The Art of Trawling

Have you ever been trawling the internet all night when you come across a patch of "old internet"? You know, the site that hasn't been moded in 9 years and has all the broken links (or URL script that ISN'T a link!) that take you to those weird site limbos after a page dies and becomes a bizarre search engine zombie? Don't you feel like you have kind of unearthed a fossil and that you figuratively have to sweep away cobwebs since the page must not have been touched in so long. It's a fragile, delicate feeling of awe at that ancient technology before you realize how frustrating the next half hour of forced content scraping will be to get the information you require. Your eyes grow stiff and your brain eventually refuses to communicate in anything farther than a guttural utterance at various stimuli poking you in the face.

Taking your first blink in twenty minutes of a staring contest with your monitor (which you may have won at this point) results in a sensation of running water moving through your head, floating your brain and making even the dull humming of a dusk-choked fan sound like a lullaby. The next moment you look out the window and see the sun beckoning with gray light in the sky, a warning akin to that feeling you get when you pass a police car and get the distinct impression they are going to pull you over, regardless of what you are actually doing. You decide to rest for a while before the birds get too loud, and so click the bookmark button and close the screen. You convince yourself of the novelty of the experience; discovering this new ancient treasure you have unearthed from 1998.

The Endangered Species.

When I started RPing, I was brought in by a friend in my first year of college. We played a Pathfinder campaign that, sadly, ended early because the rest of the group just stopped playing (the beginning of the curse?) in favor of other Friday night activities (poker night, actually). Before this, I had only heard of D&D and the concept of D20 systems, but after my first roll, I knew I was hooked. I had heard it was a stereotypical thing to do, playing D&D with a bunch of other nerds in college, so when I learned how fascinating and intriguing and just plain fun the game was, I was sure that it was wide spread. Unfortunately, it would appear my estimation was off by about 20 years.

Before recently, I did not know how bad a stigma the game carried. I did not know how few players there were, and how difficult those who did could be to track down. I did not know about 4e, or how unpopular the better systems had become. I did not know that the game was dying.

RPing is slowly dying. There are less and less players and fewer and fewer people have ever even heard of table top role plying. Groups are difficult to put together and the common populaces short attention span make it hard to teach. Couple that with the fact that most people would rather pick up a controller than dice, and you have yourself an endangered species of hobbies.

Gamers are going down a bad way nowadays. Yes, video games are amazing, I love being able to push a disk into a box and save the world in a weekend. I love that you don't have to try and visualize every detail in your head, or that you cant become inundated with choices, as the programming pretty much RPs for you. However, every advantage to a video game is a double edged sword when one is discussing TTRPG.

For instance; take graphics. When you are playing a video game, you can become awe-struck at how beautiful or epic depictions of creatures and landscapes can be. You can be totally and utterly drawn in by a level of detail that is usually only reserved for "Dude, you had to have been there." They are great. They are wonderful. They are killing our imaginative eyes.

It is now so easy to see something on a screen, that I believe we are slowly losing the ability to come up with "original content". Even video game designers seem to be cannibalizing the same graphic elements from other/previous games over and over. Even for GMs, rather than utilizing a heightened sense of vocabulary, frequently degrade to the phrase, "Have you ever seen [insert scene from movie/game]? Yeah, it's kind of like that, only squishier."

As a DM, I am subject to this as well. I've used slightly twisted versions of other things I've seen to simply make things easier, but every time I do I feel as though I am somehow robbing some of the purity of the visual. No one can read minds and see exactly what the GM is describing, but that's what adds a little fun to the visuals: trying to get it right. Gaming (at least RPing) shouldn't be so much about accuracy or efficiency, as a good game has just enough concreteness as to keep characters from floating about like a picture on a bad website. Gaming is about creativity and using the powers of imagination to make things come alive. Plagiarism is a bit below you.

Another battle between the telly-box games and primitive, surface based games is one that is difficult to overcome in the modern nerd: social interaction. That's right, guys and gals, you actually need friends to play TTRPGs. Now, please forgive me, but the remainder of this section will sound like an old man talking your ear off at 1am in a crappy diner where your just trying to have a coffee and work off that pie craving. Kids these days don't play together. And yes, I am including a good percentage of my own generation when I say "kids". Gamers went from a group of people who were inept at socializing with anyone but other gamer nerds (80s. Yes, that makes me shiver a bit) to a group of people that consider social interaction only worthwhile while trying to kill each other from across the Internet. This ultimately makes gamers scattered by nature, with one's "gamer friends" actually coming from across the yawning chasm of the world rather than from ye olde hobby shoppe. It's mostly, I believe, because they are learning young to play better by themselves than with others (but that is a rant for another time and possibly a completely different blog...)

