Gaming in 2022

 

End of year gaming doughnut.

2022 was a good year for gaming with a solid return to face-to-face, marred a little by missing North Star due to COVID in the family.

All in all, I played 49 games, 35 of which where I was GM. I suppose that I should say that of those 35, 26 of them I was DM for, as I ran 26 sessions of fifth edition D&D as the Curse of Strahd campaign headed towards its endgame. Curse of Strahd is now the longest campaign that I’ve ever run as it approaches 60 sessions; I’ve enjoyed it and just need to bring it to a good ending with the players in 2023. First Age and I  pushed hard to go weekly this year, and that’s reflected in the number of sessions. We had some quite sustained bursts of playing, but the end of the year got complicated with people’s commitments.

Twelve games were face-to-face, mainly at conventions, but the kids dipped their toes into the water of gaming this year with a couple of sessions of Mausrítter, which was fun. They’ve asked me to do another one. I hope to slide this over to another system later in 2023. I also ran Mausrítter as a try out between gaming sessions for the Strahd group and it was fun.

I’ve been playing the Eternal Lies campaign with Dr Mitch, with Rich Lock running. It’s been an intense experience and I was a bit disappointed when we had a break for a while. That was entirely our fault as players due to scheduling, and Rich decided to focus on his album release instead. However, we’ve just started to discuss playing this again, which I hope happens. We may add a third player too.

Dr Mitch has also been running The Yellow King RPG for me and some friends (Elina and Simon). It’s wonderfully surreal and captures the feel of Chambers’ fiction well. We’re on the second chapter - The Wars - now and I hope we get to play all the way through it.

On reflection, I suspect Dr Mitch is the svengali behind my gaming at the moment; he persuaded me to run Curse of Strahd and is a fellow player or GM on the other longer form games I’m playing.

Other highlights in the year included playing Blade Runner at Furnace, getting two sessions of the new Blue Planet in, and the very surreal game of Be Seeing You at Revelation. 

Online, Roll20 has dominated, mainly as I’ve run Curse of Strahd with it. The platform has come forward significantly over the year and I’ve found the various macros and scripts from a paid subscription very useful. I’ve tended to use Role for my one shots; I love the video first approach and it has also advanced a lot. It’s elegant compared to Roll20 and Foundry, which are the heavyweights. Aside from that I’ve mainly used Discord or Zoom.

In conclusion, a good year of games. Here’s to 2023 at least matching it, and hopefully getting some Traveller in as well, as that was a notable absence.

Edit: here’s a better doughnut of games. For some reason Google Sheets didn’t export the full detail.