. . . and I'm all out of bubblegum
Hello, again. How long has it been, my friends? You may be wondering, what motivated me to write again. Self-reflection. I've always has a knack for self awareness and being dialed in to my own bullshit. That didn't really stop me from indulging in it, but it did provide grist for self loathing. Self, self, self.
Anyway, I won't bore you with the minutia, but I have discovered the joys of AI assistance the last few months. One of the things I've been using it for is game design. It's been a tremendous collaboration. It's prompted me to resurrect many old ideas that had grown cumbersome over the decades due to so many disparate notes scrawled on too many pieces of paper, impossible to collate, cross-reference, or index. In other words, unusable. AI can do all that. I just have to upload all the ideas, thoughts, and random musings, and AI can focus it all into something I can actually work on.
In the gathering of these notes, I walked these dusty halls, seeking things I had written for my world of Aranor, this being the only remaining place where some of it was stored. In so doing, I reread some of my posts on 5E, and thus we approach the crux of this post.
2014
I won't bore you with self-serving cross links. I was very excited (to say the least) by the release of 5E. Sadly, my enthusiasm for new rules, in any game, rarely survives reality. What I mean is, I rarely actually play anything new. I rarely play anything at all, in fact, but if I do, I usually opt for something familiar. I believe that stems from social anxiety, but this is not the time to open that can of worms.
Regardless, I was very pleased with 5E, as a rules set. Until. This is where some of you will possibly be tempted to write me off. If so, no hard feelings. I have never been political here. I'm fairly conservative, somewhere between Libertarian and Republican. Socially, I am personally conservative, but I don't really care how anyone else lives their life. Like a lot of people, I only ask to not be subjected to someone else's lifestyle. You do you, and I'll do me. When I saw the blurb in 5E about the game being open to all sexual and gender identities, it flew all over me. I've been gaming since 1976. When I started, the LBBs was all there was. Never in all that long history of gaming had I ever encountered anything prohibiting or limiting a player from playing a character that was gay or identified differently in any way. For that matter, I had gamed with many people whose character was of the opposite sex or a different race (as in societally, black, white, Asian, etc), and there were never any problems. I failed to see the need to have it spelled out so explicitly. It struck me as proselytizing, at best, or brow beating, at worst. In a reactionary move, I decided I didn't want to have a game that preached to me from what its writers deemed to be the moral high ground. So, I got rid of my 5E stuff.
The next few years (up until recently) my attention stayed on clones, mostly, for a D&D fix. I even have a couple of 5E clones. In the meantime, I started a new job, and one of my co-workers is a 5E guy. It's all he's played. Listening to him made me start thinking that maybe I had cheated myself. I wasn't convinced, though. I had really swallowed all the bad press about 5E, all the negatives that internet folk fixated on. His stories of his sessions were starting to make me wonder. I had started considering re-acquiring the core books, at least.
Then, the buzz about One D&D started. I was still heavily dialed into an internet crowd that was extremely anti-Hasbro and WotC, and that ire stained anything they produced. They would pick apart the smallest details, in a vacuum, and then make broad assertions. Thus it was that I wrote off One D&D as a non-starter for me.
At some point, about 3 or 4 weeks ago, there was a shift in my thinking. I can't explain it, or even pinpoint a catalyst. Something in my mind switched, and I realized that I dont give a single skinny shit about the politics of Hasbro or WotC. I never even knew the politics of TSR. All I care about is a set of rules to act as an effective lens to view my world through. Most of the criticism I see about the new edition is mainly the "little guy" having beef with the "evil corporation", which really doesn't factor. Sheepishly, I admitted to myself that I had attributed far too much influence to spurious criticism. So, I bought the One D&D core books.
I'm still in the early stages of familiarity, but so far, so good. I want to put my thoughts on One D&D into a clean post devoted to only those thoughts, though. This is more of a journal entry, giving insight to myself and anyone else willing to read it, about the thoughts and attitudes that move me.
If you made it this far, thank you. I'm hoping to get back to posting here, but only time will tell. I have a lot of catching up to do.
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