Rare Topics Challenge: Inaugural post about my love story with dnd and other rpgs
After joining steemit and browsing it for a day or so, I like it so far, but one of the biggest issue with it that I found is that the topics people speak about are very skewed towards few tags that are most profitable. Those being either personal blogs, photography or crypto currency talk. That is to be expected, but I want it to change somewhat, I want steemit to be more evenly distributed in topics people write about. So to that end I announce:
Rare Topics Challenge.
The idea is pretty simple - you pick a topic that is not widely talked about on steemit. It can be any topic, but it's best if you are passionate about. Maybe you are an expert on some obscure art? Maybe you are really passionate about some hobby that no one knows about? It can be anything as long as it's not widely talked about on steemit. And then you make a post about it with a tag #raretopicschallenge, that's it.
As far as I know this is not a thing on steem. Which is good, because I want it to be a thing very much. Don't think about it as a post to break bank, but rather as a post to increase steemit value as a whole. As something to encourage people to write about new things.
So I will begin with my own special love - roleplaying games.
As a kid I did play rpg video games to some extent and later on even mmorpgs, but due to living in a small town and knowing no one who actually played board games, I never developed love for them at a young age. My biggest regret now is that I don't have anyone in real life to play with, had I convinced some friends back in school it would be so much more interesting right now.
In any case if we move to just a few years back. One of my corpmates on EVE online (that should be another topic on this challenge, maybe another time) invited people to join a game he was GMing. I don't really know why I decided to join, but sooner than later the time came for the first session. I got to create my first character (it turned out just a tad bit edgy, but family problems is kinda an expected thing for player characters).
Creating the character I quickly realized that I can make the character anything I want. Unlike video games, there were no limits. That kind of freedom intoxicated me.
And so the campaign began. From getting our first spaceship, to bringing about the AI singularity. I soon figured out that I could do anything in the game and imagination was the only limit. It was fantastic.
In any case at some point that first campaign ended, but ever since I been obsessed with RPGs. (I currently run 1 campaign and play in 4 more each week. Yeah just a tad obsessed.)
In my ideal world, children at school would have a rpg class. It is endlessly fun and it would teach children a lot of important things. It also connects people like nothing else. The people I play with are all my friends, even though we live across the world.
So what else can I tell about my roleplaying, well a few favorites would be nice.
Favorite race in DnD - Kenku. They are obnoxious and that is great.
Favorite class in DnD - Monk. Who needs magic, when you can hit people with your fists?
Favorite system - Microscope. It is entirely different system, instead of building story of your character, you are building the story of the setting.
This is another love story actually. Microscope is different but it is a good different. Your characters die and often, but they are not important. You are building the setting from beginning to end and that brings about a lot of interesting roleplay. You may know that the king dies, but how does he die? Is it assassin? Is it old age? Is it accident? The roleplay brings about all those small details.
I most assuredly recommend you try that system.
There is not much more to tell. Just that I will roleplay till the day I die.
And I hope you guys decide to join me and post about something new. Good day.
Favorite D&D race - Thri kreen. Being fascinated with sleeping (while never sleeping) leads to all sorts of fun encounter scenarios.
Favorite D&D class - Haven't found one that isn't fun.
Favorite rule system - Haven't found a single favorite - all of 'em have strengths and weaknesses. Some are less fun than others, but even those can teach you things. (Like, what NOT to do!)
Favorite die - d12. Rolls and spins nicely, and rarely used.
Favorite D&D alignment - I enjoy playing all of 'em. The reluctant paladin, the joyous psychopath, the grim defender, the curiously amoral researcher.... each has their own pleasures to play with.
Favorite oddity - Devil sticks (see
More likely to come.... :) Thanks for sharing, and I agree - the more we extend the range of conversation, the better!
Favorite die: Percentage die because you get to roll 2 dies for the price of one :D
As for favorite allignment I am not into really lawful types, limits your roleplay somewhat :)
That seems to be a common knock against lawful alignments - not something I find. Most sophonts I can imagine (slaad being an obvious D&D-world exception) tend to follow patterns - IE, rules. This leads to 'lawful'behavior.
