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Playin' DnD[1]!
Apr. 26th, 2023 09:55 pmAfter our group finished our campaign, we took a few weeks of frippering-time, and have now started our New Adventure! It's the same group as we ended with --me, Satvik, and Scoop playing under JoshZed's delightful gamesmastery! New characters though, and an entirely new setting. We're now in Victorian Londoninum (with the serial numbers filed off) and the magic is starting to come back to the world, after being absent for a few millennia!
The thing I do, when I play DnD (or like...have literally any meeting of any variety ever, if I want to have a rat's chance of remembering what happened) is Take Notes. And so the "Akram Playing Notes" for the old campaign is a google doc that is 226 pages long. It contains rough summaries of whatever I thought was important in the moment, which is sometimes actually useful information (names of NPCs! What we're doing!) and sometimes is...not (reports on what bullshit the players are talking about tonight. Sessions where I can't be arsed to write down important stuff that I want to reference later, leaving us all to be like "did...we...actually steal that one artifact or nah?".)
So this time around, I'm trying to be _minutely_ more organized. I'm still writing a messfile that just...contains everything in delightful awkward paragraphs, but critically, I'm actually including a one-sentence summary with each session date. Do you know how irritating it is to look at a list of session 1 through session 71 and know that somewhere in there is "The Time We Were On A Boat (and met PuppyBo's grandsire)" but have no idea whether that was 5 or 20 or 36? It was pretty irritating! So now I have "in which we meet each other and plan to form a coven" and "in which we form a coven and find out we live beneath a horrorterror" as useful descriptors for the first two weeks.
And of course, as is my wont, I have just willy-nilly shared it with everyone else involved. It's not like I'm usually gossiping about the other players, and sometimes other people are quicker on the search function than I am. But! But this time around, I have started a different project, and I _know_ it's not sustainable, but for as long as it lasts I am incredibly energized and excited about it.
My new character, Adelia, keeps a diary.
It's written in the form of letters to her best friend. She writes several a day, whenever the mood strikes her to sit down and gush about whatever might be happening (translation: after each session, regardless of how much game time passed). It turns out to be a really great tool for me to do worldbuilding and roleplay character development3. Look, I have been known to enjoy me a Victorian-era book or two4, and so writing my own weird historical fiction is just *fun*.
Right now I've set it up so only I and JoshZed can read it. I'll have to decide at some point if I want my compatriots to have access. This file *is* for me to gossip, or at least, for my character to gossip about their characters. I could also potentially decide to cross-post the entries here, if I thought they were an interesting fiction. Would there be a market, as it were? I don't know. Does there need to be? I also don't know --in depth writing about one's character is pretty damn masturbatory, and maybe yinz don't need to see that.
(Also I've let myself be full self-indulgent, and done Stupid Bullshit With Fonts, which is normally _never_ something I do. But the full title of this thing is "Being a Firsthand Account of the Further Adventures of Lady Adelia Rose Zaraza and the Development of her Magical Powers and Coven of Fellow Witches" with a subtitle of "For the Consumption and Enjoyment of her Dearest Beloved, Ursula Trevelyne" so like...it needed a stupid font.
In summation, I write too much, but _god_ does it feel good when I can actually get myself to write fiction, even fiction directly based off of the game I am playing collaboratively with friends. I hope you are able to find your own satisfactions, be them at the gaming table or not.
~Sor
MOOP!
12: When I was visiting Tuesday last week, I left dinner early, apologizing that I had to go play DnD. Tues explained to her family that it was ~actually Pathfinder~. Someone asked why I say DnD then, and my response was one word: Kleenex.
I like Tuesday's family for many reasons, but one of them is that her da heard me say that, and nodded appreciatively of both the reasoning and the ability to do so succinctly!
2: It's in the subject line
3: This is funny for me to say, because as always, every character I ever play is just some variation of me with the numbers filed off. Adelia is gothy, ditzy, trying and failing to play it cool about how excited she is to HAVE MAGIC, a little morbid and into horror stories and penny dreadfuls, and queer.
