With Bated Breath

Preface
     It is indeed "Bated Breath". I looked it up and this is what I found.

On With the Show
     I don't like Father's Day. It is a privilege to be a father, it is its own reward. I don't need a day to "honor" me for it. However, my wife informs me every year that I have to not only humbly accept the fact that our kids want to honor me, I also have to designate a gift. (They claim I am notoriously difficult to buy for. Posh! I say. Get me an RPG or action/historical war movie and call it done.) So, last Sunday morning I duly ordered Dungeon Crawl Classics Core rulebook. I ordered it off Amazon. The particular seller I chose claimed to ship within 24 hours, the chief reason I chose them.
     I didn't really expect that to happen, since I ordered on Sunday. I didn't expect it to go out Tuesday, either, which it did. I was really hoping to have it by yesterday at the latest, so I could get some quality time with it this weekend. Alas, it was not the case. Of course, I have the pdf. I even have it printed and in a binder. I want to hold the book. There is a certain je ne sais qiou about having the real deal. A certain mystique of the bound tome.

Thus it is that I wait. Tomorrow must surely be the day. In the meantime, in addition to the binder, I have been catching up on forums and the like. One thing that strikes me in a lot of the forum threads is the brewhaha over the dice. There is only one die type that can't be fully emulated with the dice already in any roleplayer's collection. The d7/d14 is the lone hold-out. I will order 2 or 3 d14's, half them for d7 rolls, and call it a day. In the meantime, I'll just use a d8 and re-roll 8's. Yet something so simple is very polarizing for a lot of people.

Another head-scratcher for me is all the carrying-on about "all the tables". I know it is a lot of tables, but how many are used at the same time? In the same turn? In the same encounter? I'm sure there will be occasional times when more than a couple are in play, but I suspect not all that often. Couple that with the fact that a lot of them are more "player focused", which evens out the responsibility for their use. Give each player a copy of the relevant crit table for his race/class, spell tables as appropriate, and the "table burden" is much more evenly distributed.

Back to waiting, pondering, and reading about the game, while I await the tome.