is it monday yet?
Sunday, September 15th, 2019 07:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amovingtargetI play DND. I mentioned this once in a previous post, but I don't think I adequately explained the effect it has had on me. Sometime in February of last year, enemyofperfect and I -- at my behest -- spent half the night poring over character creation, and I downloaded the Lost Mine of Phandelver module -- because I couldn't help myself -- and we rolled a couple of the pregen character sheets, just to test it with. We didn't want to homebrew something, or play with these characters we made, when after all… what if we didn't like it? Well, apparently we do like it, because we've been playing almost every week for a year and a half, seventy sessions next Monday and who knows how many hours all together.
Hours that never seem like enough. I think it's safe to say by now that we like it lots. I've bartered with one dragon and killed another. I've rescued friends, and strangers, and strangers who've become friends -- sometimes more than once! I've defeated bandits and villains by sword and spell, and aspiring crime lords and ambitious rich kids with… the power of friendship, quite possibly. Best of all, I have turned into cats, and other critters, to amuse myself and other characters and sometimes both at once. I'm pretty sure that's what the druid class was built for.
Maybe it goes without saying that I got into this because of Critical Role. Every day for hours on end I would laugh and gasp and cheer as I binged on the first campaign, feeling like I was playing along with them. It got to a point where I couldn't ignore the fact that I wanted to play myself, that I wanted to be immersed in a story like that, like the best kind of video game. When our campaign started getting long enough for characterisation to become necessary, I fumbled for a while and then did the only thing I could think of doing, dumping all my issues on Tia -- human druid, currently level 10 -- so immersion was definitely what I got.
This turned out to be the most double edged of swords. On the one hand it gave me the incredible opportunity to...be my own person. With Tia I was allowed to play up all my depressive tendencies when in real life I would have to bury them under the ever polished veneer of passing, lest I be lectured for being sad when I had nothing to be sad about. Tia got to fall in love with someone, and be with them, and have -- technically occuring outside of proper sessions -- so much good sex, the kind with talking and feelings and all that fun stuff. Suffice to say that, for various reasons, I don't have that. Tia built her own home! Three sessions ago she got married! Hopefully in future sessions she will have children! She can have friends who love her, and I get to experience what that might be like. She can tell people how she feels, and get in over her head and I get to practice figuring out what to do about her problems. She can get her heart broken and spend days and days in a depressive fugue and I get to press on my rejection sensitive dysphoria without quite feeling like I'm going to die from it. Tia gets to fall in love with her friends, male and female, and even kiss and have sex with some of them, and have a partner who understands, and friends who understand and I, in turn, get to understand what that might be like, in a life that doesn't give me the luxury of being able to find out.
In a game ruled by the whims of dice rolls, it's still the only place I have any real sense of agency. A whole world unfolds for me to walk through and touch and change, and every week it's over too soon and I have to go back to counting the days until I can visit again.
Still, that isn't to say that the good things about DND are relegated to in-universe things. I would say that the most important thing that has come out of it is that my relationship withenemyofperfect has improved so much. Playing has given me a lot of practice in saying how I feel -- something that didn't happen very often even though we talked literally every day for years before playing -- or even just letting myself feel things at all. Around halfway through -- to where we are now -- we started building a debrief talk into our routine. I tried DMing in the beginning, it made sense because it was my idea to play, but I couldn't manage it because I feel crippled when I can't plan and prepare for everything that might occur. E, on the other hand, thrives on improvising, and they have been going from strength to strength as DM since then. Adding our debrief document to that helped us both, and we've been meeting in the middle of the spectrum more and more often, both in and out of session.
It's letting me flex some of my own creative muscles too, contributing ideas for lore and worldbuilding and even, on a few occasions, coming up with backstory on the fly without even flinching. It'll be a while longer, probably, before we will be done with this campaign that was not supposed to be a campaign, but we've already decided that we want to play a new one, this one with an actual party of characters. We -- that is to say, mostly me, I think -- are still shy fiends so it's still just the two of us playing around in a sandbox, eventually taking charge of three characters each. We've talked about it and we think that it might turn out to be less of a DM and player sort of game and more like… co-authoring a story. E will still DM and put all their improv flair into the sessions themselves, and I will have input into deep characterisation and the long arcs during debriefing afterwards, so both of us have a hand on the wheel. At least, that's what we've said, I guess we'll see how it works out when we get there.
I still worry that all of this is more than I deserve, and somehow still less than I want. I get really distracted by creating things for organising and tracking the campaign -- character sheets with tabs for inventory and coin, battle trackers, many ways to save notes to build a kind of wiki, which I'm still wrestling with. And then there's the full story drafts I wrote for nearly sixty sessions, 260k words that I wrote between November and March last year. I wanted to share it somehow, either posting to A03 or moulding the material into an original work -- but this is a campaign that has been largely crafted for me personally, around my issues, and the internet is full of People with Opinions. I'm probably not going to have what the Critical Role cast have either. I lost most of my hearing a decade ago and what little confidence I had went with it, so I don't think it's very likely that I'd be comfortable in a group setting where people are too busy having fun to speak clearly and one at a time -- I'll be too busy feeling like a burden and an outsider. Even in a group at a digital table, I worry that I would be too shy to have any input and let everyone else crowd me out without even meaning to.
But I digress. What I'm trying to say is that DND is good for people on many levels, and everyone should be playing. Waking up at 2:00am and talking hypotheticals until dawn, until I was too drunk on sleeplessness to be shy and scared, until I said "Hey, do you want to play a small module…?"
I'm pretty sure it was the best thing I ever did for myself.
