Yesterday was one of those days when our Changeling game got canceled at last minute and we all wanted to kill Spikey for it. But nothing really new there, really. So, me, Taija and Mikko were grumpy for a while, pondering what to do next. Then Mikko came up with the idea that I should demo how the 4th Edition D&D system worked, since I had been talking a lot about it to him. Taija didn’t object, so we called Petsku, an almost-neighbor, made D&D characters and I ran a couple of encounters for them to show various aspects of the system.

After the demo, we talked about it for a while and the players were “Ooh, I want to play more with my fun character!”

And I was feeling really negative about it for some reason. Something about continuing the demo game further wasn’t “doing it for me”, but I couldn’t really name what was wrong, so I said a lot of “maybe”s and kept on smiling/nodding.

This morning, after spending good time wondering about it, it hit me. I want to get something out of a game I’m running. I want to challenge myself when I’m running games. I don’t want to get stuck on the same old, same old. I want to look back at a game and say that I did something new there.

The Summer DnD (I’ve mentioned a few times on the blog) is probably the last DnD campaign I’ll run using the 4th edition straight from the books – In it, I’m exploring the system, I’m trying to push it a bit each time we play, see how it works for what, all while having a fun game with it. But like with all the other gaming systems, I will want to move away from what’s been given to me. The next time I’ll start a campaign with the 4th Edition, it will be full of house rules, have a world that doesn’t look like the one given in the books on any level and will feel like my game from the start.

Starting a game based on random characters, made straight from the book, for a demo, just doesn’t qualify. It feels like doing the same thing over again, being bound by the same restrictions.

So, sorry guys, it won’t continue.

Related Posts:

• 4 Things the 4th Edition Teaches You
• Updately
• Century and Advancement
• Thoughts of the first Decade
• A Beginning

Tags: d&d, rpgs

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 at 11:20 and is filed under roleplaying games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.