It's almost one o'clock in the afternoon. I slept in this morning, relaxed in bed for a bit after one of my wife's cats finally managed to wake me up, and then my wife made me lunch/breakfast. Now as I'm writing this, I'm also going back and forth to work on Bittermint and browsing on Fearnet. This is turning out to be a good day.
Putting Bittermint together has made me remember all the years when I was a hard-core gamer. My friends and I would play AD&D from whenever we got together at someone's house on the weekend to however late we could stay awake. (My insomnia usually gave me an edge there) Looking back, I realize that it never really occurred to me that I was running almost all of the campaigns. It just seemed to me that we all were having fun, and to me fun was all the planning and deciding what to put in, and creating something for my friends to explore. My particular group of buddies always seemed to take great pride in wreaking havoc with all my beautifully-detailed cities and villages, like the time they took over a small, walled town and were completely surprised when the local lord sent troops in to take it back.
It was natural, me being the one to make all this stuff. I still remember the first game I ever saw played. My 5th or 6th grade TAG teacher had one of the guys in my class run a quick adventure so all of us could see how it worked. The group was exploring an old dungeon at the behest of a wizard, and her character fell down into a pit trap. As she was plummeting into the dark, she looked back up and yelled, "You stupid wizard!" Of course, a couple of fireballs shot down after her. I thought this weird game, which was somehow played without a board, was the neatest thing in the universe. But I also wondered just how the wizard could hear her, since he was nowhere near. I wondered where the dungeon was, and whether there was anyone living near it. How do you think you would react if you were a medieval peasant, scraping your livelihood from the soil and never knowing exactly how next years harvest will turn out, and all these armed strangers keep heading out to that old set of ruins over the hill? Some of them come back, some don't. The ones that do, often drop gold coins at the tavern in town, just to buy a mug of ale to wash the taste of that hellish underground place out of their heads. They've got all those swords and all that armor and magic, and you've got your little home-made knife. But you're hungry.
Time to post this, and see what this new blogger format looks like. Crossing my fingers.
PS: Seems the '&' is not allowed in post labels. Why?
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