So many friends!

This has been a nice week for seeing people I have been missing. The early part of it saw lovely friends crearespero and aurora_knight coming to Waltham to visit, which involved playing on playgrounds and nice dinners and a trip to go swimming and a lovely long walk. I've missed both of them terribly, so this visit was really lovely. Jane could only stay for one night, but Frances only just leaves today. She is going to spend a little extra time with katiescarlett29 before the whole gang of us goes up to her place this weekend. On Friday I will get to see nennivian  when she joins Jared, Bernie, and I to drive up to Long Island together. Steph is finally back from Argentina and has invited us all to visit her and see a Shakespeare in the Park performance of Measure for Measure. And that means that not only will I be reunited with Steph, who I have been missing painfully since she shipped off for Argentina, I will get to see Plesser and thefarowl as well! So a good chunk of all the people whom I haven't been able to spend time with in a while will all be in one place. I'm really grateful to Steph for inviting us, because it will be so wonderful for us all to get together again.

"We did acrobatic interpretations of Russian novels. I spent 7 hours on a trapeze in a overcoat."

The Burn Notice game went well last night. I felt especially good going into this one, partially because I was so excited to get back to this game, and partially because I was feeling very well-prepared. Jared and I had hammered out a particularly well-thought-out storyline this time around. While normally I do try to be very thorough, I usually have some gaps in what I've settled on that need to be filled in on the fly, but for this plot things were about as fleshed out as they possibly could be. I have Jared's help to thank for that.

Probably the thing I love best about this game is how the players play off of each other. The original three, Bernie, Matt, and Kindness, have established these awesome relationships between their characters that they roleplay so well together. And even better, before long Michael was clicking into it too, and I had an entire table to fun, funny, dynamic players who did interesting things, had fabulous interactions, and interspersed so much humor between the more serious plot moments of the game. Seeing as getting that going was my whole purpose in starting up the game, I am ridiculously pleased.

I still sometimes think I'm the world's lamest GM, given that I forget stuff like action dice and sometimes have to say, "Okay, GM break time," then go hide in the bathroom and rock back and forth muttering "What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?" But of course, there is no scenario you can entirely plan out, because players always always do things you don't necessarily expect. Still, I think I did a good job of expanding the concepts I already had to give responses to the actions they took. The one thing I'm a little disappointed with myself over is how I handled the investigation of the red herring in the plot. They were supposed to look into it and figure out that it wasn't actually the solution to the mystery, but unfortunately I couldn't find a way to tie in any actually useful clue into that investigation. I guess that's not unrealistic, but I didn't want the players to feel as if they'd wasted all that time. Not sure they did, but I think I could have handled it a little more skillfully.

What I want to do from here is activate more of the personal and meta-plots for the characters. I planted a couple of seeds for future things here and there, but they need to start factoring in. That will require a lot more planning on my part, but it will make the story and world so much richer.