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After playing in Rowe's Erzo IV campaign for three and a half years I'm kind of tired of playing it. We finished the first part of the campaign and my character rode off into the sunset and I'm pretty much done with it. So the question is do I keep showing up to the day game? In general I think that's a yes because I like being with my friends, I just don't want to play Erzo at this time.

So I showed up and watched a DVD and worked on my collection list. Not that much done because I do like to listen to them play and I do participate a little. Fantasy is just not that exciting to me and the Runequest rules are rather bland after using it for 15 years. There's just not much you can do with your character to improve during gameplay. I like D&D's ability to customize your character.

As a player it's nice to level up your character and add new abilities or see how current abilities improve. Basic Role Playing is a bit too subtle about that. There is no satisfaction of hitting a goal. I suppose GURPS has that subtle character improvement goal problem too, but at least you have the choice of what to improve.

The campaign is also rather aimless at this point. That's pretty much the playing style that we're used to and that Rowe runs well. But it does add to the malaise for me. The whole building up power structures that we're into now is not my cup of tea.

Maybe I just need a few weeks break to build up my yearning for role-playing. It can be a week in week out grind and it wears you down. I don't know what I want. But I do have my own campaign to work on so it's not like Saturdays are a total waste for me.
After two sessions of GURPS BattleTech the campaign is slowly shaping up. Tonight was a more typical session length of a bit over two hours. With that short amount of time you really can't get that much done, but then again I don't have to GM for hours at a time so it's not exhausting.

So we finished the first combat, a practice session between the command and recon lances of the 4th Altairan Lancers. After getting beat up in the last session, the players started playing smarter and held their own in this session until Donald got a couple of lucky shots off to take down two enemy Mechs and end the fight.

We used the new Edge rules, which are modeled after MechWarrior Edge. Sweet and Woo used way too much edge, especially for a simulator run, though I guess if they were playing for real it was good practice for how to use Edge. In general Edge seems to work ok and the players didn't have any problems with those rules.

I've read the Advantages section of GURPS 4th Edition and the MechWarrior good traits have been converted. As I slowly read the rest of the GURPS rules I will continue to firm up the onversions and update the characters accordingly. I suppose it'll take me another couple of weeks to get the character conversion stuff done. Maybe another couple of weeks to read the GM rules so we can do non-Mech adventures.

The Griffin iTalk is working well. The recordings are as good as the tape recorder I had and it's so much faster getting it into my Mac this way. It does use up a lot of battery power and I don't think I will get three hours on a full chage, though you can hook it up to your computer and use that for power.
Copyright (c) 2004 Kevin C. Wong
Page Created: August 29, 2004
Page Last Updated: August 29, 2004