A Short Game This Week

I moved the Deadlands: Reloaded game to Friday this week, people had fewer conflicts—all week I've been working hard at getting my Resume and Portfolio in order, and I hadn't really had a chance to prepare for the game properly.

Friday before the game I was trying to read through the material for the game and my 1.5 year old came to sit on the couch next to me, and threw up. So, I cleaned that up. Just as I finished taking care of that, my four year old wet her pants.

When people showed up, I still had not finished prepping the game. The couple that came have a child who has problems with seizures, so we warned them about the state of heath in our home (their child was with them) and they made a quick trip to the grandparents. The other person that had planned on coming sent a message that she wasn't feeling well. I felt like calling the game, but everyone wanted to play.

So we started late and I was under prepared.

When we got to the end of the only encounter I had planned, I let the small group know that we had reached the end of what I prepared, and called the game an hour earlier than I generally plan.

I generally like to run games completely analog. Part of what I like about Role Playing Games, is that they are low tech. I often use the computer to prepare the game, but I like the table to be free of Electronics. (The Exception being that I do want to get an e-reader) Since I wasn't completely ready for the game, I used a laptop as GM Screen, and Books.

Running a game out of PDF versions of the books seems a little slow. I had managed to get all the stat blocks for the evening copied into Word, I found that to be very convenient.

Halfway into the encounter my wife was mocking me for closing the notebook computer's screen every time I wanted to look at the battle mat—suggesting that I use the webcam. Frankly that was brilliant!!!

You can see from this screenshot (click for full size) that I had Deadlands, and The Flood open in PDF as well as a word file for my Encounters. If you look close you'll see that all the figures we were using were Zombies—I need to get some more appropriate figures for this game. I have the Deadlands board game; the figures in that are appropriate for the player characters, but I need to look at all my little toys and see what I have for the Monsters. The Encounter from last nights game was our player characters versus tunnel critters—mostly represented by Zombies on the map.

We didn't get a lot of story covered, so I would have awarded 1 XP. However, I was impressed that nobody took the "bait" and acted impulsively versus some of the things leading up to the final encounter of the evening or attacked inappropriately—so 2 XP for the night.