I have been busy playing some RPGs with
Big Darryl, Darryl Jr., Dalton and a couple of times with Big
Darryl's wife Joann.
I'll start at the beginning - We played
the second session of 43 AD, and we fought those battles and it
didn't go well due to some extraordinarily bad luck on the part of
the players rolling dice for the Romans. We also had to retcon a
couple of things from the earlier session because we'd missed a
couple of minor points in the rules in the first session. David
wasn't there, so we all kind of missed him, but we knew it was kind
of a long shot getting the kid back to game regularly anyway, he
lives like 50+ miles away from his grandparents, and summer's almost
over. Big Darryl was really not pleased with the character he had
rolled and was starting to really show it in a big way after the
Romans started losing battles big against the Germans, he actually
wanted his character to desert at one point and had to be talked out
of it, which was good because he ended up rallying the survivors in
the end. The session was a meat grinder for the Romans though and we
really stress tested the rules, we're putting the campaign on hold
until after the designer gets back from vacationing in Australia so
we can discuss a few points with him.
So, to keep the roleplaying going on, I
dug out my Legend of the Five Rings 1st edition stuff and had
everyone make characters for that. I figured it was a longshot for
campaign play, but Dalton was into L5R and so was I. Darryl Jr. was
always cool with AD&D OA back in the day, although he hates D&D
now (3e killed the love), so I figured a fantasy samurai setting that
wasn't D&D would be cool. Big Darryl might be a hard sell, since
he's 70 years old and not really into Asian fantasy. I had that stuff
with me because I anticipated ending early and I thought we might
want to try out another game, and I wanted to push it on my group
truth be told, since I had bought all the stuff for it, and continue
to buy stuff for it. I bought an L5R Disk Wars starter on EBay
because I'd never seen one before and it was super cheap, but I
digress. We actually didn't finish character generation that evening,
as it turns out, even when you have two (semi-)experienced players
who are (quasi-) familiar with character generation, teaching it to
others is still time consuming. So I gave each of them a book to keep
and went home for the better part of a week.
My prediction about who would welcome
the game turned out to be dead wrong. Big Darryl loved the setting,
although his grasp of the rules is still a little shaky; and Darryl
Jr. hated the bulky rulebook with it's immensity of stuff to read.
Big Darryl liked it so much he talked his wife Joann into playing,
and she hasn't played an RPG since the 1980s. So we ended up with
Joann playing a Crane Bushi, Big Darryl playing a Unicorn Bushi,
Darryl Jr. playing a Unicorn Bushi (he hadn't read a lot of the
setting stuff and decided based on the fact that they are about 1/2
Mongol 1/2 Japanese, he figured he could roleplay that - he is a
former Khakhan of the Steppe Warriors after all and a veteran OA
player) and Dalton playing a Crab Shugenja. The father and son
Unicorns are actually playing cousins.
I started them out with the adventure
in the back of the book - "Ceremony of the Samurai" where
they compete in the Topaz Championship. Dalton had played through the
first day of this before with my family, but since the game didn't
apparently stick with them, I decided it was OK for him to play it
again. He's a good enough roleplayer to not ruin the surprises he
knows about for the other players and not act on player knowledge;
and he did just that. Roughly 3/4s of the way through the first day
of the tournament I got a phone call from my wife that my sister was
in the hospital and things were looking pretty dire, this was almost
two weeks ago now and she's still in the hospital and things are
still looking pretty dire. She's 300 miles away though and my parents
went down to see her, there's nothing anyone can do at this point
except hope, and pray if you are a person of faith. Still, her
condition weighs heavily on my mind, and it's the main reason I've
not blogged much for the last couple of weeks.
Anyway, that call kind of threw me off
my game, but I got us through to the end of the first day. Since I
need to keep myself occupied I've kept on playing games, although I
haven't really been on my game all that much. I've missed stuff in
the adventure and skipped some stuff, done some stuff just flat out
wrong. I can't decide if it's because I am still really new with this
system or I am too distracted to think straight. Anyway, last time
Darryl Jr.'s son Dylan joined us and played one of the NPCs, Hida
Fujizaka; so we had three generations of gamers at the table while I
GMed. I wish the game had gone better, but maybe next time. I only
have to finish up with day three and then Darryl Jr. has volunteered
to take the reigns as GM to give me a break, since he "had to
learn all the damned rules anyway"; and I'll actually get to
play. I think I am going to be a Lion Bushi or maybe a Crab, although
if Dylan sticks to the group I don't want to steal his thunder.
Here's some more stuff I got in the
mail -
I needed this, I gave away three copies
Several of these were doubles for me, some
were not. They were extremely cheap as a lot though $40.00 for the
bunch, that was the minimum bid. I was a little surprised to win.
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