Hackmaster!

I love Hackmaster. I loved it's 4th edition and I love the new Hackmaster Basic. When I swore off 3e D&D I went straight to HM. I extolled it's virtues to every gamer I knew and I ran a game for a while. It ended mostly because I had some health issues and the group of players was starting to fragment- Steve always lived a good distance away, Matt and Heather were finishing grad school and moving out of state, John and Kevin both were hard to pin down for regular times to game, Melissa and John broke up and Tom was Kevin's high school aged son and dependent on him for a ride to the game.

When my daughter Ashli was old enough to become interested in gaming her and her friends wanted to play D&D, so that's where I went. Now, after several years of convincing, all of my kids game with my wife and me and we have gone retro. Getting my kids, my son John in particular, to see the benefit of non-video game style of play, with it's instant gratification power-ups was a challenge; but I finally did it.

Then HMB came out. We had been playing in a 1st Edition AD&D game when it was released, so we didn't get to play it right away. That game kind of guttered out amid the life-clutter of the new school year; Ashli is taking a pretty heavy course load and it took some time to adjust, John had football practice every day, only Em really had any time to spare. I managed to get a game started in November. Ashli is GMing! It's her first time trying and on a new system. She is doing a pretty great job. I really am liking the system, it has a really old school feel. However, Ashli only feels able to play every other week at most so I am picking up the extra time slot and running a 1st edition AD&D campaign.

Why AD&D? Because I can run it easily, off the cuff and my campaign world came from AD&D. I am sick and tired of converting stuff to match this game or that version. It was easy to run Hackmaster 4th edition there, it's just adding to AD&D; the new HMB is TSR-less, without D&D as it's base. Will I convert eventually? Maybe, hell probably even, but for right now, this next campaign, I am going old school with a vengeance.