Gaslamp Vanguard: The Dragon's Throat

Friday June 28, 2013 at 8:00pm gaslamp vanguard, game session notes, trogland Comments (0) »

Good Sessions, Upcoming Holidays, etc

Saturday November 8, 2008 at 11:36am gas, gaming, birthdays Comments (0) »

I'm currently sitting in our church's sanctuary while Sheri directs here choir practice. I had to get up at 8:30 on a saturday. Blah. Also, my left leg hurts for some unknown reason. Yeah, yeah. Complain, complain.

Anyway, gas is down to $1.99/gal here in Erwin. As I've previously declared, I stop complaining about it when it drops below $2.


One of the reasons I so disliked getting up at 8:30 this morning so much is because we had a rather late gaming session last night (not that i would have wanted to get up that early on a saturday *anyway*). The party wound up in a rather large and somewhat pivotal combat and we didn't want to break off in the middle of that. It was worth staying up for though.

As it turned out, we only had 4/6 of our players last night. We *thought* we were going to have 5/6, but another player had a minor crisis to attend to and had to bow out at the last minute. Since the rest of us were there already and wanted to game, and since 4 is a decent number, we decided to play anyway. I generally don't like to play with more than one player absent, but the way scheduling gets with a 6-player game, I'm starting to think the options are accept some absences when necessary, or just don't play - and the lower the acceptable number of players, the more likely it'll happen. I'm completely open to suggestions from the player on this (as always), but i may lower my 'gaming threshold' to 4 players in the interest of actually playing. When there's a month between sessions, i tend to get out of 'the groove' and it usually takes me an hour or so into the session just to get back in tune with the world & what's going on...and when you're only meeting once a month(ish) for a few hours, you don't get very far when your gm is constantly 'loading'...

Despite the fact that we missed a couple of players (and we *did* miss them), I think it was a good session. The party accomplished something important, we laughed at a lot of in-game jokes, and all the players seemed to be enjoying the game. Even Nick commented that the last, monumental encounter had been particularly interesting & fun - and that meant a lot to me. I have a lot of fun coming up with interesting/intricate/bizarre scenarios for the players to encounter & deal with, but my biggest goal is always to make sure the players enjoy the game. When they really seem to be having fun in a session, it's a success. I consider myself to be a good gm, and i think my game and the world is interesting, believable, and fun to play in - and i do take some amount of pride in it - but some of the players are harder to read than others and I can't always tell if they're really into it. Sessions like last night's are good ones. :-)


As for today - we have some errands to run after this choir practice wraps up, and then we're heading over to Nick's where he's going to make us all some burgers for *his* birthday. Apparently, he insisted on this. I'm not gonna complain. I think the plan is to spend the evening playing board games. :-)

We've now officially entered the Season of Celebrations - we have a ton of birthdays interspersed with the upcoming holidays. Very busy time of year, but in a good way overall.


~PS