Bad Pattern

I could have sworn that I posted something the first Tuesday of July, but apparently not. Last week, I'll admit I ran out of time, and then never got around to posting a belated entry. However, there is no intention here of constantly writing three posts and then abandoning the site for over a year.

So why does this happen? There isn't enough going on in my life that I can legitimately excuse this sort of inattentiveness. Its just a notable flaw in my personality and interests. I often have a number of things catch my attention, but after renting/opening them all, it becomes so overwhelming that I really get to none of them.

This is why I often have 4 Firefox windows with 60 tabs apiece open, or two dozen unread library books. I really want to do an in-depth study of the current trends in Role Playing theory, but I open up a dozen different blogs, and four articles from each, and then something else catches my attention once I'm bogged down by the weight of numbers and forget I about the open session.

When something has my attention, it can have it for some time. But being able to catch like that doesn't happen as often as I'd like, or at least not on the things I want. Taking a 15 min break to play a video game usually ends up as a 3 hour diversion at the very least.

At times I have tried schedules or rewards, but despite my knowledge of psychological patterns or reinforcement (thank you psych classes) it doesn't really work for me.

So let me apologize to my (apparently non-existant) readers about my poor up-keep. This blog is a paradox - I want to use it to concentrate on my projects and games, yet this thing itself often slips my attetion.

Ok, we're offically 87 posts behind now. Lets get cracking. Right after I finish this mission in Wesnoth...

I didn't know this survived

Somehow I was under the impression that these things would be deleted after a certain length of inactivity. After all, who needs their server cluttered by by two entry blogs written by people who forget they even had one?

Yet a year and a half after I created it and forgot about it, this document is still here. So too remains the promise that I would make multiple posts every time I failed a regular Tuesday update.

That means I'm officially 84 posts behind schedule, and I never really planned to write more than a few dozen.

High time to rethink what I want out of this project, isn't it?

For one, its going to update "whenever" - trying to stick to a schedule is just going to put me farther behind.

The second change is that I'm going to open up the scope a bit. My original intent was to simply share the campaign notes for all stuff I never played. I still hope to do that, but in addition, I will be sharing some ideas about game design and theory, reviews of stuff from 1km1kt.net, stories from the settings of my games, and developing concepts for new ones.

I must ask forgiveness from myself for my failure to even get an adequate start on this the first time, and from those who want to share my thoughts, yet find a lack of content here. May I be a better person in the future.

How I Found Role Playing

Missing the first scheduled update is hardly a noble way to go about this. Unfortunately, last week had an undue amount of distractions. I’ll try to make multiple updates anytime I miss the normal one as compensation.

I was always a child with more imaginary friends than real ones. (Some are still waiting for me downstairs, and I’m in my mid-20s!) At some point around fifth or sixth grade I acquired a “chose your own adventure” type book called “Car Wars: Green Circle Blues” – based on the game Car Wars of course, though I didn’t know of the progenitor at the time.

The notable difference between this tome and similar books I read before was the element of chance and conflict. Rather than just turning to a numbered paragraph – the start of the adventure had you create a simple character with four skills – Gunnery, Driving, Mechanics, and Prestige. Throughout the book were various battles, fought with rolls of 2d6 + your skill. To this day I recall the car, “Jupiter”, had two recoilless rifles (linked, to front) and a Vulcan cannon (turret) even though the book was lost in a flood years ago.

After a while, I created a simple system to make my own cars, and during lunch I’d have “auto-duels” with my friends. This would eventually expand into assorted spaceships and robots made with a similar system.

Yet still, I never played an actual RPG until junior year of high school some 3-4 years later. Being a fairly shy person, I was reluctant to join the Interactive Gamers’ Club at my School.

“Rifts”, by Palladium Games, was the first true RPG that I played.

There’s an old joke –

• The Engineering Student asks, “How does it work?”
• The business Student asks, “How much does it cost?”
• And the Liberal Arts major asks, “Do you want fries with that?”

Well, after substantially re-writing the rules for other games I’ve played I wanted to test myself, and what I was learning in college. Thus I began writing a game called “D.A.N.” – Dramatic Action Now (and a nod to my three friends named Dan) – correcting the faults in Rifts I’d experienced over the years.

Seven years later, DAN is still unfinished, as I have learned much about game theory and layout since that time. Yet I have completed other works, and still strive towards the goal of completing both that early system and its space opera XenoExodous setting one day.

It Begins

I enjoy pencil and paper role-playing games. Perhaps a bit too much - I've got an entire book shelf full of 25-30 different systems, and nearly two gigabytes of free PDFs (totaling over 300 works) from around the net.

As you would imagine, I rarely find the time to play most of them. Indeed, a few were acquired just to read, and haven't been played in several years.

This has of course lead to a backlog of not only characters to make, but campaigns to run. Yet life goes on, and my chances of actually running these sessions diminish further.

My intention for this blog is to share my un-played ideas with those of you out there, and hope that my preparation will do, someone, some good.

With any luck, this should be updated each Tuesday, and be divided between articles on the featured games, sessions to run, and assorted thoughts on design of new games.