This is episode 18 of my RPGcast and it’s been a little while since I did a podcast here.

I have been running my D&D 5e game almost every week.

I guess it’s not that I haven’t had a lot to say, it’s because I’ve had trouble kind of organizing my thoughts, but I thought I should go ahead and post again in case anyone’s listening to this, which is it’s probable that no one hears this.

Anyway, we are approaching session 20 of our campaign and everyone seems to be enjoying it.

We had a few interesting things happen over the last couple of weeks.

One, and I’ve written a little bit about this on a discord server, but you know, we have three players.

Two of them are old friends of mine who are like longtime gamers who started in the early 80s, like 1980 or something, and the other’s my wife who has played a bit in the early 90s with me and, you know, she’s really enjoying the game, but she’s still kind of relatively new to it.

And in the old days, I feel like the way I played and the way most of my my friends played, I think we really treated it almost like a war game more than a role-playing game.

There wasn’t much role-playing going on in those games.

There was a lot of strategizing and talking out of character about what your character and other characters could do and all of that.

So my wife is doing great in the game and there have been a couple of instances where the other players have said, hey, are you sure you want to do this?

Are you sure you want to do that?

And for one thing, that kind of metagaming isn’t good anyway.

And the truth is, she was sure of what she wanted to do.

And when a player does that with another player, even when it’s not done in a dickish way, you know, even when it’s done as a friend trying to help a friend who’s newer to the game to, you know, thrive in the game, there can be like a loss of agency for the player who’s getting the recommendation.

There’s also like, you know, an implication that the player doesn’t know what they’re doing, whether that’s intentional or not.

It’s just a bad practice.

So I had a talk with the other two players yesterday, or was it the day before?

I think it was the day before, and we discussed the whole thing.

And they’re old friends, so we can talk about these sort of things without, you know, making each other mad.

And they both agreed that that kind of behavior at the table just needs to stop.

And, you know, that, yeah, it’s hard not to do that when you’re used to doing it.

But, so I’m really pleased with my group.

It’s really nice to have friends that you’ve known for so long in your gaming group who you can have somewhat difficult conversations with.

I mean, I could see this conversation being much more difficult with someone I didn’t know so well.

But I think they both recognized that out of character conversation needs to be very, very limited.

And when you’re speaking in character, you can’t use terminology like, quote, that’s a second level spell, or something like that, unquote.

Because the characters don’t have any concept of what levels are or anything like that.

They just have spells.

So I think a lot of it can be eliminated by less table talk and more talking in character.

And another thing that can help a lot is, for me as the dungeon master of this game, to put them in fewer situations where they have an excessive amount of time for planning and strategizing.

I think I need to put them into situations where they just have to act, and they have to act quickly because the shit’s about to hit the fan.

And they’re great players, and they’re great at tactics, and they’re great at strategy.

But players like that, if you give them an hour to strategize, they’re probably going to use an hour to strategize.

And that brings a game to a grinding halt.

And the game becomes kind of boring then.

And we haven’t had it go that long.

But it’s like, okay, you know, you guys have been talking for five or ten minutes about what you want to do.

It’s time to just do something.

And as I said, part of that is on me for allowing the situation to develop that way and to to let it continue.

So I need to do a better job as a dungeon master with regard to that.

So, in summary, I love my group.

It is wonderful to have a group that you can have these kind of talks with, and who trust me not to screw over their player characters.

And another great thing about the group is that, you know, I’m fairly new to the 5e rules, and every now and then I will definitely mess something up.

And they’re great at letting me know that, hey, I think you messed that up, but none of us are going to insist that we go back and do it right.

They accept what happens in the game.

They accept my adjudication of a situation or the way I ran a spell or something as the dungeon master.

But they’re just very diplomatic.

Like, hey, I think you might have done that wrong.

Just FYI.

And because they know that, like, I may have done it wrong on purpose.

You know, like, I may have just made an exception because I’m the dungeon master and I can.

But they also know and they trust that after the game I will go look that up when I have more time.

And if I mess something up, if I did something wrong, then we’ll do it the correct way in the future.

And that’s the way we do things.

So I just love my gaming group.

Our larger gaming group that plays Traveler as well and the other D&D campaign, they’re all the same way.

And I’m just so lucky to have such good friends to game with and have such a great wife who enjoys the game and all that.

I was really impressed by what she said when she and I were discussing the whole thing.

And she was saying that, you know, when someone is, you know, speaking out of character about the rules or strategizing what your character could do instead of theirs, she said it, quote, breaks the immersion, unquote.

And I don’t know if she’s been reading about gaming and kind of this modern…

I think of it as a more modern idea of being immersed in the game.

But I thought that was really cool and that’s what she wants.

And so that’s what I want to give my players.

I want to give them a really as immersive an experience as I can.

So anyway, but the game’s going fine, having a good time.

I’m having a little trouble sometimes on Sunday afternoon finding the energy to really do as good a job running the game as I could.

