State of the Campaign

Well, we've had three sessions of my Thursday night Labyrinth Lord game, so this is certainly premature, but I figured I'd take stock at this point to give myself something of a baseline to look at down the road.

Labyrinth Lord
Labyrinth Lord is working out very well. I know these rules cold, so it's been very easy for me to just jump and run when the players zig and I was thinking they'd zag. Character creation has been a snap. The flexibility has also served us well, though we really haven't pushed it as much as I thought we'd might. I'm hoping we all get more inventive in the future.

I have had a few folks who seemed interested in maybe joining the game, but then lost interest when they found it wasn't 3.x or 4. Frankly, I'm not going to cry over that, since the players I do have are great. I've also lost more interested players to Real Life concerns rising up, which I frankly expected. Happens in every group.

New Rules
So far, I'm pretty happy with how my hacks are working. We've had three combats, and they've all flowed fairly smoothly. Rolling d6 and 2d4 for damage makes things pretty easy for everyone, I think, and cutting out the roll for initiative has certainly sped things up some. I haven't really gotten to push the spell stuff I did, since the only spell memorized by the party so far has been sleep, which has fairly boring side effects.

Someone chose to play a gnome! And he's really giving the race an interesting flavor. I think David may come to define who and what gnomes are in this campaign, and I'm just fine with that.

Setting
I'm moderately happy with this. I think I've invested the campaign with a certain flavor, and I think the players are enjoying it. I also think it's a bit more friendly than I'd originally conceived, but that's likely to change. The NPCs feel good to me, but I've not gotten much of a sense for how the players feel about them. Time will tell.

Efficiency and Pacing
We're not doing as much between games via email as I'd hoped, but on the other hand, I don't feel the game is dragging at all. We've been able to get things done and have some fun RP usually within three hours. Part of this, though, is because I'm driving events along pretty aggressively, and I'm not getting much push-back from the players. Not sure if that's a good or bad thing yet. So long as they're happy, I'll say it's good. And they took the reins pretty firmly at the end of the last session. As we head towards more traditional dungeon play next week, it'll be interesting to see how this changes.

RP
The players seem a bit hesitant here, but David really jumped into a small hole I left them and got some nice interplay going within the party itself. The players have come up with very interesting characters, and I hope to give them more opportunities to indulge in the backgrounds they've created.

Blogging
Probably the least important, so it comes last, but I'm very happy with this. I was pretty sure that playing would give me interesting things to talk about, and it certainly has. I'm especially proud of the blog about mapping Pitsh (though I'm not sure how popular it's been with y'all) and the latest in my Romance, Sex and D&D series got some great response.

UPDATE: Chgowiz does something similar for his West Marches style 1e game.