One Month Later

If only my "one track moods" were as dedicated and persistent as my ADD, what a world that would be. Alas, this is not the case. The "in betweens" I've been afflicted with are still on me, I'm afraid. There's also the little issue of real life (you know, the place where gaming and all that goes with it is NOT of paramount importance). Ugh! What a way to end a summer. At least the Crimson Tide is back on the field.

Anyway, please accept my apologies for this non-post, I just wanted to say Hi and that I am still fairly useless as a gamer/blogger. At least until this doldrum passes. I do constantly pick things up, read them for a page or a couple of days, then put them right back down. I've even dabbled with Next. Blasphemy! There are some interesting ideas starting to come out of that. My initial reaction is that they are good ideas but that they don't necessarily need to be mechanical ideas.

Like Backgrounds. Some nifty ideas to personalize your character, and it's not the end of the world to provide some sort of bonus to something, but they got a little carried away. For example, the Soldier background. Fairly self-explanatory, right? If I were to use something similar, I might tell the player that it means whatever you think it might mean. You automatically keep your gear in good repair, you know how to make and strike a camp, you're used to long marches, and so on. In Next, though, it could mean those things. But whether it does or not, it definitely means you have three particular skills. Period. All soldiers have them.

In spite of the negative tone, I'm not bashing them. It's still in test, so hopefully they will instill some flexibility into the Backgrounds as the process grinds onward.

So, there it is. My first post in a month. Sorry you had to wait a month for this bit of drivel. Hopefully my attention will right itself soon.

Personal Insight

This should be brief, but we all know what happens when I say that.

I am always trying to understand myself. I'm always looking within, trying to better understand my motivations, and without trying to understand the forces outside myself that drive me. It is a never-ending process. Well, today I further refined my understanding of my ADD a little. Essentially, it takes two shapes.


One is simple reading. When I am in the grips of this ADD I am into reading games for the joy of reading. It is sort of a manic time, seeing me bounce from title to title. I am easily swayed by the least little thing, such as the mention of another game or even a mechanic from another game, a song that was popular during a favorite campaign can also trigger a change.


The other type is when I am trying to settle on a system to work with. One I can tinker with house rules and setting stuff, like maps and custom rules tweaks. This one isn't quite as helter-skelter. It usually centers around a small number of similar systems. Eventually, it will settle on one system and all will be right with the world.


Right now I am in a Reading Phase, so be prepared for a whirlwind of titles the next few days. At least I hope it isn't more than a few days . . .

When is Gamer ADD a Good Thing?

I saw this post on Back to the Dungeon this morning. Actually, I saw the header late last night, while working on a map, but decided to hold off on looking at it. I was feeling somewhat vulnerable to my ADD last night, so I decided not to chance it. The post is about Pathfinder (in case you haven't looked). For all my old school palaver, I love the idea of Pathfinder. Something about the presentation and art, I suppose. It's not as if I had an inordinate love for 3.x that transferred to PF. I even flirted with the idea of trying to use the Beginner's Box as a sort of PF Lite, but that notion died out rather quickly.

The reality of my situation is that I will never play PF, and the chances of ever GMing are slim and none. As I have often lamented, I have no group. If I were to run anything, the players would consist of my 16 y/o son, a 15 y/o family friend, and my wife. Trying to nail down two socially aware teens is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. And my wife is pretty much along for the ride. They have all played D&D to some degree. Trying to teach them anything else is really out of the question. Trying to teach them PF? Not gonna happen.

At the end of the day, pretty much everything I do, gaming-wise, is for my own edification. The maps, the house rules, even this blog, is all just a creative outlet. It's a journey-as-destination sort of thing. That is part of what drives my ADD. I spend a certain amount of time with a particular design and eventually my mind starts to wander. I get another idea for something else, or I read a review or some such, and become inspired by someone's passion for the system they're talking about.

I realized something while reading that PF post, though. My ADD and my situation has become such that I just don't have the patience to read such a monstrous system anymore. I want to work with things that inspire my imagination, not bludgeon it to death with minutiae. That's not a knock against PF. I know it does what it does very well. From the point of someone who would be reading it as an academic exercise, though, it is more than I can to tangle with. As someone who would only ever play it as a GM (and that is a million-to-one shot, anyway), it is far too much to commit to my already dodgy memory.

So, this is like that line from Platoon, after they found their buddy all strung up:

"Barnes was the eye of our rage. And through him, our captain Ahab, we would set things right again. That day we loved him."

Today, realizing my ADD will never hold up to a rules extravaganza like PF, it saved me from shifting focus. Realizing the limitations of it actually kept me concentrated on D&D. Today, I love it.