Graph Paper Games

So right now I'm having a sort of creative blitz going on.  My son begged me to run a mini-campaign using the Pathfinder rules, so I pulled together a small adventure (about 12 encounters).  Once that's done, I have my 4E campaign, the sequel to the one that was run by another member of gaming group.  I'm trying to see if you can do a "sandbox" campaign in 4E. We're 11th level right now, having been quickly jacked up by the previous GM, who leveled us up every three or four encounters.  I'm going to slow that way down to where it is in the rules (one level every ten encounters or so).  My thought was to cobble together about thirty encounters: five 10th level, ten 11th level, ten 12th level, and five 13th level counters.  I'd then get them together in groups of 1 to maybe as many as ten, and then scatter them around the sandbox.  Get some rumors and other adventure hooks and then let the players wander around.  We'll see how it works. In addition

For the past few months, things have just really been clicking with my D&D group.  We've got a good roster of people who enjoy gaming and enjoy gaming with each other.  I've been posting pics of games over at my other blog, but I can show them here too. Now, it is all coming to a screeching halt.  The story is this: we game every other weekend because on the "off" weekends one of the players has his daughter visiting him (he and the girl's mother are divorced).  Since these alternating weekends are about the only time he has with her, he doesn't spend any of it gaming.  However, after Friday my work schedule has me working every other weekend between now and the beginning of June, when it lightens up again.  That's the rest of March, April, and May where the group has to decide if they are going to game without me, or without the other player. Right now, we're brainstorming solutions.  Sunday afternoon might be a possibility, but that's ti