Enough

I'm so tired of D&D.

Seriously.  It's gotten very boring for me.  I just ... can't do another go-round discussion of what's a subclass of what, or yet one more nitpicking argument about encumbrance or the viability of 1979's bard character.  I don't care what Gygax said or wrote or believed, and I don't care what anyone else related to D&D has said or wrote or argued either.  I'm very tired of it.  I just want to put the whole thing down, turn my back on it and never talk about D&D again.  May I never hear the appellations "weapons speed," "2nd edition" or "game module" again.

42 and a half years of this.  It was very cute when I was sixteen and arguing around a high school cafeteria table, but this idiocy has gone on way to fucking long.  Sorry.  Sorry, I don't want to rant.  I just want to break from D&D once and for all.

Mapmaking I'm down with.  The chairs I bought in November were finally delivered yesterday, nearly six months later.  I should be in a position to start running my roleplaying game (of no fixed moniker) in a month; my last actual running was eight months ago.  I haven't run a consistent in-person campaign since before covid.  Everyone I know except me and my partner have had covid, so on that front we're good to go.  The woman and I are, according to our doctor, in the "safe" category, should we get it.

With "the game" starting again, my direction for creativity and focus will change to those things the players need ... and in any case, I enjoy working on my wiki.  It reminds me of how and why I got into game design in the first place — not as a means to teach worldbuilding to readers, but to establish rules for my game world.  Not to reinvent the wheel, but to build a role-playing game that I'd love to play with people I love.  That's where my focus always needs to be.

I write because I love to write.  And I intend to write this blog.  But, alas, blogs are dying.  I've got to look for another means to reach people, since this one is getting thinner on the ground month by month.

I can't remember if I said so; I applied for a space at the Edmonton Expo, September 16-18, which I've visited twice before.  I'm looking forward to putting my menu for sale, and hopefully another project I'll have ready in the next two months.  My daughter is pushing me to read aloud some of my oldest blog posts, and then provide a retrospective as to whether or not I believe the same things I wrote 14 years ago.  I'm letting her pick the samples.  She hopes we'll have a bunch of these before September, so that we can tag them to a printed QR-code at the table when we talk to gamers at the con.  Seems like a good idea.  I'm even looking around for a cosplay designer to make me a monk's costume, so I can better get into the spirit of the con's culture.  Dressing up for a play is old hat, but this'll be the first time I've dressed up for a con.

Still working on the character generation page.  It rates at 127,355 bytes and there's still a long way to go.  To give a sense on that, the longest wikipedia page is, as I write this, 580,594 bytes.  I tried to see where my would rank, but the list provided only goes to the top 10,000 articles — no. 10,000 is 156,736.  I should meet that length in a week or two.

I know, strange things to talk about.  My head is going in so many places just now, as I puzzle out what I still care about and what I'm willing to consign my time towards creating.  I've thought about turning off the comments on this blog altogether; my daughter says not to do it.  I don't know.  I'm so tired of debate.  I don't want to talk about D&D any more.  Not the substanceless metagame, anyway.  It doesn't resolve anything, it doesn't convince anyone of anything, it doesn't make my game world or my players' experience better.

It doesn't belong here.  I've gotta write about other things.  I've just gotta.  To keep from going out of my mind.

Sorry if this makes this blog more boring for some.  I think there are enough people here to celebrate it.  In fact, I think I can hear the wind saying, "oh thank gawd ..."