Overall, good news to report this week. 

I finally found the perfect gaming spot in San Diego. Ever since Young Hickory shut down, The ideal spot is a place that is open late, has inexpensive food (or just coffee) and is only 1 bus away. The game store downtown is inexpensive if you're just getting snacks, is only one bus away, but isn't always open late. Tea N More, where the Meetup holds most of their meetings, has inexpensive meal options and is open late, but it's a hassle to get to.

A friend of mine used to run a game at a place called Lestat's, which was inexpensive, open late, and only slightly more than 1 bus away. The downside there is that it was loud. Not raucous loud. Just everyone having their own conversation so you have to listen closely to yours sort of loud. I then found out that their location on University Avenue was one of 3 locations, which I had been meaning to check out.

Well, that chance came last Wednesday.  One of the Metup memebers was running a game at the Lestat's on Adams Ave. A short walk from the bus stop and off the beaten path enough that it didn't have the steady murmur of conversation that threatened to drown out  your own. It very strongly reminded me of Old Town Coffee and Chocolates, where I enjoyed some casual gaing in my hometown before I moved to San Diego,

Which means I now have one less excuse as to why I'm not gaming very much.

Another positive update: I am writing this from my lunchbox laptop.

It's been a long time since I've done anything serious with it. I might have posted something on this blog at some point from this lunchbox, but it's been in a holding pattern for a while. The main issue is that I have a "real" laptop as well, which is a more powerful computer and uses a more popular operating system, so circumstances where the lunchbox is more useful tend to be rare. It's mostly a novelty, and I'm okay with that.

The other issue was power output. While other people who deal with Raspberry Pi single board computers have all kinds of other skills, I really don't. Rather than kitbash and solder hings together, I prefer to use standard  cable connections to assemble my projects (There's an amusing story about a project where I substituted a hammer for delicate soldering work, but that was not lunchbox related). So my power source for the lunchbox laptop has been those cell-phone charger battery packs

Which worked great when the core computer was a Raspberry Pi Zero, but once I upgraded to a Model 3B, it wasn't delivering enough power to make it happy. It would boot up and run what I wanted to, but there was a constant "low power" notification. 

So I've kept my eyes open for when power technology was going to get to the point that a battery pack would be able to deliver that much juice without breaking the bank and it finally happened.  I got rid of the "low power" notifications and am now considering what I need to do to make it a properly "finished" project. Right now that means trying to get the interior of the lunchbox organized. For a long time, the lunchbox was very much just a container for all of the various parts, which just sort of hung out inside.

 I went to the gaming Meetup that I was planning to and ran the same adventure I ran last month, though with new players this time. Very new players, in fact. Not only new to the Meetup group, but 2 of my players were completely new to RPGs as a whole.

Which makes me glad that they came to my table. Not that the other games that were being offered weren't good games run by good people. They absolutely were. But when players are coming from a history of board games, as these two were, a nice Old School dungeon crawl is perhaps the perfect introduction.

Old School D&D was an evolution of tabletop wargaming, so comparison to a board game is not far off. But it is also a step beyond. Especially in a basic dungeon crawl like the adventure that I was running, the idea of "This is the map/board and this is my character/playing piece" is pretty easy to get across.

One of my older pieces of gaming advice, before I started pitching a lot of big ideas and even designing my own stuff, is "dungeons are fine." Especially when you're starting out, don't sweat the big stuff. It's not about the 10 page character backstories or 10,000 years of history that you have to make up for your fantasy world. It's about playing. And simple dungeon crawl adventures let you get into the play experience quickly. Everything else can come later as it emerges organically from that play experience.

So I hope I gave them the baby step that will prepare them for the quantum leap into other roleplaying games.

It's also getting me more motivated to turn the whole thing into a proper campaign. Now that I've decided to stop overthinking and underthinking, I just need to figure out what the right level of thinking is. Right now, that feels like running modules from my collection and creating a loose continuity and geography around it.

Another issue is figuring out the location. I'm sure I've brought this up my issues with the lack of late night coffee shops in easy reach. Because cost is one of my concerns and my ability to hang out in a space for not much more than the cost of a cup of coffee is very important to me. There's also the local game store, which I am fond of.

It's largely a matter of getting my rear in gear at this point.

 Not too much to report.

I tried getting in touch with the players from my one-shot, but nobody responded, I've still got the notes for everything, so I could very easily either pick up with those players if they come to the next meetup next week, or just run it again for new players.

I'm trying to keep myself busy by building up a space sector for Stars Without Number. It lets me start with random results that let my analytical brain to do its job since my creative brain doesn't come out too often. While one of the things I love about the OSR is that ability to lean on random results, I've never been a strong fantasy buff. So a sci-fi game that comes with random tools for setting and scenario generation is a great thing. I'd still like to do Star Trek at some point, but SWN and Traveller-style games might be what I get.