I was looking back at some of the earliest entries on my blog recently, and it's somewhat sobering to realise that I started this just over 17 years ago. Not that I've posted with any sort of regularity or consistency, especially in the last couple of years... but 17 years is a long time to stick with anything. I guess it puts me in some rarefied company as far as longevity goes, and being part of the earliest days of D&D blogging. It was still edition 3.5 back then, just barely. I'd just gotten married that year, a marriage that ended in 2021. My son was born a year later, and he's rapidly approaching adulthood. I was just starting work at the library where I'm still happily employed. That job's been about the only stable thing in my life over that period, and given that I wrote a significant number of my early posts while I was on the clock, I might still be lucky to have it. I was excited about the imminent arrival of D&D's 4th edition... that certainly changed, and quickly. So yeah, a long time, and a lot of changes, and I'm feeling reflective about it. Please indulge me while I ruminate about my place in the D&D blog-o-sphere.
If I'm being real here, I don't have much of one. My readership, I assume, has always been low in comparison to the BXBlackrazors and Taos and Grognardias of the world. Nothing I've written has ever really blown up, or caught the attention of the D&D community. (Well, I did get in a fight with Rob Kuntz one time... but we patched it up pretty quickly.) I've had no particular insights to convey, or grand theories to espouse, or manifestos to advance. I haven't created anything. No adventures, no rules supplements. Not even a thinly-veiled retroclone reskinning of an old version of D&D, and everyone who's anyone has peddled one of those! Nah, I've just been plugging away, tinkering with ideas here and there but not following through. Making plans, but not enacting them.
Oh, what grand plans I had. Remember the Ultimate Sandbox? What a dickhead I was, but when you're young you think you have all the time in the world to tackle every foolishly enormous project you can think of. And that was a big one: creating a massive multiversal campaign setting incorporating everything ever published relating to D&D. Of course it was never going to eventuate. It would take a dedicated lifetime just to do that with the material that existed in 2007, and of course there was always new material on the way. And something that unwieldy was never going to something I could practically run. I still love the idea, and I'm still planning something similar... but a campaign on a smaller, more manageable scale. Something I might actually be able to get started in this lifetime.
Most of my blogging here involved a chronological reading and exploration of D&D's earliest publications, and I think that's probably been my most valuable contribution. I started it a time when the larger D&D sphere was rediscovering OD&D as a whole, and while I think there were many others who covered the material with more insight, I don't think many covered it as comprehensively. Reading my blog in order would give a decently in-depth overview of how the rules developed from Chainmail through to the Player's Handbook, with some sidebars for Judge's Guild, the Games Workshop scene, and others. It's something I think I'd tackle more knowledgeably now, but I also don't think there'd be as much value in it these days. The territory has been explored long ago, and I'm happy enough if I've been a small part of doing that.
The thing is, my contribution has been small. Like I said, no insights, no creations... and I think that's a side-effect of my biggest failing. Which is, no gaming. Well, very little gaming. During the course of this blog, I believe I've DMed ten games. For something that I always list off as one of my primary hobbies, that's not enough. For something I love, it's not enough. Oh, I've certainly been immersed in D&D research and note-taking during that time, almost constantly. Blogs, podcasts, books, rules... I've sunk hours and hours into it. But I've barely played. And if there's one thing that all of the insightful and productive D&D luminaries on the internet have in common, it's that they play. A lot. It makes sense, doesn't it? To contribute meaningfully to the game, you have to know the game, and to know the game you have to play it. And while I think I know it quite well on a historical and theoretical level, I'm very out of practice on the practical level. There are reasons for that, some of them valid. But I've always said, you can always make time for the things you genuinely love.
And over the last 17 years, one thing hasn't changed: I still love Dungeons & Dragons. I love learning about it, I love discussing it, I love prepping for it, and I love playing it. That love has been out of balance, though. I've spent a lot of time on the first three, and not enough on the last one. That's going to be my D&D resolution for next year: play more. Knuckle down, do the bare minimum prep required to get a campaign up and running, and play as much as possible... and blog about it. And who knows, maybe I'll be back here in 17 years, and I'll be proud of the contributions I've made, and the blog posts I've written, and happy with the amount of gaming I've done. Things can change, after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment