Waiting Up For Santa

Ever stay up waaay too late when you were a kid? You know, watching TV or reading comic books or even gaming. I am talking about far past a sensible bedtime to the point where you feel like you were run over by an 18-wheeler the next day. It's like a hangover with no alcohol. I know I did. Why, just this Saturday...

We're not kids anymore but boy does my group and I act like we're totally unaware of this condition sometimes.

Originally intending to start up my latest session of Champions around 1-1:30 pm this past Saturday, I ended up running late and told the guys to meet me around 2. Right before I left one of the players (Dave-Night Knight) cancelled and Marcus (The Power) said he was running late too.

No biggie. Marcus is usually late and I figured we'd end up getting started by 2:30.

I met up with Jeff and we starting shooting the breeze while waiting for Marcus.

We waited. And waited. Finally he arrived and 4:30-5 pm. I was a little annoyed but I think Jeff was far more bugged by it. We hadn't played in a about two weeks and we were at a major cliffhanger/important plot moment following the escape of one of the campaign's main antagonists last time we got together.

The result was that we hit the ground running when Marcus finally showed and staged a two pronged attack against the villain's recently discovered secret base. Remember my rule, 'Always Split The Party'*.

Anyway, an underwater strike team in a super sub and an above ground strike team teleporting in can really eat up time as they battle various robot minions and discover a second secret base containing captured superheroes and villains in suspended animation. Same old story right? You know how that goes.

The end result was that once we re-captured one major villain and blew up another villain's base (they were working together) we discovered what their real plan had been all along. We also discovered it was 3:30 am.

Yep. 3:30 in the morning of the next day. So what did we do? Well, the buses stop running at a certain time and Jeff really couldn't go home anyway so...we kept going.

One destroyed super aircraft, disintergrated super-powers-neutralizing bomb and defeated bad ass armored pilot later and it was 5 am.

It was then that we called it quits.

I walked to my train tired, hungry, freezing in the dramatically dropped temperatures of New York's winter nights (the days are still kind of warm so you're never dressed right) and absolutely, positively wowed by how good this game is going.

I am highly unlikely to do anything like that again as I felt like dog poop the next day but it was crazy, awesome fun.

Hope you're gaming this holiday season is fun, exciting and plentiful.

AD
Barking Alien

*I've said it before and I'll say it again, I've never understood the difficulty most groups see in splitting the party. It's key to my game style actually. I'm even doing it with the study center kids on Sundays. If 3-6th graders can do it, so can you.