[	Tags	|	rpgs	]
[	Current Location	|	The cube	]
[	Current Mood	|	contemplative	]

The D&D article making the rounds the last few days (which showed up lots of places via AP) here:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23903817/

Prompted by this blog post by maliszew on his grognardia blog:  

http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/04/d-in-news.html

Here’s the part of the post I totally agree with and am piggybacking off of:

“I simply think that what we are seeing is that the last vestiges of D&D's faddishness are finally falling away and the game is revealed for what it always was: a peculiar little hobby activity for a small group of peculiar people.

Again, I say this without contempt. In fact, I rather look forward to the days when roleplaying is comfortable being what it really is. Those days of tremendous success were oddities. The hobby has been coasting on momentum from the mid-80s and inertia is finally exerting its inexorable pull. My own kids will probably be roleplayers, but only because their father is. They might in turn spread this hobby to some of their friends, but the odds are not great. Like model railroad building or playing bridge (a fad of its own -- the D&D of the 1950s), roleplaying games will eventually become a marginal activity that a small portion of the public finds joy in. For myself, as one of the people who finds such joy, I see no problem in this future. My only concern is that, in their quest to regain something that can never be regained, D&D's current custodians will sell the game's soul and history for a bunch of magic beans.”

Rpgs are a hobby.  You can still identify highly as a roleplayer (I do), but the hobby doesn’t really have to be any bigger than it already is.  However, I’m not sure most roleplayers see it that way.

[	Tags	|	gk, rpgs, star wars	]
[	Current Location	|	The cube	]
[	Current Mood	|	giddy	]
[	Current Music	|	The loud air handler above my desk	]

A friend of mine returned some rpg materials to me last night: most of my WEG Star Wars stuff and a Paranoia boxed set.  He had kept them for about 10 years.  

This wasn’t contentious or anything, mind you, I gave them to him when I thought I might be getting out of gaming for good.  However, he shortly ended up getting divorced, and though he had lost them during the upheaval.  He recently discovered them going through some boxes that had been in storage all this time.  Boxes believed to be old clothes and unimportant papers, had my treasure within.

It was awesome to skim through this stuff again.  One of the coolest things for me was finding stuff I had created: adventure maps, margin notes, a cheat sheet that was essentially a DM’s screen page written in pencil on ¼” graph paper.  Then there was some of the cool published stuff: poster diagrams, the mock ads,* and especially the official Sabacc rules.  The Sabacc cards were missing however, but I think I had lost those before.

I’m also the kind of guy to troll through the credits, and found one set that caused major cognitive dissonance: Galaxy Guide 6: Tramp Freighters was written by Mark Rein*Hagen and Stewart Weick.  I just would have never guessed the WW guys would have written one of the most highly acclaimed SWRPG books.