Tuesday, October 26, 2010

The Top 5 Reasons That I Haven't Updated Fistful of Coppers In Over A Month

So, yeah...

I hope you folks who were interested in my stuff initially are still out there so I can explain myself.

#5 The Distance

My prospective gaming group was located two and a half hours west of me, in my old college stomping grounds. The only way that I would be able to commit to a game was by calling off of work on Saturday, driving into Oberlin in the evening and hoping that everyone there hadn't decided to do something else in the intermittent time. I would rather go out to Oberlin to visit my girlfriend and spend a quiet weekend together where we can cook, work and spend time with each other, which have become few and far between.

#4 The Ol' Gamer ADD

After a prolonged four-month period of old school fantasy influence, my imagination began to crave something new for inspiration. I've been reading the Dresden Files, Raymond Chandler and John Dies At The End, watching old 60s Westerns and 80s action movies, both foreign and domestic and listening to Man Or Astroman?, Bomb the Music Industry! and episodes of Yours Truly Johnny Dollar. I'm not really sure what my next idea for a campaign will be. Maybe I'll revisit Bullets and Tequila, play around with Mutant Future or go to my old standby, Savage Worlds. Maybe I'll unpack 4th Edition to do a ridiculous Scott Pilgrim-like game with D&D tropes replacing beat-em-ups. Maybe none of the above.

#3 GM Burnout

It happens to the best of us. All this prep, prep, prep towards an eventual goal that may never occur. For as long as I can remember, I've always been the GM. It's probably been 6 years since I've played in a game and even before then, the games I joined never really lasted more than two sessions. As a result, I found myself both a little disenchanted with the process and really, really wanting to just play a game. I think that the Motherlode game really suffered because I was trying to run a game that I had never experienced from the other side of the screen and I fear that something similar might happen with anything I try to run.

#2 No One Around Here Seems To Want To Do It

I've only really started making friends here recently and so far, none of them seem to be too into the role-playing idea. I sent out emails to all of the people who were so supportive of my Library D&D game to see if they wanted to play something, but never heard anything back. I'd love to run something for my new library school folks, but it's a little daunting, given that we've only known each other for a few months

#1 GRAD SCHOOL!

Seriously. School takes up pretty much all of my free non-work time, what with project meetings, message board postings, papers and reading about 3-4 books a week. It's been impossible to even fathom finding the time to get a game together. But hell, if David at Tower of the Archmage can keep up his posting regimen, then I can too!

I'm going to try and start updating this thing again as I catch up with the blogs that I haven't read in a month. I hope that folks are still willing to take a look back at the Fistful of Coppers blog. I feel like I disappeared at a time when people began getting really excited about my stuff and I'd hate to disappoint the people who gave me the confidence to keep posting. I feel like an asshole for accepting Scott's setting creation type challenge in September and then dropping of the face of the planet, so hopefully I will be able to rectify that with more detail on the Motherlode campaign, along with some musings on a potential gonzo kitchen-sink Western game and another potential column called Mixtapes.

So, from all of us here, it's good to be back.