Thursday, April 26, 2012

W is for Wacky

And I've noticed the same phenomenon in the A to Z Blogging Challenge, the blogs with the quirky titles tend to have the quirky content. There are some very strange people out there…and some very funny ones too.

Really Bad Eggs Wacky.
So the 2012 A to Z Blogger Challenge winds down.

Early impression? I'm glad I tried this, and I doubt I'll do it again next year.

As of the time I write this, I've only managed to visit about a score of other blogs. April has been an insanely busy month - holidays, birthday parties, anniversary, vacation, baseball and football games, all on top of work and family routines - and it's been a challenge just keeping up with my own posts. Exploring other blogs has taken a back seat, unfortunately, but I do hope to visit many more, and offer a comment or three, in the coming months. Even just reading through that score or so, I'm left with an unmistakable impression: wow, there are a lot of authors out there.

I've received a number of interesting comments over the past few weeks. I imagine that to many, like Fiona Maddock quoted above, this all must seem rather strange. Roleplaying games are a niche hobby, and cape-and-sword roleplaying games are a tiny niche within that niche. A grown man writing about the finer points of pretending to be a pirate or musketeer must seem very wacky indeed.

One of the reasons I enjoy roleplaying games is that they are an avenue for me to scratch a creative itch in a distinctive, perhaps unique way. Writing a story holds little appeal for me - and acting in a play even less - but creating a vast web of characters linked by intrigue, and playing them out in real-time, with actions resolved by the rules of the game, hits me like an endorphin rush. Most of all, I like roleplaying games for the ways in which they are not like writing or performing. There's nothing else quite like it.

Wacky it may be, but my muse carries dice in her hand.

3 comments:

  1. Hats off to you sir and all the other a-z'ers. I couldn't do it. Wouldn't even try. Agree about liking rpgs "for the ways they are not like writing or performing," that's a good thought.

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    1. Thanks very much.

      Thinking more about A to Z, if I do it again next year, I'll either make all of the entries something from my campaign or make them all historical vignettes.

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  2. I'm a Goth and whenever I go to a Goth party, I think that, just once, I want to see it all again with the eyes of a compete newbie. I just don't notice anymore how strange the scene really can be and the same goes for roleplaying. Although I do have moments of "man, this is weird" at the table when I watch people build worlds and characters just by exchanging words.

    And yeah, I know what you mean about the endorphin rush. For me as a players, there's nothing quite like the moment when a character finally starts to come alive (usually by doing something I didn't plan).

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