Out with the Old, In with the New

Happy New Year, everyone!

To commemorate it, I'm trying a new method of goal-setting, inspired by this post at The Dododecahedron. 

While I had no specific goals for 2024 beyond game more (a wash) and spend less (I spent more), I feel that for 2025 I need to set some more specific goals.  Therefore, I present these:

1. Write at least three blog posts per month.  Today counts, so only 35 to go!

2. Publish a free adventure - I have several in varying stages of completion, tied to published posts, but this year I want to share examples.

3. Game more.  While I'd love to get more than 8 sessions of RPGs in, I suspect that this will be another year with more Magic than RPGs - it is far easier to squeeze in pick-up games of Magic.  Regardless, more gaming means more substantial topics to write about, even if they are only session logs and play reports.

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All that said, it looks like I'll be taking classes this year, cutting back on available game time, but we shall see.

If nothing else, I can content myself with occasionally spending an hour or two at a local Game X Change store sifting through boxes of poorly sorted Magic cards in a never-ending quest to find treasures, or at least playables.   

I do this because I get a thrill when I pick up a dollar card for ten cents. Not that it matters, as I don't sell the cards and only rarely trade them away.  The endstate is that I hoard cards, but only the best cards, for a somewhat refined hoard.  

A cardboard hoard.

A cardhoard.

Dragons have hoards, and I have a hoard, so that makes me a dragon (but not like Eustace; as an aside, here is a great read about Eustace's un-dragoning).  

2025 is looking up already!

Rapacious Dragon by Johan Grenier - lovely art and somehow fitting.

Gaming 2022 Reflections

Reflecting on the past year is a regular habit of mine.  In addition to the notable life events, though, I added some hard numerical data to the mix this year, and this post is the result.  

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2022 was an eventful year for me and my family, but not so much for my gaming.  Over the course of 12 months (or 365 days), I ran two DnD sessions, and played maybe a dozen MtG sessions.  Compared to how much I have spent on DnD and MtG, I don't know that it was worth it, beyond sating my desire for new things.

First on my image search.

The one New Year's resolution I kept from last year was to maintain a 'hobby budget'.  The Games category is by far the largest chunk of my hobbies (other headings include Books, Stuff for Kids, Alcohol, and Eating Out).  Since I began intermittent fasting, Eating Out has declined (yay!), but I also started a YouTube channel (Ben Buys Beverages) in October, so the alcohol category has been on the uptick, but that is not the purpose of this post.  

The purpose of this post is to accept that RPGs (a mix of DnD and OSR and both-adjacent) ate lots of money, spent almost entirely on Kickstarters and Drivethrurpg purchases.  To be specific, $972 US dollars on these items - with several Kickstarters still awaiting delivery.  I have faith they'll arrive, but not this year.  

Which is different from the money spent on Magic card packs, sleeves, and singles for current or future decks; that rings up to $876 for the year.  About half of this went towards my Away Decks project (for the record, the R and BG decks have won each time played, and the UW deck came in second, so I consider the whole thing a success), and while I have a temptation to do another round of Away Decks (GW, UR, B), that project will definitely sit on the backburner.

Don't misunderstand, I know that I am fortunate to be able to have a hobby budget like this, but overall, nearly $2000 on games that I don't get to play all that much is not the best use of my money.  Looking at the numbers, if I keep away from Kickstarters and only buy Magic singles I have an immediate need for, the costs should be more than halved.

All that said, I did get in some writing in on the blog, both in published posts and partial posts awaiting completion.  Quite a bit of writing, actually, and next year promises much more, as I am planning to participate in the #Dungeon23 challenge.  

Perhaps next year will see more gaming - I certainly hope so!

And I hope your year sees more gaming, too.  

Happy Holidays!

That Wasn't Supposed to Happen!

There is an adage in fiction writing, about how every solution should be the start (or aggravation) of one or more other problems for the protagonist.

This is also a key takeaway from the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck - every solution is another beginning of a new problem for regular folks like you and I.

Or a challenge, depending on how optimistic or pessimistic you might be. 

Now, some folks may be worried that this isn't realistic, or that it is somehow unfair for the PCs to be able to rest on their laurels and reap the rewards of their heroics (or homicidal tendencies or both).

Given that DnD, and other RPGs, are all about pretending to be other people with more ... interesting ... lives, this adage works for these games as well.  After all, challenges and misfortunes propel adventurers into additional adventures, which is what defines their job descriptions, so it works.

Nobody wants to roleplay this game.  Will McLean, AD&D DMG, 1979.

There are several ways to approach or address this method of DMing, highlighted here:

Embrace the pillar of improv known as 'yes, and...' and adding this phrase to your DMing toolkit will serve well in demonstrating how player choices impact the world.

Monkeypawing (from here) wishes is perhaps the most commonly seen form of this advice, and as such, is often ridiculed as being 'adversarial DMing.'  Yet it isn't, or shouldn't be - unless the wish comes from some sort of fiendish or other ill-natured source, and then the PC (and player!) should know better.

My wife's favorite idiom, 'The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions' applies to the do-gooding PCs out saving the world, rescuing the helpless, and generally making life better for those less fortunate.  Don't let this stop you (or PCs) from doing Good and Right things, just be aware that the next rule will rear its head, more often than not.

The Law of Unintended Consequences is an economic theory that also applies to everything else that humans (and the other races/species commonly encountered in RPGs) do, to include doing nothing, but especially actions committed and words spoken in the heat of the moment.

