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canyonwalkerI have been playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) for a long time. As I recounted in a "Five Things" retrospective a year ago I was first introduced to the pencil-paper-and-dice roleplaying game around age 11 by a pair of my cousins and I've been playing it pretty much ever since. It's odd, then, that as much as D&D has been a major pastime of mine for so long I've written so little about it in my journal. That 5 Things retrospective is one of just three blogs I've written about D&D in the nine years I've been keeping this journal.
Why don't I write more about something that's obviously so relevant to me? I've discovered the answer is because it seems too much. There's so much I could write about, in so much detail, that I don't know where to start. And I'm concerned that anything I try to write would go on so long that a) you'd lose interest before getting to the end, and— more importantly— b) so would I. 😨
The way to solve this twin problem, in any kind of topic really, is through scope and structure. Identify a small enough but meaningful subtopic (scope) you can delve into in reasonable time, and organize your description of it (structure) to make it lucid and easier to follow. I did that with a blog I wrote 18 months ago, "Speeding up Combat in D&D". In hindsight, though, I feel that that blog suffered from a third problem: lack of context. It makes sense if you're already well familiar with D&D; but what if you're not?
How do you solve the problem of context? I'm reminded of the classic line from Lewis Carroll: “'Begin at the beginning,' the King said, very gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'"
I don't know that I'll be able to reach the end. It's a long way away! Though I can get to an end, and I definitely can start at a beginning: Session Zero.
The practice of Session Zero is how successful roleplaying game should start, though it's often not how they do start. Session Zero is a concept I started to figure out years ago on my own, from sheer need, before I saw it formalized with a coined term "Session Zero". Now that I've built up some of the context around the topic here, I'll dive into what a Session Zero is in my next blog entry, then give some examples of how it works (and counter-examples of what happens when you don't do it) in a subsequent blog. Stay tuned!
Keep reading: Roleplaying Games and Session Zero
Why don't I write more about something that's obviously so relevant to me? I've discovered the answer is because it seems too much. There's so much I could write about, in so much detail, that I don't know where to start. And I'm concerned that anything I try to write would go on so long that a) you'd lose interest before getting to the end, and— more importantly— b) so would I. 😨
The way to solve this twin problem, in any kind of topic really, is through scope and structure. Identify a small enough but meaningful subtopic (scope) you can delve into in reasonable time, and organize your description of it (structure) to make it lucid and easier to follow. I did that with a blog I wrote 18 months ago, "Speeding up Combat in D&D". In hindsight, though, I feel that that blog suffered from a third problem: lack of context. It makes sense if you're already well familiar with D&D; but what if you're not?
How do you solve the problem of context? I'm reminded of the classic line from Lewis Carroll: “'Begin at the beginning,' the King said, very gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'"
I don't know that I'll be able to reach the end. It's a long way away! Though I can get to an end, and I definitely can start at a beginning: Session Zero.
The practice of Session Zero is how successful roleplaying game should start, though it's often not how they do start. Session Zero is a concept I started to figure out years ago on my own, from sheer need, before I saw it formalized with a coined term "Session Zero". Now that I've built up some of the context around the topic here, I'll dive into what a Session Zero is in my next blog entry, then give some examples of how it works (and counter-examples of what happens when you don't do it) in a subsequent blog. Stay tuned!
Keep reading: Roleplaying Games and Session Zero
