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Item the First:
I recently started up a D&D game with a couple of friends online. Well, Zeretal, and a friend who says he'll join when he's finished a paper, and a friend of Z's who I've only just met but is pretty cool, and a friend of mine that stood us up, and another friend of Z's who stepped in to fill in for him.
I'm really excited about it. I've wanted to do a game in the Ravenloft setting for years (I'd prefer to play, sure, but that's not likely to happen ever...), and this is the first time I've managed to do so. I'd been kind of nervous about it. I've only DM'd a couple of games IRL, and those were for my sisters, so I'm not an experienced DM by any stretch of the word. And its been ages. Plus, I hold Ravenloft on a pedestal as the ideal type of setting and gameplay experience, so I'm always worried I'll screw it up. But we ran our first game last night, and it went pretty well.
Though I painfully underestimated how much time the adventure I planned would take when translated to online play.
I'd planned out a (theoretically) short tutorial adventure for the players, because they were both new to D&D. My thought was that they'd have a chance to get used to combat using throwaways, and I could get an idea of how to run the game without putting their beloved first PCs at risk. It would also give them a chance to stock up on knowledge of the setting so they could really dig in to the RP once the "actual" game started. Needless to say, we didn't even get past the first encounter. First, the one player didn't show up. Then we recruited the fill-in. Then I had trouble because the IRC dice bot I'd downloaded and tested successfully failed to work when I needed it. We wound up moving the dice rolls to AIM (I hate AIM's diceroller). Having to manually add bonuses further slowed the game. Then the fill-in had to leave, and I wound up NPCing the NPC I'd given him.
There was some fun RP, but the weaksauce portion of the first combat encounter took forever. And we had to cut off in the middle of the larger part because the game ran so late.
Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun. I'd planned on cutting the tutorial short if it ran long, but the players were interested enough in finishing it, so I should manage to get to the rest of it.
I have logs of the first session. I've been thinking about posting them here, but I'm not sure whether there'd be interest, and if there was, whether I should post full logs, or just post links to the wiki I have set up for the campaign.
Item the Second:
Given my tendencies as a writer (i.e. my predictability when it comes to choosing subject matter as far from canon as possible), it was never a question of whether I would write a vampire story for the Roach pairing so much as when.
And how. Which is really the issue.
You can do vampires so many ways. And the thing about vampires is they're basic enough that readers would probably accept a vampire story where they might not accept, say, hive-minded alien abominations, sentient zombies, immortal ex-Nazis or magical mice. So, I have a plot for a vampire story that's been in my head for a while, but I've only the loosest conception of how the vampires in the story are going to act or operate.
On the one hand, nobody is going to want lame Twilight sparklepires (and I don't think I could respect myself as a writer if I went that route anyway).
On the other hand, nobody is going to want crazy, Lovecraftian, Necroscope-esque wamphyri either (except maybe me, but let's face it, I basically already went there with Sui Generis, so yeah, still no).
On a third hand still (wait, what?), I could go the traditional route and pull the rules from Dracula or earlier folklore. But , when you go traditional, you're pretty much giving up on making the rules do anything interesting and new. Plus, it would mean pretty much abandoning my usual preference to keep magic and science as ambiguously defined parts of a greater whole.
And I can't go the hard science route because...well, if I did, I'd just be writing Life again, wouldn't I?
So thoughts, should anyone care to weigh in?
