The unabashed joy of returning home…
Over the weekend, I finally bowed to recent social pressures within our gaming group and purchased an Xbox 360 (My Gamertag: Dante8309). I have been without a console that could perform well for such heady endeavors as first person shooters, a genre that I enjoyed quite a bit in my high school and early college years. I even dabbled professionally with a game company you’ve probably heard of, but that’s a story best left for another time.
The Oh-So-Verbose Setup
After firing up my new console and slapping in the Halo 3 disk, I was amazed how in a few short minutes several elements that I knew were on the fringes of technical possibility sprang to life in fully polished, amazingly high fidelity (pseudo) reality. It was as if I was frozen in one of those Walt Disney’s head tubes and was revived hundreds of years in the future to play the games only dreamt about!
When I would wax nostalgic about these features being amazing and incredible some of my friends who had been gaming all throughout my “off years” would just pat me on the head and assure me that they’ve had that feature two games ago and its pretty commonplace now… and I’d be off to the next cool thing to enjoy, like a kid on Christmas.
Does this even relate to roleplaying?
You bet it does! I know there are many of you out there that used to play a certain campaign setting, system, or even entire genre that you’ve let get old and crusty just like I did for my first person shooters.
You can approach the solution to this in several ways. First off, if you’re not into a lot of research or a lot of extra cash outlay just remember a few of the elements of those long-past games that you used to enjoy and weave them into your plotlines as you prepare your gaming session for this upcoming week. It doesn’t take a lot to evoke the feeling of certain environment or setting (or even game type) and the natural reverence that you hold for the source material will probably come out in a satisfying way when you actually run your session.
If you are feeling a little more ambitious, pop open Google and see if that old setting or game system that you used to love has been updated to new versions or a newer rule system. If you’re lucky, the new rule system may be the same one that you’re running in today which can ease the argument to support a one-off nostalgia session for the rest of your adventuring companions.
It is fun to get back in the saddle!
Take it from me… getting back in the saddle and experiencing something you once loved through the new shiny lens of revisions and improvements can be a pretty wonderful thing. In fact, I think I have done myself a disservice by staying away from something that I once loved for so long.
There are those of you in the world (trust me, I’m thinking of one person specifically when I write this) that will argue that not all revisions to a gaming system are good. That’s true, however you won’t know what good or bad became of your old favorite until you check it out with your own eyes and roll some dice and kill some players… I mean… reward some experience points.
Especially since I was part of the reason my cohort was playing Halo 3 all night, I gotta step up here and take one for my homeboy Dante. Also he beat me 25-17 and maybe he’ll go easy on me next time if I help a brother out. 🙂
In blogging, as in DMing, you have good days and bad days. Some days you just come up completely dry. Those days suck, and you wind up writing an article about Seinfeldian magic items.
You just have to try to find inspiration wherever you can, and a lot of times when you can’t think of a damn thing you go somewhere else and relate it to what you were doing. I’ve played in (and run) lots of campaigns where an idea completely foreign to D&D was adapted for use and it worked great.
Did Dante softball his post a little? Maybe. One of the things we want to be able to do for people with this blog is to learn how to think out of the box and find inspiration for their roleplaying from other sources. Hell, we just want to let them know it’s OK to do that.
Usually it just takes one measly little grain of inspiration to get someone going. Hopefully, a half hour before a gaming session in which you have no idea what to do, you can draw on something else in your life and that inspiration will hit. And if everybody winds up playing a fantasy adaptation of Discs of Tron (Mordenkainen’s Skeet of Death? heh heh) and still has fun, then everybody wins. 🙂