There you go, the dying gasps of the original "gaming" all summed up into one convenient package so that you don't have to look around to point fingers anymore. So please, if you know anything about RPing, whether you are new to the experience or if you "played back in college a lot", get out there and play. Your DM will thank you.

Character-ize yourselves!

I have found a wonderful resource on the web that allows you to find out what kind of D&D character you are! This site is actually rather accurate, unlike most of those "What[insert pop-culture reference] are you?!" surveys that frequently appear more and more on social networking sites. All that is required is a 130 question survey (not as bad as it sounds) about actions you might take when presented with certain circumstances.

I found the process to be rather enjoyable, actually. It allows for some personal introspection, as many of the questions are actually rather unique. All in all, a good resource for fun and education. Meanwhile, after you are done it gives you a rather detailed description of your character, as well as the statistics on how your answers are broken down.

Here is a link to the survey. Hope everyone can enjoy it!

Ah, and yes, I took it myself, but I will only post the results if great enough interest is shown!

A group without Players

Frequently, I have difficulty finding players for my campaigns. This leads to small groups consisting of players that I have often just taught how to play. Now, this isnt so bad; sessions are usually very fun and pretty creative learning experiences for everyone involved. I love to watch newcomers get used to the game, or fall in love and get really attached to the character they are playing. However, there is one massive detriment to small, newly organized gaming groups: the loss of a player.

Since I have moved back to my home town, I have run a variety of D20 games ranging from D20 Modern, Future, Past, Apocalyptic (Zombie and Robotic), and D&D v3.5. Each time I run a new system, it is because I'm running a new group with their own tastes for stories, and I am generally teaching a new person how to play with a D20 system every campaign. Normally, this is not uncommon for an experienced DM who hasn't gotten his roots deep enough into the gaming community of a new place. He may play one system with a group for a month or two before moving on to a new story (after the last group finished the story, of course). Unfortunately this has not been the case in my experience. Over the past year, I have run all of the above listed systems for possibly a few weeks to a month or even maybe just a few days at a time! This is mostly due to something I consider "the curse". Every time I recruit a new player, 1/4 to a half way through the adventure, something occurs in that person's life that forces them to go far away. So far, my players have gone to New York, California, Philadelphia, and Florida.

Now, I wish not to be misconstrued, while these happenings are VERY frustrating, I more mean this post to be a cautionary tale to other GMs out there who may happen upon this blog. It's the only issue I have ever found with playing TTRPG as apposed to video games; you have to actually have other people to make it work.

Back story musings

I am beginning to realize how difficult it is to keep a blog on the adventure at hand. While I want to categorically catalog the happenings in the world of Landera (the name for the Material realm in my campaign), there is a lot that happens behind the scenes that would be more poignant to write as it happens (for the casual reader's sake at least). Unfortunately, I have shared this blog with my players, and so I cant really clue them into many of the reciprocal acts their actions take without completely destroying the air of blissful unawareness that keeps the game both realistic and intriguing. I cannot bring myself to ruin a good surprise, however the haphazard nature of my writings make it so that those following along might be confused as to how these things came to be in the first place. So all these wonderful secret acts are played out of paper in my notebook, probably never to see the glow of a computer screen unless the characters seek out the knowledge themselves. Thus is the nature of back story...

Well, this is the Beginning.

So I have decided to create a blog in order to spread the word about possibly the most wonderful and epic game ever created: Dungeons and Dragons.

Now I know that I probably lost a lot of viewers just with that first sentence, but for those of you still with me here, I give you my thanks and accolades. This is a place for gamers to thrive! This is a place for imaginative thinkers, philosophers, D20 lovers, and gamers of all sorts. Most of all, this is a place for fellow Nerds.

This site (which with any amount of luck and late night rambling sessions) will be a place for waxing game philosophical for anyone who wanders the internet late at night looking for something to do.

Let it all out, my fellow Nerds; comment, argue, laugh, and learn.

This is your DM, Torin the Badger, signing off till next time. May your rolls always be critical, and your enemies heavily nerfed.