Thinking about gaming again

[ronboakes_87114]

Recently, I've been thinking of starting up a new D&D game -- provided I can find the time and the players. To that end, I've made some near-decisions about what I'd like to do:

• Use D&D 3.5 rules.
• Hold the game on Saturday afternoons about once a month
• Hope that I can get some friends to join me in this
• Start seriously next spring/summer after I complete my Masters Degree

Some explanations.

Based on what I've heard, and my looking at the books, D&D 3.x is a sufficient improvement over AD&D 2 and 1 to make it worth dealing with. Further, since I have a set of the basic books, and the core rules are, mostly, available on line through the Open Gaming whatever (WoTC's equivalent of the GPL for d20 text and ideas), this won't require my players to purchase new materials if they don't want to. I've also been able to find decent custom database applications that will support D&D 3.x on modern machines (and I'm not sure the AD&D 2 applications will still work very well)

At this point I've got enough other things that I'm doing that I don't think I have time for a weekly game, but a monthly game would work out well. Similarly, most week nights are pretty well booked, but my Saturday afternoons can be free at least once a month.

As long as I have school work, it will have to come before any gaming (although family, work and some other commitments come before school most of the time). So I cannot get ready to run a campaign style game until I have time to prepare and update for each session.

However, I'm thinking that the first step (after confirming that I have players) would be to run a quick one-shot game with two purposes. First, to get used to the new rules in D&D 3.5 (like the fact that Armor class is backwards of what it was in the older rules, and that combat is now a normal d20 skill roll). Second to get some of the rust off of our general role-playing skills. I'm tempted to use or get a "dungeon crawl" type module and just create some characters to send through it and then throw them away. I don't know when I'd be ready for this (and it probably depends on what I'm willing to do when I'm in India without access to MY PC and heavy books).

Comments

[rono-60103.livejournal.com]

Actually, it was WoTC's announcement that got me thinking about it again a few weeks ago. This time it sounds like 4.0 will be pretty backwards compatible with 3.5 so I won't need to replace my unused -- or hopefully by the time 4.0 is out barley used -- books to keep current.

[mbcrui.livejournal.com]

We've been playing nearly every sunday afternoon since May with the kids. You should get Derek involved, I bet he'd have a wonderful time...

[aeto.livejournal.com]

If you're looking for victims, er, players, I may could be tempted. My Sundays are up with the kitties, but I can generally free up a Saturday once a month or so easily.