Ye Olde Staging Point

Whew. So much has happened in the several days since I last posted that I'm hard-pressed to know exactly where to begin. All sorts of news items--CIA leaks, Rush (hang in there, man), the CA recall campaign getting even nastier, Charles Pickering finally approved... I feel like I am literally experiencing an overdose of "breaking news." And this week hasn't exactly been the most stress-free week at the Rau household (file under "Surprise Car Repairs" and "Cancelled Weekend Getaways"). Like most everybody else in the universe, I've got opinions about these various ridiculous topics, but I think if I attempted to actually post about them, I'd just give myself a migraine (not to mention I'd just bore you all to tears). So on to more frivolous topics, which in my case almost invariably means gaming. (That means this will be a gaming post of little interest to those of you who don't dig this sort of thing... you can duck out the back door now and nobody will say anything.)

Item the first: I was quite pleased to read this week that White Wolf will be revisiting their Aeon Continuum games next year! The Aeon Continuum consists of three now-defunct games--Trinity, Aberrant, and Adventure!, all of which focus on specific time periods in an alternate history wherein humans with psionic/superheroic powers began to manifest publically in the 20th century. They never sold particularly well and were more or less shut down a year or two back. (Adventure is a pulp superheroes game set in the 1920s; Aberrant is a fairly cynical "supers" game set around the year 2000, and Trinity depicts a sci-fi future in which the heroes of the earlier games have become the enemies of humanity.) I'll restrain from further promotional babbling about these games, but will reiterate that I'm very excited about this. I remember picking up a copy of Trinity on a lark ($15 for the core rulebook, good deal!) at Games Plus with Jon back while we were both in grad school. I've been collecting the Aeon Continuum games ever since.

Of course, the announcement that the revived games will be using the D20 system has sparked off an online D20-hatred-fest that surprised even me, accustomed as I am to the vocal minority of online gamers who think (and want to tell you at every opportunity) that D20 spells the end of gaming. Several veteran members of the official Aeon mailing list (a pretty cult-like following, given the defunct status of the games themselves) have gone on record as hoping for the games' failure. Apparently the horror of using the D20 system is so great that they'd rather see their favorite games dead than let anyone else have a chance to enjoy them. In the words of Bruce Baugh, one of the original Continuum developers, "The moment anyone feels themselves inclined to use words like "alienated" and "betrayed" about rolegaming lines, it's time to set the games aside and do something else for a while." Intelligent critique of D20 is fine, but if you find yourself actually hating a game system enough to mouth off about it in public... yikes. Time to find a more appropriate target for your enthusiasm, like helping fight world hunger or something.

Which sort of brings me around to Item the second, which is that I'm thinking of taking a nice long vacation from D&D. It's accounted for almost all of my gaming over the last 3-4 years (a handful of Call of Cthulhu games being the exception), and I'm starting to feel quite overdosed on it. I like the game, I like the system... but it's getting harder and harder to muster up enthusiasm for our weekly (in theory, they're weekly) sessions. Back in the "old days," my gaming group did a pretty good job of keeping things varied--every couple of games, we'd switch to a different system, play that for a bit, and then go back to what we were doing before (usually alternating between MERP or D&D and Top Secret S/I). At the moment, the only D&D game I am enthused about is an online game with Mark, due largely to the cool and interesting character/plot ideas we have been discussing lately.

Most of my frustration is the sheer length and complexity of combat in D&D. It can take forever to get through even a medium-sized combat encounter if you have more than two player characters involved. Now, my complaint isn't that D&D combat is too complex--I love its gloriously tactical complexity level, and playing through a great battle scene can be an absolute blast for all involved if it's run well. No, my complaint is simply that given the length of your average combat, it's really difficult to tell an interesting story in an average game session, because there simply isn't time. The last several games I've DM'd involved about two combats per session. That's not a lot of combat, but the combats take so long to resolve that in order to finish the adventure in a reasonable length of time, I have to skip over an awful lot of other material (which includes more combats, plot elements, and various other interesting encounters). It's not a matter of simplifying D&D combat--if I tried to simplify it much beyond what we are doing now, I would be taking out parts of D&D combat that I enjoy. Nor can I remove combat from D&D entirely, since epic combats are part and parcel of the whole fantasy genre. If I had eight-hour chunks of time to devote to a typical game session, there would be no problem (ah, for the days of junior high and high school, when we could game through entire Saturdays!)--but these days, four hours is about as much time as I can game at any one sitting, and when 2-3 hours of that is taken up by combat, that's not a lot of time left over to do some of the other fun stuff--roleplaying non-combat encounters.

Which means (and I think I've sauntered into Item the third) that I'm starting to look closely at a number of other games, with a particular eye towards finding one that Michele and I can try out together. Some of White Wolf's Storyteller games are tempting me, but not quite as much as BESM (short for Big Eyes, Small Mouth) is--in fact, BESM is looking mighty interesting to me these days, and might be just the sort of 180-degree change in gaming style that I'm looking for. (Plus, they just released their core rules online for free--woo hoo! Now if only they'd consider open-sourcing it, D20 style...) Despite my above gripes regarding D&D, I wouldn't mind some D20 Call of Cthulhu or an investigative-style D20 Modern game, as Michele and I both love those genres; provided we kept the fighting as streamlined as possible (not really an issue with Cthulhu; with D20 Modern it would depend entirely on the setting). And there's always Exalted and Godlike, which rule. So many games, so little time and all that.

Any ideas for someone looking for a breather from D&D? Nothing too rules-heavy, but at the same time I do like some rules--with an emphasis on open-ended character creation. If you've got a suggestion, send it my way.

And wow, it felt really good to post about something relatively unimportant. Unimportant, but fun, that is.

Have a great weekend!