It’s been a couple of years since I last posted about my fantasy role-playing game, Argothald. That game has been a part of my life for about 35 years, including a 20-year hiatus. If I’m to use this blog to document what’s important to me, I should check in on Argothald once in a while.
At the time I last posted about Argothald, I’d just started running the game after that long hiatus. For a while, we were using a D6 system, then we returned to my older mathematical system from two decades ago. The complexity of the system and the difficulty in scheduling meetings made things challenging, but we managed… for a while.
It gradually became harder to get enough players to come to make the game viable. Finally, last December, we had to acknowledge that we wouldn’t be able to continue to meet on a regular basis. I put the game back on hiatus.
Fortunately, I wouldn’t have to wait another 20 years. Since last July, I’ve being going to Hobbytown in Nanuet NY for their weekly board-game night. Through gaming, I’ve made some new friends. Some of them expressed interest in playing a new tabletop role-playing game.
So I found myself running Argothald again with a new group of people. This time, I decided to switch from a private overly-mathematical system to a professionally-published one that focused on storytelling: Fate Core. We had our first expedition last weekend. It went well. There were the usual difficulties in starting a brand-new game with a brand-new system: character generation took a while, and there was some fumbling through rulebooks during the game. Everyone enjoyed themselves, and that’s the bottom line.
I’d like to be able to blend the old players with the new, but scheduling issues remain. This makes me sad. Still, I must move forward. Perhaps the old players will return; they’ll always be welcome. Perhaps new players will come in. The game goes on!