Rolling for Initiative
Hi there.
I’m back at work this week, because the institution I work for has been designated an essential service for the city I live in, and apparently all it took for me to start writing for an audience (however minuscule) again was the feeling that I’m slacking off while doing it.
While I was sheltering at home over the past eleven weeks, I wrote another, much longer, draft of this missive, but on reflection I don’t think I need to share it. The upshot was that over the last few years, and especially within the last three months, I’ve become attracted to and then obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons (and other tabletop roleplaying games) actual-play shows, both podcast and video, and while that has constituted a minor identity crisis for me, since part of my self-conception has for a long time been bound up in rejection of the elements of nerd culture I perceived as jejune and imitative (and, not incidentally, social), my naïve enjoyment of the shows as works of entertainment has overridden my skeptical posture toward virtually all (non-comics) fantasy and sci-fi properties I’ve come into contact with since adolescence.
For the past several years, podcasts like The Adventure Zone (for a while anyway), Friends at the Table, Not Another D&D Podcast, and Rude Tales of Magic have charmed and distracted me (generally one at a time), but what really sealed my doom this spring was getting hooked on Dimension 20, CollegeHumor’s actual-play streaming show with several easily bingeable seasons of high-concept campaigns. (For the initiate: The Unsleeping City is my head’s favorite season, because anticapitalist magical realism > everything else, but Fantasy High: Sophomore Year wormed its way deeper into my heart, because God those idiot children.) For what it’s worth, I bounced real hard off the biggest actual-play of them all, Critical Role, and have determined that, universal exception F@tT aside, I don’t want to listen to anybody but comedy professionals engage in this particular form of stochastic storytelling; reckless entertainment, rather than patient worldbuilding, is what I’m in it for.
About that exception: Friends at the Table is the only actual-play show I listen to that doesn’t run on D&D, although their Hieron cycle runs on a modified version of the Apocalypse World system explicitly patterned after D&D, and functions as much as a salutary critique of the colonialist pulp-derived lore of D&D itself as it does a singularly beautiful story. If I had to name a best actual-play show in existence it would be F@tT (and I’m still only halfway through the archive), but that’s a bit like calling Joyce and Kafka the greatest fantasy novelists of the twentieth century: there’s a lot more going on than mere genre.
But before I accidentally turn this into a close reading of every actual-play show I’ve listened to and watched since 2017 (since I’ve been a bit embarrassed to admit to consuming them, I have had no outlet to express my opinions of them, and quite a backlog has accumulated), I wanted to turn to my ostensible purpose for writing about it. Which is, regrettably, that after consuming hundreds of hours of actual-play shows, I kind of really want to DM now.
Have I ever actually sat in on a session of a tabletop roleplaying game before? No. Did I buy digital copies of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, Player’s Handbook, and Monster Manual a month ago because why the hell not, I was stuck at home and not spending money on anything else? Sure did. Have I spent more hours than most veteran DMs would deem advisable constructing a fussily-detailed homebrew setting for a party of entirely notional players? Also yes.
And because I’m me, I have notes for another five further settings in case my “replace medieval Western European folklore with twentieth-century Latin American proto-magical realism” continent isn’t appealing to whatever players I might manage to cobble together. I am not wholly comfortable with the fact that my immediate impulse on discovering a delighted love for a particular artform is to attempt to assert authorship within it (I spent a lot of time trying to create novels as a child, songs as a teenager, comics in my twenties, and criticism in my thirties), but it is, alas, who I am. Of course, in direct contradiction of my attitude as a consumer, I doubt I would make a particularly entertaining DM; I’m certainly no performer.
So I guess hit me up if you want to attempt to engage in long-distance collaborative storytelling as an experiment and perhaps distraction in this era of endless yawning hours and rapidly vanishing weeks. If you have managed to read this, I presume you know where to find me.
So does the emergence of this newsletter mean I’ll be picking up the threads I dropped back in March of the other projects I’m always theoretically working on? The Light Brigade, Just One Song More, Bilbo’s Laptop, etc.? God I hope so.