D&D Quandry

Occasionally, if for no other reason than a dearth of other things to write about, I have to turn to the original purpose of this blog, role-playing games. You've been warned. Tonight is family game night again (normally it's every other week, but we're doing it two weeks in a row for reasons I can't recall). It used to be that playing family game night meant family D&D night. But I wanted to figure out some way to play more board games. There's classics like Puerto Rico and Carcassonne which I've purchased and only played once or twice.

Each of the couples involved take turns preparing dinner for game night, and so the solution we arrived at was to have the couple preparing the meal choose what we played, whether it was D&D or some other board game. This has worked really well from the standpoint of board games. We're playing a lot more of them (not hard since before we were playing almost none). It hasn't worked quite as well from the standpoint of D&D. Mostly it's been hard from the standpoint of continuity. We end up playing D&D about once every other month, which means that no one remembers what was going on. No one is particularly invested in their character. And variations of these problems make it difficult for me as the DM.

There are a variety of possible solutions to the problem (at this point I suppose it would be a good idea to interject that on a 1 to 10 scale of problem severity, that this would come in around a 0.001) but most of them involve either not playing D&D any longer or not playing board games. However there is one that might work and I think I may suggest it tonight. D&D campaigns are generally divided up into adventures, perhaps the solution would be that once we start an adventure we play nothing but D&D until it's done. And then in-between adventures we play boardgames until people are ready to play D&D again...

For those of you that made it this far I salute you. It's hard enough to have to read game-related posts. Reading posts about game-scheduling has to be a violation of the Geneva Convention. So if you made it this far here are a couple of rewards: a Forbes article on the best places to go to prison and a story about the judge in the case of the Da Vinci embedding a secret message in the ruling.

What this blog needs is more cowbell