22 August 2020 - Plague Journal Day 162

Micah 6:8
Acts 1:21-26
Yes, your life matters.

We all are still sheltering in place, but I'm here to keep you sane and entertained.
One could hardly ask for much more than that, now could one?

Christian is after me to get back to playing D&D again. 

 

It's been a looong time since I've DM'ed a game, and even longer since I've been a player. Looking at the current rule books and so forth, I'm amazed at how much things have changed since I was a regular player.

OK, maybe changed isn't exactly the right word. The whole concept is the same - a role playing game of the mind, not on a board, it's almost like radio, in a sense: theatre of the mind.
As I've written before, I'm a big radio fan for that very reason - it engages the mind rather than subsituting for it. So the changes in D&D are not exactly cosmetic, but they're not fundamental. There are new character races and classes available. There are new weapons and spells and magic items and all that. But we're still left with a game where one person (the DM) has created a world within which other people (the players) will roam and act. It's a shared creation of a story or stories. In a sense, it's what authors are talking about when they say their characters dictate what they write. The bones of the plot are there: the setting, the cast of characters, their basic attributes, etc. Then, as the author puts them through their paces, it sometimes becomes obvious that what was originally intended simply won't work; that the characters need to be true to themselves and do what they need to do, not what the author initially intended.
That's pretty exciting.

I have often wondered how authors can collaborate on stories and novels and so forth, but maybe now I know. They're each bringing some of the background, the setting and characters and story arc, but then they each listen to the characters they're dealing with and weave it into what it really needs to be, rather than what they had intended.
I know sometimes one author has created a world and a basic plot, maybe a very detailed outline, and then the other one writes to that outline and plot, but often they work much more closely than that. I think that's how D&D creates stories. The DM has created a world with a set of problems to be solved, or a series of goals to be achieved, and then the players go in and make it what it really should have been.
This could be exciting!

Keep Calm and Stay Away.
I'll be back tomorrow.
The mental health issues related to our lockdown and the pandemic are especially hard for people with depression. NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, has a 24 hour helpline: 800-950-6264.