Laugh Out Loud—I Can't See My Dice Through the Tears in My Eyes

Saturday's game was one of my favorites. None of the Regulars came (except my wife). The group consisted of my Wife, Two of my friends that I've known since Jr. High and the daughter of one of those friends.

I've only been running games for a year, and I only started running because I wanted to play Savage Worlds and I had a feeling, if I didn't run the game it wasn't going to happen. In that time I have never run a game that was a setting or adventure that I created myself. I just haven't really felt that I have the time to do so, and there are so many great settings for Savage Worlds. So I started Deadlands: Reloaded with the Coffin Rock adventure and then moved it into The Flood plot point campaign—the transition was a little ugly, but the shoehorn seems to be working.

The beginning of The Flood is a little Railroady. I couldn't believe the amount of "box text" that was part of the first few sessions. I try not to read verbatim out of the book, and paraphrase, and say things so they fit the characters—at least in my mind that's what I want to do. I don't know how well it goes, but the session seemed pretty good.

The combat involved fifteen villains, and three extra allies. I'm glad how easy it went, but I feel like I need to come up with a way to make combat a little more interesting. Justin (a.k.a. "Bruce") was reminiscing on a GURPS game he had played and reminded me of something that I've been wanting to do since almost day one of the Zombie Run game, and that is to relinquish a certain amount of narrative control to the players.

I've written a reminder down to do so and pinned it to the back of my Game Master screen multiple times, and then I get caught up in franticly trying to keep a step ahead of the players, but last night it became almost second nature to say, "you killed him, describe what happened." Now I have to relinquish even more responsibility to the players. I keep meaning to tell them the numbers required to hit at the beginning of combat so they can determine their dice rolls ahead of time.

The other thing I need to do is use the more creative combat maneuvers that the non-player characters have at their disposal, so the combat isn't just group A shooting at Group B, or Group A pounding on Group B. I have gotten better at actually remembering to use my Game Master Bennies, so the Wild Card Villains come off more villainous.

I'm pretty sure there were some rules that I was getting a little off. I thought that once I had been running a game for a year that I would have sessions in which I didn't have rules questions—though I think I'm getting a little better at breezing past and looking things up later (For instance, I didn't do the Fear spell right the first time, but I did get it right the second time it was cast).

Joshua had me laughing so hard at one point in the game, that my eyes were literally streaming tears, and I was having trouble breathing. Every time I get together with friends that I have known since Jr. High and High School is a good time (Even when those times are bitter sweet).

I'm looking forward to the next session.