What I am playing and how I am playing it

Hey all!  So excited to get this post underway!  It has been a little while since we have had anything properly Role Playing Game (RPG) related and I feel like I should put my best foot forward.  I will tell you what I am playing and how I am playing it!  Once I have that out of the way I intend to do some deeper dives into my games and the gaming systems I use.

What I am playing?

I am currently playing two RPGs and a bunch of Frosthaven board games, but that is not what the site is about!  I have started up a Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) game and am continuing a game of Degenesis.  From my last posts, you will remember that I was dabbling in Pathfinder 2E.  That fell through because getting people to play games face-to-face these days can be hard.  The campaign world that it was set in I have carried over to my DCC game though.

Once Pathfinder kind of fell in a heap, a group of the in-person players, who were playing Degenesis prior to Pathfinder 2E decided we would like to revisit that game.  Multiples of that group actually have the physical books and love the setting for it.  The system I used to think not much about it, feeling it was a bit generic, but I am warming to it.  There are complexities to it that reading the Katharsys system book does not communicate well.

DCC got picked up because the Pathfinder 2E game was set in the world that I wanted to tell the story of.  The story and world have basically been transferred to a different group of players also, who are always keen to get together and game.  The choice of DCC was in the end a no-brainer for me.  It is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of my favourite systems I have ever run.  I can not remember a single game of DCC that I walked away from without a massive smile on my face.  And I am picky.

How I am playing.

If you can read the subtext of the section above you will know that I do not have an in-person game at the moment.  I am disappointed by that as I love sitting around a table and playing the game as a group.  I also love rolling my dice.  My dice are beautiful and they sit alone, left out of my games (kind of, I will elaborate).  I run both of my games online with two different groups (though one of the players sits at both games).  The Virtual Tabletop (VTT) software I use is different for both games for reasons I will explain shortly.

Dungeon Crawl Classics

One of the groups I play with, the DCC game, is experienced with online gaming. I have been playing online with them for probably a decade or more.  This is because we are geographically separate.  I could, with an hour’s drive, visit one of the players.  The rest though I would need a boat, plane and an international trip with some of them to sit at the same table.  We found each other a long time ago, playing Pathfinder and just clicked.  DCC has brought one newbie to the group, who is the person that sits at both tables.  We play this on Fantasy Grounds Unity, a system I have been using for many years now.

Degenesis

Degenesis is the game I moved to for my local players on the Foundry VTT.  We moved the game online because weekend after weekend we could not bring a game to the table.  I decided that, while I was enjoying Pathfinder 2E, it was too much of an investment to get all the things I would need onto the VTT at this point.  I had, after all, shelled out around $700 for rulebooks and screens of a physical version.  Adding on top of that another $400 for their virtual equivalents was going to be an extravagance.  Also, I was not sure if it was the game itself that was causing issues with attendance.  So I moved to a game that many of the players enjoyed the setting of.

The Degenesis game has still been a bit patchy.  Having to learn Foundry VTT as well as translate the system and work out how to run it has been a challenge.  I find myself losing more time to technical work than actual planning for the game.  We chose Foundry because it boasted the Degenesis module, but I can tell you, it is good for the players and terrible for the GM.  I am literally sitting at my computer with all my notes on paper and rolling physical dice because the implementation is terrible from a GM perspective.  It does run the player side well though, so it is a small sacrifice in the bigger picture.

Future Posts

I will begin to make posts about what I am doing.  It will primarily revolve around the Dungeon Crawl Classics material as I want to bring a spotlight on the system.  I feel it is a great system, that is well-supported but does not receive as much attention as it needs.  I am also going to discuss Virtual Gaming and the tools that I use in that space.  There will be a bunch of other posts intermingled with these, but those are my main focus at the moment.

Longer term, I would like to broaden my posts.  Bring you reviews of independent RPGs, give you encounters for the systems I am running and also respond to requests from readers for posts.  It is time to ramp this blog into gear again.  I commit to now providing one blog a week at a minimum for you to read.  I am not going to schedule it on a particular day though.  It will happen when I get the time to write and get things up.  If you want me to write anything in particular, or have an independent game you want me to review, there is a contact form on the site.  It would be nice to have someone use it that does not want me to pay them money for a change!  Until the next post, keep rolling!