spent most of the time using my spells to make things easier for the party/harder for the monsters, and I really enjoyed it!

As a game designer, this was a dud year. Well, I had a lot of ideas, but when my wife and kids returned to Korea from the US in the spring because of covid, my game design time was limited. And pretty unfocused. I started the year excited about finally doing something with Krynn, having picked up the Dragonlance Adventures hardback, and reading through the Immortals Set. Quickly lost interest in both of those. 

East Marches is still something I want to work on, but my TSR-East houserules are a bit of a mess right now, and I'd like to get them in a satisfactory form before working on East Marches in earnest. Or maybe I should give up on that and just make EM for Chanbara. Sales have been sluggish lately, may want to put something out for it next year (like my Ghost Castle Hasegawa adventure!). I did spend a LOT of time working on (redundant) GM rules for TSR-East in case I ever release it. I've decided not to mess with phased initiative anymore after it just complicated my West Marches game, though, so they will need a small rewrite there.

And these days, I keep fiddling around with Chainmail combat, and trying to figure out how to make sense of it for D&D. I guess I need to just play it that way, but it seems like played straight, it will be very deadly and very arbitrary. But fiddling around with numbers has been a headache. I should just give up on it, I guess.