We're in the endgame of the Shackled City adventure path from Dungeon magazine, which means we're now in the process of looking at games for the future. (Hard to believe that we've been playing that campaign for eight months now - since the start of August. It doesn't seem that long.)
The group are more-or-less united in a desire to play something other than D&D for a change. Sadly, though, there's no real inspiration as to what we do want to play. So, looking at the options, we came up with a list of available systems.
Unfortunately, from my own point of view, there are only two systems I currently know well enough to run, being d20 and Storyteller. And I'm not really keen to expand this list at this stage - I don't have a great deal of free time, and there aren't any games out there currently that say to me, "You must run this!"
There is another unfortunate problem, though, also caused by a lack of time. In addition to working full-time (when I am working), I'm busy running two pipe bands and the local BB. Granted, none of these are solo efforts, but they do demand a lot of my time. This, in turn, limits my ability to develop adventures for a game.
The biggest problem that I have, when it comes to running games, is a lack of quality published adventures. This applies to every system except (fairly vanilla) D&D. Even d20 variants, or even a heavily house-ruled D&D would suffer from this weakness. In most cases, systems just don't have published adventures, or have a very small number of vildly variable quality.
Now, it's probably important to point out that the published adventures for D&D are also of variable quality. However, with the sheer number of them that there are (between Dungeon magazine, the Wizards website, and the d20 publishers), you can usually avoid the dross and use only the best ones.
It's funny - I never used to use published adventures at all, and didn't use published worlds either. Now I find that the one is almost indispensible, and Eberron is starting to look mighty inviting as well...
With us all working full time and having other issues to handle outside of work it's understandable that published adventures are looking so good just now. Without a lot of support from the publisher a game can die because of lack of adventures.
ReplyDeleteFor myself, I'm just getting my flat sorted out after major work on boiler, both grans having heart attacks and work wanting more out of me as my boss is looking to retire soon (which means looking after 3+ servers and about 300+ desktops) so life is hectic.
I just wonder if there is anyone in the current group wanting to run something other than D&D?