RPGaDay2019 Day 28 – Love

Love. That’s the inspiration for day 28 of #RPGaDay2019, following Suspense yesterday.

I have to confess romantic love hasn’t featured much in my D&D sessions. The closest I’ve come was my friend’s characters during my teenage years – he had a male magic user and a female elf who were definitely partnered. But since we were teenage boys, it was more lust than love – my main memory related to their relationship was providing them an area of ground in the campsite which was like a comfortable mattress…complete with squeaky springs which very definitely broadcast exactly what they were doing… :-S

So I’ll need to take another angle. And what better than this hobby of mine (and presumably yours, since you’re reading this)?

What do I love about it?

• I love creating stories and sharing them
• I love fantasy in general – I have devoured so many fantasy books over the years
• I like organising things for others to enjoy – I just organised the 25th Dunedin Folk Dance Festival, and while I wasn’t so personally interested in the dancing itself, I got my satisfaction from seeing everyone enjoy themselves, and from all the people who said afterwards “I actually enjoyed this Festival”
• It’s a team sport – an excuse to socialise and meet people
• I suppose I like the approbation of the players enjoying what I created
• It gives me an opportunity to pontificate, er…, share my experience with the world in this blog
• I get to act and no-one minds that I’m not very good
• I get to speak in funny accents and my daughter isn’t allowed to tell me off
• There’s such a breadth of material to read and choose from
• I got to work with the wonderful Heroic Maps on my creation Ragnar’s Keep, and see my creation turned into their art-disguised-as-battlemaps – publication this weekend if all goes well!
• I’m getting to publish my own creation
• I get to spend money on cool stuff like battlemaps and modules and dungeon tiles, and I can even declare it as a business expense
• I have a dream to create my own software product, and I’ve finally found a market gap I can fill
• I get to build up a whole world of my own
• I get to create puzzles for the players and watch how they overcome them
• I get to challenge the players
• I get to act out and experience loads of different personalities and mindsets
• I get to play with loads of funny-shaped dice! (I’ve got two jars of them, including more than 20d6 for a max-strength BECMI fireball or lightning bolt)
• I get challenged to learn about things I might otherwise never have considered – like the time the players decided they wanted to go shopping for horses (my sister may know the difference between a piebald and a grey, but I had to rely on Wikipedia…)
• I get to make things up
• I get to be boorish and unreasonable and it’s all part of the NPC character
• I get to be benevolent and helpful and generous and it’s all part of the NPC character
• I get to take the players on a tour of the world…and hence explore places I might not otherwise get the chance to
• …but it’s a world with only the warts I want; I don’t have to face aspects of reality I don’t want to…
• I get to explore dilemmas, and enlist the players in exploring them with me
• I can live in a world of heroes and heroic deeds for a time
• I like to write (don’t tell my mum – she would be astonished given the agonies I had with writing in English at school), and I take pride in writing well, and my sessions go best when I have pre-written descriptions to start from
• I get to create a story – and the players help me flesh out the detail

I love it!

Tomorrow we have “Evolve”.