2014 in Review (300th Post!)
Was this a good year for gaming at the home of W.Q. Robb? Let's take a look at the year in review
From January to March I concluded the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying campaign featuring the Ultimate Posse. As far as I can tell looking around the blogosphere, I might be the only person to play this game a) with scratchbuilt PC's and b) more than three times. The Ultimate Posse campaign was a hell of a lot of fun for everyone, but I started feeling like the decisions the players were making didn't have a huge impact on the effect of die rolls. I've been pondering that a lot lately, but it was still a good run for this group on a single RPG. My daughter, Macy, joined the gaming group as an on-off player.
April to August had J Evans taking over as GM and running a home-brewed RPG based on the video game franchise Mass Effect using the Cortex Plus system as its core. There were a lot of things I liked about this campaign and the rules J came up with, including having different dice when you do things in tandem with other PC's reflecting how well you get along with that person. I was binge-watching Revenge at the time and was thinking that the ever-fluid inter-personal relationships of soap-operas like that one matched what J was trying to do with his relationship dice. Isaac, J's son, came into the group at that point too.
In August I also did the RPGaDay blog-a-thon, answering 31 questions about my gaming preferences. I also did a one-shot of FATE, "The Legion of Extraordinary Dudes" which was a pretty comical outing.
In September and October I started a Firefly RPG campaign, but I felt the campaign had two problems. One, the group was too large for both the genre and the ruleset, neither of which have much in the way of internal differentiation to make large groups really viable. Two, Fifth Edition D&D came out, and the group wanted to take it for a spin.
In November and December I ran the group through a small pre-published adventure using the 5E rules. Reviews were generally positive but admittedly mixed. Two new players, Tony and his daughter Emma, joined the group.
In terms of blog traffic, the best month was August, clocking in an all-time high of 2,069 page hits for the month. My top post of the year was my response to the post I did for The Initiative: Superhero RPG Appendix N Blog Challenge (trivia bit: it's the sixth most popular of all time. My top three are a post I did about modular dungeon tiles that I linked to on The Miniatures Page, my review of the Primeval RPG, and a meandering post about Grognardia.)
What was good about 2014? My group got together pretty consistently throughout the year and had a great time gaming. We added three new people to the gaming community, two of whom are children and will hopefully become part of a future generation of tabletop RPG gamers. As to what will happen next year? That will be the topic of a different post.
This is also my 300th post, which is pretty cool. Thank you, loyal readers, for making this blog still a joy to write. I hope reading it is as much for you as it is for me to write it!
-WQRobb
From January to March I concluded the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying campaign featuring the Ultimate Posse. As far as I can tell looking around the blogosphere, I might be the only person to play this game a) with scratchbuilt PC's and b) more than three times. The Ultimate Posse campaign was a hell of a lot of fun for everyone, but I started feeling like the decisions the players were making didn't have a huge impact on the effect of die rolls. I've been pondering that a lot lately, but it was still a good run for this group on a single RPG. My daughter, Macy, joined the gaming group as an on-off player.
April to August had J Evans taking over as GM and running a home-brewed RPG based on the video game franchise Mass Effect using the Cortex Plus system as its core. There were a lot of things I liked about this campaign and the rules J came up with, including having different dice when you do things in tandem with other PC's reflecting how well you get along with that person. I was binge-watching Revenge at the time and was thinking that the ever-fluid inter-personal relationships of soap-operas like that one matched what J was trying to do with his relationship dice. Isaac, J's son, came into the group at that point too.
In August I also did the RPGaDay blog-a-thon, answering 31 questions about my gaming preferences. I also did a one-shot of FATE, "The Legion of Extraordinary Dudes" which was a pretty comical outing.
In September and October I started a Firefly RPG campaign, but I felt the campaign had two problems. One, the group was too large for both the genre and the ruleset, neither of which have much in the way of internal differentiation to make large groups really viable. Two, Fifth Edition D&D came out, and the group wanted to take it for a spin.
In November and December I ran the group through a small pre-published adventure using the 5E rules. Reviews were generally positive but admittedly mixed. Two new players, Tony and his daughter Emma, joined the group.
In terms of blog traffic, the best month was August, clocking in an all-time high of 2,069 page hits for the month. My top post of the year was my response to the post I did for The Initiative: Superhero RPG Appendix N Blog Challenge (trivia bit: it's the sixth most popular of all time. My top three are a post I did about modular dungeon tiles that I linked to on The Miniatures Page, my review of the Primeval RPG, and a meandering post about Grognardia.)
What was good about 2014? My group got together pretty consistently throughout the year and had a great time gaming. We added three new people to the gaming community, two of whom are children and will hopefully become part of a future generation of tabletop RPG gamers. As to what will happen next year? That will be the topic of a different post.
This is also my 300th post, which is pretty cool. Thank you, loyal readers, for making this blog still a joy to write. I hope reading it is as much for you as it is for me to write it!
-WQRobb
A good year, indeed. Congrats on the blogging milestone.
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