Kiss My Knits!

What did I do yesterday instead of knitting? First, I joined Facebook. Welcome to the World of Tomorrow!

Next, I tried something new with my husband. No, not like that, you weirdos. A new role playing game. No, not like… oh, I give up. See, when we cleaned up for my daughter’s birthday party a while back, we also went over the bookshelves in a way we hadn’t done in a while. Steve uncovered his old D&D red box. It still had old character sheets from high school in it.


Now, I’ve got a red box too, although I never got to play in high school. We haven’t played actual D&D since before we were married. In fact, one of the reasons we haven’t been playing these days is due to time constraints, but also because it’s tough to find people willing to play who are our age. Frankly we’re not that interested in playing with teenagers. It just seems like it would be kind of weird when you’re sitting around the table for hours at a stretch, kind of like we’re going back to hang around the old high school. Ew.

But the red box got him to reminiscing, and we realized that actually, with friends who’ve moved down here and new friends we’ve made, we do have friends who are adults who might be interested in playing D&D or some kind of RPG again. Unfortunately, they’d also have our time constraints. And it’s been a long time since we’ve played, so we’ve sort of been going back and forth over who’d have to GM, since we’re not that up on the minutiae of the rules anymore. We haven’t really played since second edition.

He says, and I am forced to agree, that I’d be the best GM. But man, what a lotta work! I haven’t GMed anything since Paranoia. I LOVED that game. Once, I provided insulated jumpsuits for the players as part of their gear. On the way to their mission, their tube car stopped, so one of them got out to try to fix it. He carefully put on his insulated jumpsuit and stepped onto the electrified grid. FOOF! Little downy feathers everywhere. He probably should have looked more closely at that jumpsuit – it was insulated against the cold.

Mwahahahahaaaa…

But I digress! Since we’re just two people with no guarantee of finding someone else at any given time to play, we bought Runebound. This is a ginormous boxed game where players take a character, move around a board, roll for combat, etc. It’s kind of D&D-y but without the sadistic gamemaster. Which, you know, is the best part, but maybe that’s just my time in Dragonrealms coming out.

The best thing about this game is that it can be played with one to six players. It’s very hard to find good two-player games in this genre. The reviews for it are decent. The say it can drag a little with too many players, but I don’t see us having a huge number of players for this. I’d say it’d be good to bring to Simucon, but as a GM somehow I always wind up having to guard the game room door, soo… maybe not.

We left the game in the middle last night, and when I got up this morning, somehow another person had mysteriously joined the game. Em put another figure on the board. We hope she didn’t rearrange any cards or tokens, but who knows?

I don’t think she’s ready to play just yet. The rules seem a little complex for a nine-year-old, so maybe when she’s a little older. We’ll finish up tonight and remove temptation from her path. And then figure out which of our friends we can talk into playing this or some other RPG some night.