Gaming with Baby: Motion Sickness

Time for another report on how having a one year old impacts my gaming situation. I can see things improve, even as we battle Autumn illnesses.

Sickness Alert

I've noted before that Sebastian has been sick a bunch this year. Pretty much anything he gets I get as well. Combine that with lack of sleep (due to caring for a sick baby) and I've lost of lot of time this year for gaming and work.

On the gaming front I've had to cancelled several game sessions, leading to slow progress on my campaigns and a general sense of frustration. I hope that my son is past the worst of it however and that he (and I) get sick less often going forward.

Fingers crossed.

Baby in Motion

My son continues to grow and become more mobile. He still hasn't begun walking as of this writing (early September) but will cruise around furniture or along walls without any problems. He loves to climb or walk by holding someone's hand.

He's also using more words and imitating what we say as well. To my wife's chagrin, he mastered both "kitty" and "cat" before "mama". He's got "daddy" down pat as well as "that", no ("nanana"), grapes, nose ("nah"), cup, tree ("tre"), chicken ("chikeh"), crackers, and bye. He seems to like "ka" sounds.

He also (finally) had his first tooth. 15 months is a bit late but it looks like he will begin to catch up now.

The major advance however (for gaming purposes at least) has been our successful sleep training. It once took a half hour or more to get him to sleep. Now it can take 2 minutes or less, ten minutes tops. This means our online and in-house games are going much smoother. My wife or I just have to step out for a few minutes to put him to bed instead of breaking up entirely. We've also shifted his bedtime back to around 7-ish to compensate for the fact we are generally up around 6 each morning.

This advance gives me hope that we might be able to get a baby sitter to take care of him occasionally and actually get out more often.

Convention Plans

Talking about getting out, we will be at DunDraCon next year and I will likely run a game there. Specifically I'm working on a Trail of Cthulhu scenario called "In the Blood" that focuses on a "haunted" house and the unusual nature of the family connected to it. I'll be running it for my local group this month first and then refining it for the convention. I promise to post a pdf once I've run it.

Housework

On the house front, we finally have our upstairs bathroom fully functional. That is making cleaning Sebastian's poopy diapers much easier. The cat has recovered and the heat is finally passing. I've unpacked everything that's mine and getting to work on organizing the last things.

Outside, I'm busy breaking up some of the concrete that seems to lie under everything in our yard. My wife wants a planting bed where the "Monolith" of concrete was. I thought I was done until I found a two by two foot slab beneath it. What were these people thinking?

After that it is time to clear the gutters and get ready for El Nino.

Gaming Update

The Online Game (The Climbers & String Theory)

As I mentioned I've had to cancel a couple of games due to illness. Combined with gaps caused by conventions and vacations by my players, we haven't played much of the Climbers in the past couple of months. With only one session left, I'm a bit frustrated.

In the end I basically called it quits on getting that final session completed and focused on Night's Black Agents. At some point the stars will align and the Apocalypse World game will come to an end.

In the other game, String Theory, our ex-spies escaped Beirut and a "terrorist bomb" to flee to Italy. Eventually they lost the men hunting them but not before surviving another werewolf attack. With the clues from its corpse and their earlier encounters they have now moved to the offensive. I plan to start the (much simplified) play reports in November.

Games at Our House (board games and RPGs)

Despite a month of delays, my wife finally completed her Dungeon World game. It was fun though I missed much of the first few sessions caring for my son (which caused one PC's death). In the end we thwarted a lizardman doomsday weapon, destroyed their city (apparently this is a theme for my PCs), and I merged with a mound of star metal and returned to the heavens. Druids are weird.

I've decided I'm not as much of a fan of Dungeon World (compared to other Apocalypse World based games). I think this has less to do with the dungeon fantasy theme than with how damage is handled. In Apocalypse World damage is fairly simple and non-random. You can expect most things to deal 2 or 3 harm and that you can survive a couple hits before things get dire. Dungeon World makes this damage random and generally high enough that a couple lucky rolls will kill you. It makes facing groups of foes (a common heroic fantasy staple) exceedingly dangerous.

Otherwise we played more board game playing and we managed to get to our friend's monthly board game extravaganzas a couple of times as well. Nothing amazing to report.

This month I begin my play test of my DunDraCon game. I'll let you know next time how that turns out.

Vampire Elders Play By Post

After several delays we finally did our first session. I really enjoyed the world creation however, building up our characters, the relationships between them, a map of the city and the territories within it. I'd say more but the Rat-King, my character, is a bit of a mystery. You can follow some of the action here.