Resolutions

 Another year over and not a lot to show for it.

Not nothing, though. I lost my job a few months ago, so I've definitely been in a downer phase. But it did allow me to develop some material to actually try out Ashes Without Number.

I also learned the value of backstory. While I haven't done campaigns for quite some time, I have kept myself busy with one-shots for the local gaming club. So I've written some adventures and made sure to provide pre-gens. But these have always been purely mechanical constructions, a set of stats to roll against as necessary.

Then someone asked on the gaming club's Discord server: How much backstory is appropriate for a pre-gen? I realized that my answer was "None" and that quickly followed the realization "Am I doing it wrong?"

For a game like D&D, the mechanical setup of a character actually conveys a decent amount. Elven fighter, dwarven rogue. Halfling monk. It tells you enough that you can have an idea of what they are like and what they can do without having to read the character sheet in depth. And even though I don't do D&D anymore, that thinking stayed with me. Especially for one-shots, where the character is only going to get a limited amount of "screen time."

This caused me to go back through my collections of pre-gens and try to assemble a few paragraphs of backstory.

For my D20 Modern pre-gens for my "Tabloid World" scenario, I tried to come up with a basic paragraph explaining the character's deal. While it is a class-based system, the classes are deliberately flexible and bland, so just saying "Smart Hero" tells you a lot less than "elven bard." So I went back over the choices I made and tried to tie them together and turned that into a tight paragraph. I then spent another paragraph describing an encounter with the bizarre that led them to working for the Midnight Star (named after the tabloid themed Weird Al song).

Then I went over my Ashes Without Number pre-gens. For now it's just a paragraph for each one giving a rough explanation of their abilities and a bit about how they learned or used them. A little bit to tie them to the local area and/or what made them pull up roots and become a wanderer in the wastes of Humboldt and Del Norte counties might be nice, but I think there needs to be more detail on the current version of the setting for me to have enough of a handle to make those sorts of additions. Maybe filling in those details for the characters will give me more of a hook into the setting. We'll see.

But my crowning achievement would have to be the backstory work for my All Outta Candy Canes Christmas adventure. The All Outta Bubblegum rules don't do character stats. The only stat you have is how much Bubblegum each character has remaining, but the character's deal doesn't involve the rules at all. My previous solution was a character sheet consisting of a photo of a military action hero and a little form inspired by the GI Joe action figure file cards for the player to fill in as they chose.

This year, I upgraded that approach by filling on the file card myself. In some cases, it was very easy, since they were pulled from the live-action GI Joe films. I just used the GI Joe file card for that character. In other cases, I tried to extract the relevant information regarding popular film characters and populate the cards with that. For example, I couldn't not include Arnold Schwarzenegger in my list of action heroes, so I dug up what information I could about his character Dutch from the movie Predator. Since the premise of my All Outta Candy Canes adventure calls for military action, I tended to favor roles that were military in flavor. So Stallone goes on the list as Rambo.

This resulted in probably one of the best runs of this adventure.

Now that I've gone on about my accomplishments this year, what are my resolutions for next year?

Blog more: I'd like to get back to a weekly schedule. Mostly for my mental health. Like I said, I've been in some doldrums lately (and actually for a while) and one thing I can do is imitate Milo from The Phantom Tollbooth and try to escape the doldrums by keeping my mind active. Whether this means this is a gaming blog, and Oz blog or a descent into madness, who can say?

Run a campaign: This has been on my list for a long time, but only rarely accomplished. My usual standard is 2 sessions in continuity with each other. And I haven't always made it.