Hello 2017!

So this is officially the first post for the new year. It is now 2017 and we got 365 days to celebrate in various ways waiting to be filled with gaming.  Lots of things in store for us this year, from a variety of games that need to be written, to a range of stories that desire to be penned down, and even a bunch of table top non-role-playing games that are to be released or further developed.  It is gonna be a busy yet fantastic year!

A Second Moment

It feels very apt to call upcoming next book A Second Moment.  As the Companion book to my first game release, A Single Moment, this book has a hefty amount of content in its pages.  When you're designing a game, it is not uncommon to find your mind wandering over a lot of ideas and different approaches that you could have done or wanted to try.  The tougher part comes when you need to "kill your darlings" and edit away parts which you feel over-complicate the initial goal of creating a game that people can grasp, enjoy, and play.  But afterwards, that's when you realize some of those ideas can be repackaged to work wonderfully with the existing rule set and deserve to be brought back as options.  And that's the main key word of A Second Moment: It is all about the options you have available.  The book is about taking a second moment to look at what is happening and find ways you can make it cooler and more awesome. The book offers alternate resolution systems which I initially hinted in the first book, such as systems that use ten-sided dice, or systems that use the variety of polyhedral dice instead of just the six-sided ones, as well as a few diceless systems, such as one that uses playing cards and another that completely removes any random element and trusts the players to resolve things without any random numbers being generated.    The book also offers ideas on running A Single Moment with more than 2 players, as well as running games which might feel almost like traditional role-playing games, with one "GM" being the antagonist, and the rest being a group of heroes... or switched around with one being the lone hero and the rest being the group of antagonists the hero has to go through.

It would be wrong not to admit that works such as Lone Wolf and Cub, Kill Bill, Scott Pilgrim, The Devil Wears Prada, RuPaul's Drag Race and the Super Sentai Series were not huge influences on this coming book.  And if you are all wondering how a confusing set of influences figure into this book, well, I guess you'll just have to imagine for now.  Finally, I've also offering what I call the Forty Minute Face Off, which is a way to play A Single Moment in far less than an hour, which can be perfect for those days when you just want a quick session.

12 New Games for 2017
Continuing my promise to myself to always explore new ground and never limit my experiences in gaming, this new year has once more opened the opportunity to explore twelve new game systems.  To be quite frank, the last two months were filled with instances where I was actually holding back from playing certain systems since I wanted to have them count for my list this year.

Last year's tally has these:  Twelve New Games for 2016
1) Pocket Odyssey
2) Marvel Heroic Role-playing Games
3) Fiasco: Bookhounds
4) Wield
5) #TagRPG
6) Mutant City Blues
7) 7th Sea, second edition
8) Curse of the Yellow Sign #3
9) Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine
10) Inspectres
11) A Single Moment
12) V20

And yes, I haven't really transcribed all of them yet.  I have a backlog of 40+ game session recordings to transcribe into this blog. But I definitely am happy to have tried such a range of games and I experimented with others. I am anxious to try a lot of other game systems, including King Arthur Pendragon, Mistborn, Blood and Honor: A World of Dew, the Star Trek Adventures RPG, the Frost Papers, the various Protocol Games and so many more.

Let's see what will be the games for this year.

More Updates
I'm also looking at making sure I be more active in updating the blog as well. I used to write a lot of articles, but that was eventually replaced by other ways I shared knowledge.  This year, I think it is time to go back to writing more articles, and maybe even having a new webshow with Rocky. Whether it is just YouTube or Twitch or something, we will find what will work best.

But yeah, 2017 is a very promising year!  Let's celebrate more gaming!