---
If you're interested in the DM's perspective of this, you can read E's post here
enemyofperfect and I -- at my behest -- spent half the night poring over character creation, and I downloaded the Lost Mine of Phandelver module -- because I couldn't help myself -- and we rolled a couple of the pregen character sheets, just to test it with. We didn't want to homebrew something, or play with these characters we made, when after all… what if we didn't like it? Well, apparently we do like it, because we've been playing almost every week for a year and a half, seventy sessions next Monday and who knows how many hours all together. Hours that never seem like enough. I think it's safe to say by now that we like it lots. I've bartered with one dragon and killed another. I've rescued friends, and strangers, and strangers who've become friends -- sometimes more than once! I've defeated bandits and villains by sword and spell, and aspiring crime lords and ambitious rich kids with… the power of friendship, quite possibly. Best of all, I have turned into cats, and other critters, to amuse myself and other characters and sometimes both at once. I'm pretty sure that's what the druid class was built for.
Maybe it goes without saying that I got into this because of Critical Role. Every day for hours on end I would laugh and gasp and cheer as I binged on the first campaign, feeling like I was playing along with them. It got to a point where I couldn't ignore the fact that I wanted to play myself, that I wanted to be immersed in a story like that, like the best kind of video game. When our campaign started getting long enough for characterisation to become necessary, I fumbled for a while and then did the only thing I could think of doing, dumping all my issues on Tia -- human druid, currently level 10 -- so immersion was definitely what I got.
This turned out to be the most double edged of swords. On the one hand it gave me the incredible opportunity to...be my own person. With Tia I was allowed to play up all my depressive tendencies when in real life I would have to bury them under the ever polished veneer of passing, lest I be lectured for being sad when I had nothing to be sad about. Tia got to fall in love with someone, and be with them, and have -- technically occuring outside of proper sessions -- so much good sex, the kind with talking and feelings and all that fun stuff. Suffice to say that, for various reasons, I don't have that. Tia built her own home! Three sessions ago she got married! Hopefully in future sessions she will have children! She can have friends who love her, and I get to experience what that might be like. She can tell people how she feels, and get in over her head and I get to practice figuring out what to do about her problems. She can get her heart broken and spend days and days in a depressive fugue and I get to press on my rejection sensitive dysphoria without quite feeling like I'm going to die from it. Tia gets to fall in love with her friends, male and female, and even kiss and have sex with some of them, and have a partner who understands, and friends who understand and I, in turn, get to understand what that might be like, in a life that doesn't give me the luxury of being able to find out.
In a game ruled by the whims of dice rolls, it's still the only place I have any real sense of agency. A whole world unfolds for me to walk through and touch and change, and every week it's over too soon and I have to go back to counting the days until I can visit again.
Still, that isn't to say that the good things about DND are relegated to in-universe things. I would say that the most important thing that has come out of it is that my relationship with
enemyofperfect has improved so much. Playing has given me a lot of practice in saying how I feel -- something that didn't happen very often even though we talked literally every day for years before playing -- or even just letting myself feel things at all. Around halfway through -- to where we are now -- we started building a debrief talk into our routine. I tried DMing in the beginning, it made sense because it was my idea to play, but I couldn't manage it because I feel crippled when I can't plan and prepare for everything that might occur. E, on the other hand, thrives on improvising, and they have been going from strength to strength as DM since then. Adding our debrief document to that helped us both, and we've been meeting in the middle of the spectrum more and more often, both in and out of session. It's letting me flex some of my own creative muscles too, contributing ideas for lore and worldbuilding and even, on a few occasions, coming up with backstory on the fly without even flinching. It'll be a while longer, probably, before we will be done with this campaign that was not supposed to be a campaign, but we've already decided that we want to play a new one, this one with an actual party of characters. We -- that is to say, mostly me, I think -- are still shy fiends so it's still just the two of us playing around in a sandbox, eventually taking charge of three characters each. We've talked about it and we think that it might turn out to be less of a DM and player sort of game and more like… co-authoring a story. E will still DM and put all their improv flair into the sessions themselves, and I will have input into deep characterisation and the long arcs during debriefing afterwards, so both of us have a hand on the wheel. At least, that's what we've said, I guess we'll see how it works out when we get there.
I still worry that all of this is more than I deserve, and somehow still less than I want. I get really distracted by creating things for organising and tracking the campaign -- character sheets with tabs for inventory and coin, battle trackers, many ways to save notes to build a kind of wiki, which I'm still wrestling with. And then there's the full story drafts I wrote for nearly sixty sessions, 260k words that I wrote between November and March last year. I wanted to share it somehow, either posting to A03 or moulding the material into an original work -- but this is a campaign that has been largely crafted for me personally, around my issues, and the internet is full of People with Opinions. I'm probably not going to have what the Critical Role cast have either. I lost most of my hearing a decade ago and what little confidence I had went with it, so I don't think it's very likely that I'd be comfortable in a group setting where people are too busy having fun to speak clearly and one at a time -- I'll be too busy feeling like a burden and an outsider. Even in a group at a digital table, I worry that I would be too shy to have any input and let everyone else crowd me out without even meaning to.
But I digress. What I'm trying to say is that DND is good for people on many levels, and everyone should be playing. Waking up at 2:00am and talking hypotheticals until dawn, until I was too drunk on sleeplessness to be shy and scared, until I said "Hey, do you want to play a small module…?"
I'm pretty sure it was the best thing I ever did for myself.
---
If you're interested in the DM's perspective of this, you can read E's post here
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-15 07:23 pm (UTC)Why you gotta be so nice to me though, omg. I am still very new at DMing! *hides*
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-15 07:25 pm (UTC)I guess that means you're a natural then :T
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-15 07:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-16 01:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-16 04:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-17 04:31 am (UTC)