I spent a good amount of time in the 80s with my nose buried in the rule books of role-playing games. Dungeons and Dragons was the gateway drug, of course, but soon I started dabbling in comic-book-based Champions, and eventually got to the point where I could look at a 20-something digit hexatridecimal (base 36) number and describe in quite some detail the Traveler starship that was encoded therein.
My fascination with those faded, though. Between the lure of the instant gratification of computer-based RPG games and the demands typical of the spouse/kids/gainful-employment lifestyle I adopted over time, it became something I just didn’t think about much anymore.
That’s changed in the last year or so, though. Many years of the endless MMORPG gear-grind have made those games less appealing to me. Somewhere along the line my two daughters, without any urging or prompting from me, started reading sites about pen-and-paper gaming a year or so ago and expressing interest. (The youngest, 16 as of this writing, specifically said the wanted to “play something like D&D”. The oldest, 19, was interested right up until we actually started playing, at which point she became too aloof to bother… but she hangs around our sessions and tosses in comments and advice, so I suspect she’ll be lured in eventually.)
So why start a whole blog about it?
Because I like to write – another long-term hobby I haven’t pursued much lately – and this is something I’ve been in the mood to write about as it unfolds. Yeah, maybe someone will pick up some ideas from it. Hopefully if I describe something I’m doing that can be done a better way, someone will chime in to say so. It could be that someone will get a laugh out of some of the characters and scenarios that my family’s twisted minds will come up with.
But mostly, this is all just here because it seems like a good idea at the moment.