New Years, blog, changes, looking back, optimism, unfounded optimism, actual optimism, wistful, some kind of quote.

New Years, blog, changes, looking back, optimism, unfounded optimism, actual optimism, wistful, some kind of quote.

Having dispensed with all that, you're getting a New Years blog post whether you like it or not (or as Mr. Feeze would say, "Weather you ice it or not!"). I generally don't get into the swing of making resolutions. Instead, I negotiate with myself. It's how I managed to stay off fast food for the past two years, get married, and keep my car running in the face of entropy. What follows are not true resolutions, but simply a hodgepodge of things I'm making it my business to do next year, knowing full well only the most respectable half of the list will get done. But like any creative endeavor, you can have a hundred ideas, only three will be worth pursuing, only two will be pursued, and only one will be completed. But you'll still be better off than all the people who hem and haw about their novel/screenplay/webcomic, but who don't have a written word to show for it.

• Give D&D a Fare Shake. As mentioned in our Edition Wars live webcast, the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons does something no previous edition of the game has done since the red box days. It makes me want to play D&D. I want to run a one-shot. I want to run a full campaign, from method one character generation to the final death/ascension to godhood of the heroes. I want to break from urban fantasy for the first time in almost twenty years and get a game of swords, sorcery, skullduggery, and scandal going.
• Bloody Unicorns. I'm moving ahead with the development of Bloodhounds and Unicarnage. The ideas behind these games is just two fun to leave in my head, and the limited playtesting I organized at Con on the Cob in 2014 was enough to whet my appetite for the settings, but not enough to put the games through their paces.
• Cthulhu Lives Again. I need to return to my old levels of involvement with Cthulhu Live. This goes beyond editing my playtested scripts and scenarios and getting them in print. I've got a backlog of ideas for this game that can't go fallow. In 2015 we'll see The Doom that Came to Carcossa, my most ambitious large-scale Cthulhu Mythos LARP to date.  And for all the work we did developing the game to make sure it could be used to run a campaign, I'm not aware of anyone actually doing this. I'm going to look at the feasibility of running a campaign at Moonlite Comics, my FLGS. I'll also start looking at smaller scale games. Always giving myself the goal of creating scenarios that will support 30 players has kept me away from other design and story possibilities, and not every Mythos fan has a convention where they can run the large games I tend to produce.
• Expecting Expectations. It's a bad habit born out of running games for players I was completely simpatico with for years, but I rarely state my expectations for a game as a GM. This has tanked one or two campaigns in the past, and campaigns don't deserve to die that way. For this year's games, I'm letting the players know exactly what's up in terms of theme, tone, and content.
• Run That Campaign. 2014 was my year of the one-shot scenario. 2015 is going to be my year of the campaign. I want to go long, no less than 5 sessions (not including character creation, though I will do my damnedest to make sure that doesn't become a momentum-killing session in and of itself) per game.
• Bonus Content Video Content Videos. I've got an HD camera, a laptop loaded with editing and FX software, a tripod, and a photographer's eye. Why the heck am I not making and posting videos all the time?

• Throw The Bastards Out. Though you wouldn't know it from my piece about being a fed up GM, I let my players get away with everything. Overall, I think this is a good thing. "That Game Master is best which masters games least."™ But 2014 was the year I reached my limit, where I ran multiple games that included a player so toxic, so un-fun, so chest beatingly, hair pullingly, ball kickingly awful that for the first time as a gamer and a professional I had to break my policy of never turning a player away from my table. And the tragedy is I should have ejected this player, and others like him, much sooner. 2015 is the year I cull the gaming herd, stop being a glutton for punishment, and respect the awesome by keeping the awful players out.

So retire 2014, level up in 2015, and play, Play, PLAY! We're gamers, dang it!

Bonus Resolution! 

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