This week I got my Institutional Review Board approval, meaning that I will soon dive into more research for the next year. This is good for me, but will pose an ongoing challenge for blogging. Also, we will soon start the busy season at work. Oh, and there's the 200 pages plus a week I am reading for one of my classes. Which is all to say that I'm sorry for the infrequent updates.
However, I am going to try an experiment that I suspect may fail, which is trying to run a SSOA style one-shot using the 4e rules on May 18. Yes, you can toss out all my old-school cred, but I'm rules agnostic, so it's no big deal to me.
I'm going to toss together an airship fight, a battle with some dinosaurs, and a fight with cultists in some ruins, and I plan to encourage the use of stunts and being loose with powers and the likes to see if the rules can be bent in a direction I can work with. I'm trying to set things up to push the envelope and try to see what breaks, and I'll see what happens.
I fear the rules will still be too much of a burden, but I don't want to be too much of a pessimist quite yet. I'll try to be open-minded before I start declaring this a lost cause and pining for a more rules-light system. At least for now.
I tend to think of each fight as its own little story- like the monster encounters in harryhausen moves are.
ReplyDeletebeyond that, it all comes down to how well your players understand their powers and how good they are at making decisions. If you've got a player that dithers, 4e crawls- otherwise it can be a lot of fun.
Also, I feel your academic pain. I have competency exams in December and fieldwork on another continent throughout the summer.