Paper or Plastic?

According to . . . somebody somewhere . . . first anniversaries are marked by paper (traditional) or plastic (modern) gifts.

I guess the book and the dice I got for Christmas will have to suffice.

Yep, it's time once again for a tedious, self-indulgent retrospective.

First, the numbers. According to Blogspot, RBE topped 52,000 pageviews in its first year, but I've learned that pageviews are functionally meaningless in aggregate, telling me next to nothing about whether or not I have an audience for what I'm writing. Random adware and Google image links bump up the numbers while having nothing at all to do with the content, and sometimes some oddball occurrence, like a link to one of my posts in a 'trouble ticket' at Big Purple, may draw eyes which really have no interest in the blog itself. The numbers for individual posts are a little more telling, and a typical post gets viewed about thirty to sixty times in its first full day and around a hundred times in a week, which is up from six months ago.

The top five RBE posts in terms of pageviews are as follows.

Random Encounters That Don't Suck
Frankengame
Grumbler
Using Mythic Game Master Emulator as a refereeing tool: two actual play examples
Lightly Armored Fighter

From my seat, it's a respectable list, and I can honestly say I'm glad they are among my most read posts.

Two series of posts, the first on the cape-and-sword endgame or 'domain play,' and the other on random encounters are probably the best things I've written this year, and they are certainly the posts I'm most proud of in my short time as a blogger.

I really appreciate the many comments I've received. Over eleven hundred comments were left on the blog, and even if you consider around half of those are my own replies, that's been very satisfying.

Okay, that's enough looking back. What's next? Well, the video feature Cinematic is done, replaced with The Pen and the Sword, with excerpts from cape-and-sword tales. There are presently forty posts in my draft queue, and I'm both happy and a little surprised that there remains so much to write about in the coming months. Looking back six months to my previous milestone post, my anticipated posts on criminal enterprise got bumped back - still a lot of research and brainstorming in progress on this one - but in the next week or so you can look forward to a tiny swashbucklers' ruritania, the village of Saint-Sidoine-aux-Puis, with the 'swashbuckling furnishings' idea morphing into a recurring feature with descriptions of standard rooms - a bedroom in a noble's townhouse, an armoury in a palace, and so on - to drop into your own campaigns.

It's been a good year, and since I haven't run out of things to say, I look forward to an even better one ahead. Thanks so much for hanging with.