Gaming Ambitions for 2017

Welcome, 2017. I want to write a bit about things I want to do this year, related to gaming. Always optimistic, but I think circumstances may make more of this possible this year: it is something to aspire to at any rate.

1. The obvious thing is the play. Online, in person, the usual suspects, and if possible, getting involved in other games - anything. This as player, DM, both, either - just being involved in games, more often - as close tsoweekly as possible - is going to make my life a good deal happier.

2. I specifically want to run. I have three adventures pretty well worked out in my head - I have to get them on paper (or the computer) and run them. I've talked about these enough: there's the Fire Giant thing we've been poking at the last couple months, with the Bono/Inky/Milo party... There's a pirate/jungle adventure I have been working on, and have a good deal of material for... and I want to redo the House on the Cliff adventure for 5th edition. Some in person, some online - work out which is convenient, and get on with it.

3. Related to that - I want to develop these adventures, and try to turn them into something concrete. Into artifacts (as they like to say) - to write them up and put them in a tangible form, that can be shared. I would like to get into the habit of doing this - not just with my ideas, but other people's. Work on publishing (however modest an audience we might have for these materials.) The act of creating them is the goal - anything more is gravy.

4. I also want to develop the world of our games. I have been playing for 35 years and almost from the beginning, I started making up a world to ply in. I have a ton of material - maps and stories and history and social and cultural essays and information - that I have never quite managed to get from my head (and my computer and piles of paper) to somewhere other people can use them. (Other than a few posts here.) I want to do this partly just to get it into tangible form, to have done something - but also to make it possible to develop it, as a group. For all the info I have, the world is bigger than my ideas of what is in it - it would work better if we could all work on it together. Whether adding areas to the core - developing areas I have done nothing more than drawn and named - or filling in what's there - the more the merrier, I think.

(I was thinking about this playing Storm King's Thunder: I don't care much about the Forgotten Realms - I mentally translate all those published worlds to my own, fit the towns onto my maps, or - sometimes - just tack their maps onto my maps.) Doing that could help us get this game going - but only if you can build up some kind of world of your own that you have some investment in. I need to get this thing into a form that can, in fact, be worked with...)

5. I definitely need to blog more. I have to get a post in here every month at least - every week if I could... at some point, it might be worth changing this to something more public, too - linking out and interacting with other blogs. Maybe not this one, since this tends to be rather insular, a conversation about how to play, specific to what we are playing - but something like it. But to do that, I think I need to have the material, and keep producing material... We'll see. But I still need to write here more.

6. I would like to try to get some kind of audio-visual thing going. A podcast, a video blog, something - whether conversations about the game, or gamecasts, or something else. This is another thing I don't quite think I'm ready to unleash on the wide world, but I want to start doing something like this. Figure out the logistics, the technology, figure out what you have to do to make these things good - and practice them.

(This is one of the areas where work is not helping: because things like that do come up there - but the material is so mind-numbingly awful, and the kind of hypercriticism that has become the norm is so maddening, doing some kind of presentation at work ends up not teaching you to speak in public, but making the thought of speaking in public horrifying. Every time I do something like that, I think about what I want to be talking about, and it drives me nuts. So I have to find a way to start doing those things on a topic that interests me. Like - D&D!)

7. Finally, I need to write. Obviously, some of this is included in the comments above - I need to write up adventures, write up the world (in a shareable form), write for the blog - but I also have to write fiction. I always have, of course - but I have to do two things I have not done: 1) I have to actually finish something - this would be a miracle... 2) I have to do it more openly. NaNoWriMo did this - talking about my project and others was very satisfying - and very helpful in keeping the story moving forward. I didn't finish it, no surprises there, but I passed 50,000 without rewriting it four times - that's a step in the right direction all my itself. So - in short: I want to work on stories - and talk about them, both the writing process and the actual stories. (This, I should say, also relates the world building, since I am mainly talking about fiction set in this D&D world.)

And that is it - for now anyway. I could be really ambitious, start talking about all the things I want to do: Build Models! Publish! watch more video stuff! get involved in other people's games! - but that might be a bit much. If I can do the 7 things above - not well, or bringing anything to a conclusion, just doing them - that will be an excellent start, something to build on...