The other key factor to me is asking the question - what law? Whose laws are they following? One character I greatly enjoyed was a paladin class from an external, so-called "barbarian" society with a radically different belief system than the pseudo-roman society he found himself living within. While the character hewed closely to a set of laws, those laws didn't cleanly mesh with the greater society's interpretation, which led to fun conflicts and confrontations.
Drove the GM a little wild, but - they let me make the character. :D
I guess you are right and it's true that laws can be different. It's just that I prefer to not be limited by any laws. If some moral issue arises I prefer to think of what kind of answer my character would choose based on his personality, instead of what kind society he lives or lived in.
Usually I play either chaotic good or chaotic neutral.
grin I've played all the alignments, but I tend to default to neutral good or chaotic neutral, it seems, especially if I can't find an "edge" to play with like the aforementioned barbarian-paladin
In one of the campaigns, I play a character that is me transported to DnD world. In it I chose the chaotic neutral alignment.
Ironically, I think my entire history on Steemit is posting about unusual topics. I've made a few posts about game theory and its interaction with the Steemit reward system, but by and large I've written about role-playing games, video games, and no fast food.
In fact, I wrote a rather long article talking about GM-less role-playing and systems which are good for doing so (including Microscope, which I can't recommend enough) and a much longer two-part article on doing character generation for both Capes and Sorcerer.
Also I do some stuff about 3D design and 3D printing, but my passion is real role-playing games outside of the traditional architecture.
I suspect you might find a thing or two you like over there.
Keep the faith!
Yeah Microscope is great :)
Ultimately I want people to talk about more things than cryptocurrencies here. Hopefully someone decides to join this challenge and do a better post than me :)
I've been trying to pull together as many people who write about role-playing games as I can in my feed, to some slight avail. There's at least one other published RPG author on the platform, a few other people who are really excited about the prospect of GM-less RPGing, and now you.
Unfortunately, the platform has a little bit of an incestual relationship with content creation. Articles about cryptocurrencies get the most upvotes, and as a result get the most fiscal rewards, and as a result get more people voting on them in order to chase the Dragon of curation reward – which is it based on whether you give people content that they want but only on whether you upvote content that other people upvote.
As a player of games, you can immediately see the problem.
That doesn't keep us from expanding our own little community, and so we shall.
I have @GINAbot set up to alert me whenever the word "roleplaying" is used on any post on the platform. You would be surprised how little that triggers, though as a result I can track anytime someone brings up the subject anywhere.
Really, when I say it out loud – it's kind of creepy.
Regardless, that's how I got here and I'm glad that I could provide you with some entertainment.
Well that's why I chose this topic, searching the #rpg and #dnd tags I saw that they were mostly empty.
That is probably the worst part of steemit, that the topics spoken about are very heavily skewed towards whats profitable at the time. Not sure what would be a solution maybe some sort of higher vote weight for the topics with less upvotes. Not sure if its possible to implement without the system getting gamed.
I've written some stuff that is pretty critical of the current mechanical situation on both Steemit and the STEEM blockchain in general (which you can read as much of his you like by going to my profile and then looking at my Comments tab), but the obsession with "chasing the Dragon" as I put it leads to some really unhealthy community behaviors. Along with the Whale Wars (organized groups of high Steem Power users and swarms of bots who have ideological differences with one another and get into down vote wars, with average users caught in the middle).
It would be a great set up for an RPG if it wasn't so horribly real. (In fact, I think FreeMarket even fails to capture the true dystopian nature of it.)
There is some talk about implementing Communities as an inherent part of the way that the interface works and that will help a lot – if it ever happens. Until then we can sort of use the tools that we have to discover and re-steem content that we like. That's about all we can do.
haha yeah. My topics, while some are not rare, some of them are certainly rare :) I just write what inspires me at that moment, most of the time.
Same with me here i put my inspiration into writing..
I'll have to check out Microscope. Sounds interesting - thanks for the tip.