Why am I doing this?

Blame it on boredom, perhaps...

But maybe I just needed a place to rant about gaming. My tabletop gaming has trickled down to a handful of sessions a year now. Long gone are the days where I used to play dungeons and dragons EVERY DAY. The pulling responsibilities of my life, the scattering of my friends/players across the globe, and various failed attempts to get new gaming groups together have nearly spelled the end of my gaming career. In the last five to ten years I thought I was probably going to quit gaming at least once a year. Thus the title, Gaming on the Precipice....

Instead of quitting, in the last two years I've started using play be email (PBEM) gaming as a way to get some gaming back into my life. Initially, I started playing in Risus rules, or free-forms, or home-brew games. I played in sci-fi games, spy games, mutant apocalyptic fantasy games. But still the strings of my heart kept pulling me back to my first gaming love - dungeons and dragons.

I wanted to play "by the rules" but I found 2nd edition to be a bit too complicated for PBEM.... so I went looking for rules-light versions of DND. I found castles and crusades, and labyrinth lord, and swords and wizardry - I ended up using castles and crusades for my first dnd PBEM campaign. Though this search I found out about the OSR and started to dig into it like a miner searching for gold. I was impressed by this new-found wellspring of creative energy, thoughts and ideas, and a bunch of folks that like to play games the way that I do.

My plan for this blog is to discuss rules-light DND gaming. I'd like to discuss the OSR from the context of a player who is more of a mid-schooler who is/was stuck in between the new school (WOW based gaming) and the old school. I'd like to talk about other gaming systems and what I've learned by using them.

I have a lot of ideas so expect a lot of posting. Maybe I can draw in a couple of followers. Maybe I can get another tabletop game started... maybe it will use a retro-clone as its rules-base. God knows it won't be 3.0, 3.5, or 4.0!!!