A long, long time ago in the same year that Star Wars was released, I first started DMing OD&D. I moved on to AD&D and finished with Metzer’s Basic / Expert set. I stopped DMing in 1989 – by then all of my friends had young families and I was self-starting a career in computers.
I made my 2016 New Year’s resolution to get back to RPG’s by leaning on VTT technology in the form of Fantasy Grounds. I spent most of the year running a D&D5e campaign and had a great time! I got a couple of my old gaming buddies involved and made a handful of new gaming buddies along the way.
As I progressed through the year, one thing slowly became evident to me – VTT game play is just arriving. Being a bit of newbie, I thought that it had already arrived and was old hat, when instead it is still just starting to get the attention of publishers who are just now starting to alter their production efforts to allow their products to be used online.
I was also wading through 25+ years of gaming history that I had largely missed. What I see is an industry that is fractured into various segments so small that most publishers have to really be struggling. The number of game systems and attendant settings is staggering.
By September, it was starting to become clear to me that while 5e was a great take on D&D, that means that it suffers from the same design problems. In a nutshell, players attain strength and power and that in turn eliminates the excitement of danger while automatically lengthening any combat encounters. It’s always been like this.
The year 2016 was a great success – I completely realized my New Year’s resolution and enjoyed all of the creative fires that we’re ignited over the course of the year.
2017 will be my Savage year! I am moving over to Savage Worlds as my core game system and will start with GRAmel’s Beast & Barbarians which is a low fantasy setting.