4: Okay, fine, the Bloody Jack books are pre-Victorian. Technically pre-Regency even, I think --the first one is like...1804? 1807? At any rate, I should pick back up the one I stopped in the middle of, and finish my reread sometime, but maybe not until after I finish reading through all the Wimsey mysteries (which are post-Victorian, but also have sensibilities I'm emulating here.
The thing I do, when I play DnD (or like...have literally any meeting of any variety ever, if I want to have a rat's chance of remembering what happened) is Take Notes. And so the "Akram Playing Notes" for the old campaign is a google doc that is 226 pages long. It contains rough summaries of whatever I thought was important in the moment, which is sometimes actually useful information (names of NPCs! What we're doing!) and sometimes is...not (reports on what bullshit the players are talking about tonight. Sessions where I can't be arsed to write down important stuff that I want to reference later, leaving us all to be like "did...we...actually steal that one artifact or nah?".)
So this time around, I'm trying to be _minutely_ more organized. I'm still writing a messfile that just...contains everything in delightful awkward paragraphs, but critically, I'm actually including a one-sentence summary with each session date. Do you know how irritating it is to look at a list of session 1 through session 71 and know that somewhere in there is "The Time We Were On A Boat (and met PuppyBo's grandsire)" but have no idea whether that was 5 or 20 or 36? It was pretty irritating! So now I have "in which we meet each other and plan to form a coven" and "in which we form a coven and find out we live beneath a horrorterror" as useful descriptors for the first two weeks.
And of course, as is my wont, I have just willy-nilly shared it with everyone else involved. It's not like I'm usually gossiping about the other players, and sometimes other people are quicker on the search function than I am. But! But this time around, I have started a different project, and I _know_ it's not sustainable, but for as long as it lasts I am incredibly energized and excited about it.
My new character, Adelia, keeps a diary.
It's written in the form of letters to her best friend. She writes several a day, whenever the mood strikes her to sit down and gush about whatever might be happening (translation: after each session, regardless of how much game time passed). It turns out to be a really great tool for me to do worldbuilding and roleplay character development3. Look, I have been known to enjoy me a Victorian-era book or two4, and so writing my own weird historical fiction is just *fun*.
Right now I've set it up so only I and JoshZed can read it. I'll have to decide at some point if I want my compatriots to have access. This file *is* for me to gossip, or at least, for my character to gossip about their characters. I could also potentially decide to cross-post the entries here, if I thought they were an interesting fiction. Would there be a market, as it were? I don't know. Does there need to be? I also don't know --in depth writing about one's character is pretty damn masturbatory, and maybe yinz don't need to see that.
(Also I've let myself be full self-indulgent, and done Stupid Bullshit With Fonts, which is normally _never_ something I do. But the full title of this thing is "Being a Firsthand Account of the Further Adventures of Lady Adelia Rose Zaraza and the Development of her Magical Powers and Coven of Fellow Witches" with a subtitle of "For the Consumption and Enjoyment of her Dearest Beloved, Ursula Trevelyne" so like...it needed a stupid font.
In summation, I write too much, but _god_ does it feel good when I can actually get myself to write fiction, even fiction directly based off of the game I am playing collaboratively with friends. I hope you are able to find your own satisfactions, be them at the gaming table or not.
~Sor
MOOP!
12: When I was visiting Tuesday last week, I left dinner early, apologizing that I had to go play DnD. Tues explained to her family that it was ~actually Pathfinder~. Someone asked why I say DnD then, and my response was one word: Kleenex.
I like Tuesday's family for many reasons, but one of them is that her da heard me say that, and nodded appreciatively of both the reasoning and the ability to do so succinctly!
2: It's in the subject line
3: This is funny for me to say, because as always, every character I ever play is just some variation of me with the numbers filed off. Adelia is gothy, ditzy, trying and failing to play it cool about how excited she is to HAVE MAGIC, a little morbid and into horror stories and penny dreadfuls, and queer.
4: Okay, fine, the Bloody Jack books are pre-Victorian. Technically pre-Regency even, I think --the first one is like...1804? 1807? At any rate, I should pick back up the one I stopped in the middle of, and finish my reread sometime, but maybe not until after I finish reading through all the Wimsey mysteries (which are post-Victorian, but also have sensibilities I'm emulating here.