I first learned the acronym TANSTAAFL from Robert A. Heinlein's Notebooks of Lazarus Long (a character that is not exactly an immortal, just quite long-lived).  It turns out that this is another economics theory (based around opportunity costs) that pertains to all other human (and other) activities.  

Will McLean, AD&D DMG 1979

All this talk of economics has me thinking of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand and how it might rival the various Bigby's Hand spells, given how it impacts the local economies.

Then again, instead of a spell, perhaps the Invisible Hand might be better as a monster of some sort.

Just not the kind of Invisible Hand that fudges dice rolls.

What is your favorite game-related unintended consequence?

On Reading

I enjoy reading, and always have.

Starting with my older brother's comic books, then moving on to proper books: super-heroes, fantasy, science fiction, science fantasy, westerns, history, and other nonfiction.

These days, though, most of my reading is blogs and forums.  I almost said FB groups (I am a member of several D&D-related groups there), but I am both trying to wean myself of FB and don't know that FB meets my definition of reading, despite how long some posts are.

Anyhow, I read blogs and forums.  Not every day, or even every other day, but there are times I sit down and binge-read (which is cheaper and healthier than binge-drinking), following links and reading article series and entire forum threads.

Sometimes I participate with comments, but that is a rarity.  Which is different from FB, where I often comment, and occasionally get responded to (on rare occasion, my comments get responses from surviving creators of the earlier editions of D&D or published authors, which I find super exciting).  Usually I read and absorb, maybe save a document to the computer (a second step, as my online reading is mostly done on iPad), and then let the ideas percolate in my head, mixing with other thoughts.

Which is related to one of my favorite quotes: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” - Friedrich Neitzsche

It is related because that bit about the abyss drives what I do and do not read (or watch) - I firmly believe that nothing we come in contact with ever goes away.  We may consciously forget about it, but it lingers forever, affecting us in strange and subtle ways. 

But I'm not writing about philosophy (because then I'd be all over the Stoics, because it lines up neatly with my personal beliefs and Catholicism in general), I'm writing about reading.

The blogs and forums linked to the side are my most common haunts, although I drift to others as the links take me.  On occasion, those links take me to Amazon for a proper book, and then I come full circle.

So when it comes to gaming (or the fiction that I write that stays safely unpublished), you now know the source of the ideas.

Third Time's the Charm!

 Hail and well met, fellow adventurers!

This makes the third, and hopefully final, start of Thalian Musings.  The first was December 2007.  The next 2011ish.  And number three is today.  This time around, the goal is just to write about gaming.

And by gaming, I mean Dungeons and Dragons, and sometimes, Magic the Gathering.  I play other games, and own several more, but D&D and MtG are what I am most likely to be playing, so what I am most likely to write about.  

There are other games in the house I enjoy or would enjoy playing: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy box set, GURPS proper, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Catalyst Games' Battletech box sets, Munchkin, Dungeon (the good old one), Carcassone, and when it ships, the new Twilight 2000 box set - I backed the kickstarter.  

This list doesn't even touch all the games I own as pdfs only.  Suffice it to say, it is way too many, but it all provides grand idea fodder for the games I may or do run.

Speaking of games I run, I am running a D&D 5e (ish - I love houserules and a homebrewish world) game on Thursday nights.  It started as a mashup between the venerable B2 and B5, with a healthy dose of blog and forum cullings, as well as the healthy pdf collection mentioned above.  We play on Discord and enjoy ourselves.  The players are former students from my days as a high school teacher, so I am the old man.  

We opted for 5e, because it is what they are most familiar with (and two run 5eish games of their own).  Before COVID, I ran an in-person B/Xish megadungeon for the current crew plus more. I think we had 12 people at its height.  Now it is me and 4 players - a good number.

In addition to B/X and 5e, I have enough books to run good old AD&D, as well, but so far, that hasn't happened.  So I mine the books for ideas.

Beyond that Thursday night 5e game, a friend has a standing MtG Commander game every Saturday that I attend once or twice a quarter.  I sold most of my cards off, and even with what I have, the joy of deckbuilding and sifting through cards quickly becomes a chore.

tl;dr - I'm back, hopefully for good, and hopefully focused on gaming.  

His father's son.

I enjoyed my last day of freedom from work by shopping at the local Sears/Kmart (S-Mart? Shop smart, shop S-Mart!) and I found a copy of Heroscape Master Set 1 on sale for $10.00 USD - a veritable steal. So I bought it and brought it home.

I had lots of fun building the 3-D game board in a variety of permutations. Then I fetched the children from daycare, stopped at McDonald's for dinner (cheeseburger happy meals, yum!), and came home. Owen became instantly fascinated with the Heroscape stuff, especially the giant robot, Major Q9. So I got out the dice and we started playing an abbreviated version of the game. We called it on account of the game room being right next to Riannon's bedroom, and her needing some semblance of quiet to fall asleep - the clatter of dice and excited laughter echoing in the dining room simply would not do.

When the game ended, Owen's side was winning; all I had left were two viking champions and a dragon versus Owen's Elite Airborne squad and an Airborne champion.

Here are some pictures of Owen: by my dragon; with his robot; and through the cave, fronted by some of his Airborne squad. I really like this latter one.

So, if anyone is curious about birthday presents for Owen and I, more Heroscape stuff would be grand...