The Year of Absence

Oh man! It happened. Any of you still around may vaguely remember that my last post was about some minor progress I had made on a "Game Jam" on itch.io, the "MS Paint TTRPG Jam" that kicked off back on September 14th, 2021.

What happened!?!?

Well, as you may guess from my absence, I did not complete the game jam. Also, as sometimes happens to people... I let one failure kick me off the blogging wagon altogether. Sad! The jam was not a total failure, however. It did generate a number of ideas I'm still riffing on. For example, readers are likely to know I'm a big fan of Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game, and so I often consider systems that might serve to capture the joy I found in it. My work on Savage City during the jam had me considering a lot of alternatives to the systems in Street Fighter and there were fun ideas I'm definitely keeping! At the beginning of the jam, ideas piled up and things got complicated. As the deadline approached, I started to cut back the weeds to get something workable in time for the end of the jam. I did not get there, but the effort still taught me some lessons.

Anyways, not to dwell on that for too much longer. The bigger point of this post is that I still have things I'd like to say from time to time about role playing and role playing games, and I felt I had to make this post just to acknowledge my failure on the whole game jam thing so I can move on to what is next here.

In my personal role-playing life, things have been good. The pandemic changed the habits of my regular group in a way we haven't recovered from and maybe things are just forever different now. Still, I'm involved in an online Street Fighter campaign with mostly all friends from "back in the day", and the role-playing is beautiful. I had another campaign using a friend's fairly rules-light system where we played magicians in Marblehead which included a player that was new to role playing games and it had solid role-playing as well. In addition, I've played on and off sessions with bits and pieces of the classic group in a variety of systems that have all been entertaining enough as well. I had a wonderful GenCon back in August this year (though I focused more on board gaming there this year.)

Enough of this. More to come soon!