But not in a bad way.

Sure we completed a story arc in the Will of the Saint campaign last night, defeating a host of demons by the skin of our teeth, but the big news is that the game is moving.

After almost 5 years of gaming in Josh and Nick’s Moms living room the game will now take place at Joe’s house starting on Monday next. There were 2 main reasons for making the move. The most important to us is that 3 of our guys have made a 1 hour plus trek down to the game every Monday for 5 years. We felt it was time to reverse that, and now the other 4 of us will make the commute up to Joe’s instead. The other reason is that though Mom loves having us all around, she is working on a house remodel and we would have had to relocate for some time in any case. Joe does have a dedicated gaming room so we will be able to leave things set up week to week, which will be nice, but we’ll all miss Mom. We’ll have a game night in her newly remodeled house sometime next year, just so she does not miss us too much.

So at midnight last night we started loading Joe’s truck with all the stuff, and it sure is a lot of stuff:

• 1 entertainment center turned into a storage cabinet
• 18 Army Transport cases full of painted mins (some are D&D pre-paints and have been based and touched up)
• At least 2 of every Dwarven Forge set
• lots of plastic drawer units for storing said Dwarven Forge pieces
• 2 plastic tubs of terrain
• our white boards, pens, and magnets

Here is what the storage looked like before we moved it all.

Check out Joe’s truck full of it all.

The gang will be meeting at Joe’s on Sunday to get everything settled for Mondays game. Pictures of the new setup coming soon.

It has been a thorn in our side for quite some time. The 3.5 rules really seem geared towards 4 players, causing a lot of monsters to die rather quickly when facing our parties. At lower levels we have managed this issue fairly well, but at the higher level we are playing at right now it has made it less than fun for Kelly as we mow down his carefully crafted encounters.

One of the potential issues we identified relates to our house rule on “fate chips”. To mitigate the game breaking effects these can have, while still allowing the players the ability to use them heroically, we are currently limiting each player to 1 chip expenditure per encounter. This worked well last night. Chips were still spent, but with a bit more discretion than in the past.

The other issue we have certainly identified, as have the D&D developers, is that it takes 3 encounters to deplete enough “resources” from the party to potentially present a truly challenging encounter. As a group we are not of the “let’s rest to get back spells” mind set, but even so it can be hard for Kelly to deplete enough of Vaal’s spells and our other renewable resources to make it a challenge. In the current campaign Kelly has employed a “deadline” method as well as many “linked encounters”.

When on a deadline the party cannot rest or the “bad guys” will win, so they have to operate on fewer and fewer resources to complete their mission. This can be a lot of fun and was the primary method he used in our hostage rescue in the City of Brass. We had some very entertaining running fights and chase scenes.

Linked encounters give the players no opportunity to rest as one encounter leads directly into the next, ala Aliens. That has been the story this week as we entered a demi-plane to rob an ancient demon temple of an artifact. The party had to fend off 2 abyssal drakes as a warm up and now are assaulting this demon temple. Lots of fun!

Pictures of this weeks game are up in the gallery. They are a bit darker than I’d like so I will color correct them and re-upload later today.

Nick has submitted the overviews of the two Freeport based campaigns he ran for us, check them out.

Freeport 1

Freeport 2

With the holiday most of the group was out of town so no D&D, but 1/2 of us did play a game, of sorts.

5 of the 7 active members of the group are also very active in the SCA, as are 3 of our 4 inactive players. Joe has built a permanent tournament field (based on a period illustration) and we all got to go fight there in his yearly tournament. What a blast.