I mean, they’re fun, but, like, I feel like I’ve kind of dropped the ball the last couple of games as far as role-playing non-player characters and just kind of having the energy level that I would like to.

And so I’m gonna try to find some way to correct that.

And the main method of correcting it, I think I’ve already done, and that is awareness.

If you’re not aware that you’re doing kind of a subpar job in some respect, you probably won’t fix it.

So awareness is really key, I think.

What else is up?

So, Sword of Cepheus.

Sorry, I’m coughing, y’all.

Sword of Cepheus is a swords and sorcery role-playing game from Stellagama Games, and it is based on the Cepheus engine, which, as you may know, is kind of the open gaming license version of Mongoose Traveler first edition.

And without boring anyone to tears who doesn’t know about all this stuff, when Mongoose, the company, put out their first edition of the Traveler rules, licensed from Mark Miller, they published it under the open gaming license.

And when they came out with the second edition and did not publish it under the open gaming license, it pissed a lot of people off.

And those people continued using the first edition open gaming license version, and they used the OGL, as it is called, to produce kind of an alternative version of Traveler, and it is called Cepheus Engine, the Cepheus Engine.

There is a system reference document available on the internet for it, which you can download for free, and you can play an entire campaign with it forever.

You would not need anything else to play a great science fiction game forever.

And there are other versions of the Cepheus Engine with different rules, tweaks, and those are all also published under the open gaming license.

So, Omer Golanjo, who is a game writer in Israel, along with a couple of other guys, have produced a fantasy role-playing game version of Cepheus Engine, called Sword of Cepheus.

I got the first edition, and I thought it was pretty cool.

It was inexpensive, you know, it’s basically one book.

There were some things in it that, like, kept me from wanting to run it, although I, overall, I liked the game.

But they came out with second edition a while back, in which they fixed basically everything that I didn’t like about the first version of the game.

And I haven’t played it, but I have now read the whole thing, and I have to say it is absolutely brilliant.

As an absolutely huge fan of classic Traveler, I love the fact that it’s a 2d6 system, and that it is a relatively simple system, without being too simple.

One thing I really like about it, that I dislike about not just 5th edition D&D, but really all editions of D&D, I hate how long it takes as a dungeon master to come up with and write the stats out for non-player characters.

If you want to create, like, a unique wizard or something that’s a non-player character, you’ve really got to put some time into it.

It’s a little bit on the complex side, and the same with GURPS and some other systems that I really like a lot.

And the problem is that if it takes 15 minutes to write up an interesting player character, that’s 15 minutes I’m not working on the rest of the game.

If it takes longer than that, well, that’s even more time that I’m not working on the rest of the game.

And even with D&D Beyond, and its ability to crank out characters for you, I find creation of non-player characters that are well conceived and well statted out to be oppressive for me as a dungeon master writing the game, writing the scenarios.

However, if I were running this, my campaign, with Sword of Cepheus, it would take very little time because you can fit the characters on a note card just like you can a traveler character.

Even if they’re a sorcerer, you know, it’s really simple to crank out the characters.

The combat system, extremely simple but effective.

Task resolution system, extremely simple but effective.

The list of skills is sufficient without being extreme.

And it does such a great job, the second edition does, of being kind of a perfect vehicle for doing kind of classic swords and sorcery games, more so than high fantasy.

And I was reading, you know, today really that that was the intention.

They wanted to to try to strip most of the high fantasy concepts out that had somehow snuck into the first edition, and they did a great job.

So it’s available in DriveThruRPG, Sword of Cepheus, second edition.

It’s one thick book, and I think it’s in the A5 size, so it’s a compact size book, pretty thick.

It’s written really well.

It’s clear that…

I don’t know if Omer did the page layout and all of that with the game, or the other guys, you know, worked on it, but he’s a professional writer, and the book is really well organized.

It’s concise, there’s not a lot of fluff, and it really gives you what you need.

I have to admit, when I open, for instance, my core rule book for Mongoose Traveler 2, character creation isn’t…

it’s not like it’s that hard, but it took me…

it took me a long time, I feel like, to kind of navigate the rule book.

And maybe my attention span is just terrible, I don’t know.

But I didn’t find that with Sword of Cepheus at all.

I found it really easy to understand the game.

Like, I feel like I could open up the book right now and run a game.

So I recommend everybody pick it up.

It’s really cool, and I’m gonna start this weekend trying to just do some experimental characters and see how it all works.

I don’t know if I’m gonna…

probably…

I’m probably not gonna move my 5e game over to it, just because everybody’s used to the 5e game.

And they like their characters, I think, and it would be hard to really replicate.

Impossible, really.

But I would absolutely consider running a full campaign with it forever, just like I do my classic Traveler game.

All right, I’m almost out of lunchtime here, sitting in my car in a nice, beautiful North Texas day.

I hope everyone is well, if you’re listening to this, and take care.