From Nothing to Everything All At Once

 Wound up taking a week off of the blog, but that was mostly because things wound up being very busy. Also, the writing group didn't meet last week, so I didn't have the reinforcement to get me writing.

I went back to my hometown the weekend before last. Some old friends have been doing an annual camping trip for the last few years, and I've made a point of attending. This year, however, some signals got crossed and the group wasn't able to do the camping trip. I already had the vacation time allotted and train tickets purchased, so my wife and I just made an effort to catch up with the people that weren't part of the camping group. That was really gratifying.

The other thing that kept me away from writing club last week was the fact that we arrived home at 6 in the morning that day and I cannot sleep while traveling. Not well and not comfortably, anyway. I knew I was going to want as much of that day as possible to catch up on my sleep and stop feeling like death warmed over.

Then my gaming life got a little good news, bad news last weekend. It was Free RPG Day and I had volunteered to run a game at the nearby gaming store. There were going to be several D&D modules on offer, but I'm not much of a D&D guy. A few indie games as well, but my confidence level is not where it should be to run something like that.So I had talked myself into volunteering to run the Starfinder module that was going to be released. This was a mistake.

I have something of a love/hate relationship with Starfinder. I find the concept of the setting, the far future of a D&D-style fantasy world, really exciting and the description scratches a lot of that itch. But the mechanics are complicated and dense. Also, the last time I tried to run it, the players were jerks and things didn't go too well anyway.

The game store was very cool and let me pick up the module a day early so I could prepare. I saw that the first encounter was a starship combat, so I printed out the starship character sheet and copied the ship stats onto it. I assumed that the rules would be difficult, but woe unto me, I was not prepared.

At the store, there were enough people there that were interested in the idea of Starfinder that they were willing to give it a try. I had brought my copy of the rulebook and a tablet with the PDF so everyone had rules reference. It took everyone an hour before they declared that they were familiar and comfortable enough with the pregenerated characters for us to proceed. So I read the first few bits of boxed text and head into the starship combat.

I had warned everyone that I was only mostly familiar with Starfinder and that we were going to muddle through together. Boy did we muddle! After a full hour learning the characters and their abilities, we then spent 3 hours in a starship combat that used none of them. Right about when they finally defeated the enemy starship, one of the players announced that they had another engagement. I felt like that was a good time to call it.

I also finally got the courage to mention that I was a game designer and publisher and that I had a few copies of my RPG sitting in my closet. We're working that out and hopefully there will be news soon.

 If you're getting tired of reading about how not much is going on with me and I'm not running games or doing the things that I want to be doing, how do you think I feel writing it?

I spent the other time I had with my writing group doing dungeon prep for my eventual world-building game. Yes, it does include dungeons. An OSR game without dungeons might be technically possible, but much less fun.

I'll be going back to Northern California this weekend. Just for a visit. Getting out in front of other people will be good for dealing with my feelings of isolation. If only I didn't have to travel 800 miles for that feeling.

I think I'll buy another deck of Magic cards. I don't have the budget to make it a serious thing (They call it "cardboard crack" for a reason). But playing the game with a decent preconstructed deck could get me out of the house and maybe build up a network of people to recruit for the various games I might run.

I could also make the effort to track down my last Magic deck, and I still might. But I also want to support the new game store and buying stuff is a good way to do it. Also, I'm sure that it's been long enough that the planned obsolescence of Magic cards will render that deck unplayable in some fashion and I'd be better off buying a new deck in order to keep up with what the kids are doing these days.

 At least part of what I'm trying to do here is talk about my feelings. I don't really have an outlet for a lot of them, which I'm realizing has been a problem.And that goes hand in hand with the feelings of isolation.

I've been trying to get out of the house most days, and that's helped some. But my social life, such as it is, is entirely online and mostly through text chat. My writing club meets over Zoom, which is the exception. The coffee shop where we used to meet opened back up under new ownership, but I haven't had the time to stop by. And the group also now consists of people that aren't quite so local.

I'll be heading back to my hometown to visit my old friends for a weekend. That should help.I really need more local friends, though.