My slow return to posting

The last few months have been marked by illness, job stress, the process of applying for a possible new career opportunity, and copious amounts of writer's block. Oddly enough, I have had plenty of opportunity to play, but not to run a game. And am a bit dejected at my current player base only being interested in D&D 4e.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I personally find 4e to be hard to embrace as a system I would like to run. Like an old love of mine, Hero System, I feel that 4e pulls all gaming toward a core activity of combat, and it's hard to get people enamored of the character-building system of the game to look at other portions of roleplaying that I actually like -- mysteries, exploration, character interaction, creative use of limited resources. Not that this isn't possible in 4e, but whazoo action is its strong point, and the great draw of the game.

That said, I did run a one-shot 4e game set in Athanor, trying to see if I could play around with the game and trying to see how much it breaks beyond my interest in the paragon tier. The answers to that are 1) I think I could make it work with a lot of house rules if I had to and 2) but not beyond heroic tier play.

Of course, none of this addresses my sense of disquiet in general about current RPGs, and none of this ends my writer's block, so I am trying to return to a writing regimen. This may have the side effect of getting me past my process block for my dissertation, too. Hopefully, this means you will see some regular posts for a change.