Thursday 2 January 2014

A Belated "Happy New Year"

Here's wishing all my readers a belated Happy New Year, and a heartfelt "Thank You" for continuing to read my ramblings. I have had quite a few issues with my broadband over the Christmas and New Year period, so I have been unable to update the blog as often as I wanted to over the holidays.

The blog has changed a lot since I started it a few years back. Initially it was there for me to post reminder pictures of figures I had just painted from my enormous lead mountain that had not really been touched in anywhere up to 30 years! It then went through a brief phase of writing up table-top battle reports and ideas I had about gaming, before slowly becoming an almost total write-up site for the RPGs I started playing in about two years ago when I joined my local club.

I suppose that all things change with time and blogs are no exception - they are reflections of our eclectic minds and ever changing hobby tastes. So, what does the future hold for Little Odo's Grand Days Out?

My gaming tally has gone from zero games per week back in 2009 when I first started the blog to once a week in 2013, and I am hoping that the upcoming year will get me back into table-top games to raise that figure further. I am also hoping to increase my painting output so that the lead and plastic piles further reduce, and I amass enough minis of a particular type/army that they can actually be played with.

The AD&D RPG I am currently running is taking up a lot of my hobby time with weekly prep work and adventure write-ups, but my stint as DM is comig to an end in March, when one of the other members of my gaming group will be taking over the mantle. I am thoroughly enjoying creating new situations for the players to interact within, but I am also hankering after a little bit more time to get on with other aspects of my hobby. Unfortunately I can't have it both ways but, luckily, at the moment the game running is the more enjoyable for me, so I am happy with the situation.

When my stint as DM comes to an end in March, I will try to get more painting and table-top gaming done. I have many ideas of what I want to achieve; these include...
  • Finish off painting a couple of the Hordes of the Things armies that have been languishing on the shelves for a good long while, and get them clashing on the table-top
  • Complete my Rohan and Easterling armies and get the LotR: Strategy Battle Game played a few times. Alex wants to use his Elf army soon, so I may start with Battle Companies to begin with and move up in scale from there
  • Try to get another e:PBM game going - maybe a Dogerland III?
  • Play in another RPG at the club
  • Play in a sci-fi e:PBM run by one of my old gaming friends
  • Finish painting my Roman army
So, these are some of my gaming resolutions for this year. They are not set in stone as I am sure I will start on something else that is just as exciting that I have just not dscovered yet.

Alex, being a young teenager now, has lost a lot of his gaming mojo. He has part-painted a few figures but has pretty much lost interest in most that the hobby has to offer. I think this is in part due to his age, school homework, his X-Box obsession, and the fact he has not seen me painting or tinkering with rulesets that much over the last year. He still regularly reads several hobby related blogs and forums, and gets his paints out on ocasion to put another colour onto whatever figures he has an idea in mind for at the time, but he han't finished anything this year. I had a chat with him about this the other day and he said he wanted to play some games with me using his LotR figures but he had lost interest in Warhammer. He even suggested selling of his 40K stuff, but I told him not to just yet as they would be worth a lot more in the future when the metal minis and other particular plastic sets are OOP. Hopefully he will get an interest back in them so that his efforts up until now are not wasted.

Last year was a bit of a slow year blogging wise. I managed more than one post per week but ideally I wanted to put up two or three posts per week; a weekly summary of what I had achieved hobby wise, a write-up of my weekly RPG session, and a table-top game or rules write-up once every couple of weeks. This year I hope to be closer to that target, but do not want it to be a chore. I am enjoying my hobby still, and even my wife is starting to ask a few questions about it now. I don't think I will have a convert in her, but at least my hours under candle light are not being looked at as wasted.

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