Wednesday, April 30, 2014

All blogs start with a single post. How many end that way?

Once upon a time, I had a blog.  It was bad.  It had no focus.  I talked about a whole lot for random stuff.  We all now know that is what Facebook is for.  My reason to start a new blog is to talk about specific stuff.  Gaming stuff.  To be even more precise: gaming stuff that interests me and that I hope I will interest the other players in my gaming groups.

My tastes in tabletop roleplaying are wide. I have heard the stories of people who have played whatever flavor of Dungeons and Dragons they started with exclusively for decades.  Good on them.  That would not be a great situation for me.  There are too many great ideas out there to confine them to one game or genre.  Sometimes I want to hit my players with an axe and sometimes I would prefer to shoot them with a disruptor rifle (As a player, I almost always want to hit something with a baseball bat, but that is a very different situation).

I know some people in the hobby like to complain about gamer ADD.  The new shiny thing distracts them from whatever game they are currently playing.  I like to think that this is not a problem I suffer from. Rather, I think that I have been a game master for so much of my playing time that I see a new game and immediately get ideas for how to craft stories with it.
 
I have been gaming for 32 years at this point: longer than the youngest player in my gaming circle has been alive.   I have collected a lot of ideas over the years.  I have forgotten a fair share of them to, so many that I cannot remember how much I have forgotten.  This blog will hopefully serve two allied purposes.  The first is to record the ideas as I have them lest I forget.  The second is to put those ideas into a form that the others in my groups can see them, comment on them, ask questions, and hopefully gain an interest as well.

As a result, there may not be anything truly revolutionary here for others who put as much effort into the hobby as I do.  My description of a particular game setting or mechanic may seem rudimentary to the knowledgeable outsider, and rightly so.  Since my goal is to present these things to my own play group, their level of engagement with the material is my sole concern.

My first goal is to get into the rhythm of posting as close to daily (Monday through Friday anyway) as possible.  With that in mind, I am beginning tomorrow with a campaign “elevator pitch” a day.  I already have more games and campaign ideas than I will ever get to play.  These short game synopses will serve to show potential players what some of my (as of yet) unused campaign ideas might entail.  In each I want to give an overview of the campaign world, potentially with an initial plot hook.  I do not expect every one of them to engage every player. With twenty-two weekdays in May, however, I hope to present at least one that engages each player.

After the initial month of posts, I will look at expanding or modifying my focus.  I am pretty sure that the elevator pitches will continue to make appearances.  I have way more than 22 ideas kicking around in my head right now.


And now a teaser for the first post tomorrow:  the campaign title is “Masks of Lakefront”  

2 comments:

  1. A post a day!! That is mighty ambitious! I have set myself a post a week, and have only recently reached it.. Best of luck to you in your goal.

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  2. I am trying to combine two pieces of old wisdom. First, that if you make a goal public then you are more likely to complete it. I have thrown down the gauntlet at my feet, now I must pick up the gauntlet and accept the challenge. The second is that writers write. I have no real aspiration to write the Great American Novel, but I do desire to put these ideas down for later and make them available to other interested parties. I have no opportunity to succeed if I do not make the attempt.

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