Welcome to another 'weekend in the life of' post. Well, actually, you've already heard part of the weekend, with the Thunderbirds and all...
Sunday saw the resumption of the Bloodstone campaign. We started our usual time, with the plan on continuing the holiday monday. Sunday went quite well, I think. I was worried that a long pause might cause some problem 'getting back into it' but it didn't take long for the characters, nor I to get into the swing of things. Well, except that I continually and continued to forget about the major town NPCs, such as, oh, the Baron. I'm sure the players think he's not doing anything, when in fact he's been very visible and active in the community. Grrrr. I curse myself for that. The telepresence of Sir Barus also worked rather well, save one computer explosion on saturday night which unfortunetaly cut him off from some good inter-character RP. Other than that, sunday was rather smooth, didn't drag, and the characters were getting puzzled -- a good thing.
Monday we started early but a bit too leasurely, and the game sort of went in fits and starts, paused for dinner, had the characters even more frustrated, caused some party friction, the death of an NPC, and then came the battlesystem battle. With so many participants we doubled up each figure (1=2), and began -- and continued on and on and on until late. I think at this point I'm going to declare the Battlesystem experiment a not-success. Even one of the most enthusiastic 'yeah, we should do that!' players is saying 'maybe not' now. It isn't that the battlesystem rules are bad, its mainly a) the length of time it takes b) the lack of space we have and, most importantly, c) the changes in the abstraction that confuse some players and diminish the directness or the immediate obviousness of their abilities. Plus its different enough that they are unsure what to do in the best way. So, I'm modifying from here on in for the rest of this (first) module. No biggie.
In a rather amusing tie in with this post, after that long long battle, I fell into bed drained and spent the whole night in fitful sleep, dreaming about running large-scale combat. Ugh!
Meanwhile, allergies or a cold (or both) have wracked me hard, leading me to not even doing conditioning at KF last night, leaving me downright miserable and getting bloody noses. Combine that with other frustrating this and thats, and though gaming wasn't bad, and the airshow was good, my spirits aren't doing any aerobatics.