Hitting the ground running
tovaglia and Napkin visited last weekend, and we had a nice time pottering around and having our traditional leisurely chat over a long and bibulous meal. Then back to work, including a Parents' Conference and several successes on the Oxbridge front (yay!). This weekend also saw a fun birthday party for the elder son of some of our friends; but both Neuromancer and I were too tired to handle hectic kids at the after-party and bailed out early.
Saturday mornings have a new routine, which might or might not last: N takes the kids to Dan's dancing school (Katy can read very happily while he's in class), dropping me off at the Town Moor to join in the Newcastle Parkrun (a 5km weekly event). I was incredibly impressed by the event. It was huge, with over 400 runners, and so well-organised that it even had volunteer pace-runners (keep up with the nice lady wearing a '35' shirt if you want to complete the course in 35 minutes, and so on). I walked home afterwards (another 4km, so all good exercise) and even got some work done.
I'm also currently hugely excited by RPGs, and have rediscovered the joys of opening D&D stuff. (Katy was soooo excited that it had all arrived.) Production values have risen hugely since I last played, with beautiful table-maps (both generic and module-specific) and counters to play out encounters. The whole thing seems faster-paced and less deadly to lower-level characters than I remember, on a casual flick through the rules (in particular, healing is much faster). We're playing the 'essentials' ruleset, which offers a slimmed-down selection of classes/races/equipment/spells etc from the (now hugely bloated) list so as not to overwhelm new and/or young players; in fact the range is very similar to original first edition three-volume AD&D, so I feel right at home.
The (nicely boxed) Starter Set is based around a good idea; a solo 'choose-your-own-adventure' section gradually introduces key rules and concepts, building up a character sheet as you go (a nice mix of pre-generated and player-influenced) before taking those characters on a simple dungeon crawl as a group. My plan is to go through this solo stuff today with each child (after chores/shopping etc and before dinner out with my dad), then run the adventure over one or two sessions once we've got a group together (we have enthusiastic schoolfriends of Katy, but it's hard to arrange a time they're all free!). After that, they can do a 'proper' character generation (once they know the ropes a little and have some idea what they're picking) and I'll put the new party through a different Lvl 1 adventure. At that point, each player will decide which of their two characters to play for the rest of the campaign. (I have enough stuff to keep them busy for quite literally months of gameplay if they take to it; if they don't, I'll simply store it away until they're a little older.)
I've also read through the new Star Wars RPG (Edge of the Empire) -- again, in a nice Starter Set. It's a lovely, narrative-heavy system where dice rolls check for two things; success/failure and good/bad side-effects (in any combination), driving things forward in an exciting Star-Wars-ish manner (you hit someone but run out of ammo; you miss the stormtrooper but hit the door controls next to him...) However, it's conceptually a lot more complex than D&D, so I think we'll keep it in reserve for a later date.
Time to start the Sunday a.m. routine!