Here we are. As I type this, we are under two weeks from my first game of what I am dubbing in my head, the Rotation. The second Saturday from today (again, as I type this), I will sit down and introduce a new group of players to the world of 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. I cannot tell you how excited I am this is finally happening. And then, at the end of the following month, we are having our Session Zero for Cyberpunk Red.
It has been a long time since I have DM'd/GM'd any game, looking back on my posts here, it has been almost a full year. But we are almost there. I had a job change that killed all of my extra free time, and while the pay was good, it was not quite good enough to put up with no free time to speak of, and so another job change occurred. There, free time! I can run games as I had been hoping to! Wait, no, another snag - our dining room chairs, veterans of my last weekly campaign, were in dire need of repair and reupholstering. Seriously, carpentry and sewing were holding up my game. Fortunately the repairs to the chairs were not too difficult and well within the scope of the tools I possess and skills I have attained. The chairs that need repairing have been repaired, and reupholstering has begun, but that does not need to be completed in its entirety, and can be done in between sessions. The repairs did need to be done, as some of the chairs were literally falling apart and not safe to sit in. Strange what has kept me from starting a campaign back up, but sometimes you have no control over what decides whether you can do something or not.
Speaking of, my other major problem was having enough players. I have found that scheduling, the reason my last D&D campaign folded, is still a major issue, to the point that even going to a one session a month schedule that three out of six from that last group are completely unable to join in and a fourth that is still on the fence on if he wants to give up one weekend afternoon a month or not. Out of six previous players, only two of them have committed to one or more of the games in the Rotation, where all six had professed an interest in playing something with me as the GM again. But this just shows why that group perished - when I decided what days and times worked for me, and would not budge, three players were no longer interested. Gosh, I wonder why that last campaign crumbled? I get it, other things come first, as this is just a hobby, but if you are not paying your game master and your schedules are too far away from each other, you are just going to have to find a new table to play at. Would I like to get that last group back together? Yes, but as many scheduling conflicts as we had in that group, and no one is willing to change their own situation even now, that tells me that group will never exist as it once did.
So I went to the Book of Faces, and posted on many local RPG, nerdy, and tabletop wargaming groups what I was doing and got responses. Oh, I had a few friends here and there that were interested in getting into one or more of my games, but definitely not enough for what I wanted to do. Luckily, I managed to catch a few interested folks who could meet on the established day and time, enough to max out my D&D game at six, and enough to get my CPRed to the minimum of four to get it rolling. Yes, I want just five in any RPG I am running, but six is better, as inevitably someone has to bow out of the session come game day, and so I get the optimal five I wanted in the first place. And I am okay with just four for CPRed, this campaign will eventually roll into a long term arc, but for the beginning, to get everyone (including me!) used to the rules and the world. It also allows for other players to join at later points and not feel like they have missed out on much. Very nice.
The third game in the Rotation, Savage Worlds, is still shy a few players, but as you cannot find the core rulebook in print, and only one of the three settings I want to play (a rotation inside the Rotation) are currently in print, I am not in a huge hurry to get it rolling. It will be my least accessory intensive game, because while I am an admitted tactical combat junkie, with maps and all the minis, I recently decided my SW games were going to be the true palate cleanser for me and my players - theater of the mind, beer and pretzels, sitting on the couch instead of at a table, and just enjoying a relaxing game once a month. Yes, I am sticking with 15mm miniatures and and my patented (okay, stolen idea) grid under plexiglass map for both D&D and CPRed, I already have some wonderful minis (body bags!!!) and found so many more out there. I wish I was a better mini painter as there are so many fantastic sculpts out there that deserve better attention than what I can give them.
I almost have everything ready. Binders are almost done - I splurge and get 3- ring binders for each player and fill it with handy info, character sheets, blank paper for note taking, even graph paper for mapping out those dungeons (I am an admitted old school kind of DM) or abandoned warehouses deep in the combat zone - got most of the minis I need for the first session ready, I am tidying up a few other details... running RPG campaigns is as hard as a real job. But here we are, not too long now and I will be back to describing musty holes in the ground and slinging duce. This is the fun stuff.
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