Posts made by 2mspris

@Arkandel
Fantasy Grounds has most of the book information on the platform available, the PDFs of the books can be loaded into the library and accessible to the players. (The platform is free to use for players, though the GM needs a subscription, whomever is running it - we have a subscription because my husband GMs a lot on there + does some coding work for them.)

Consistency is about the same, in my experience. Honestly the attention paid is probably higher because we're all "plugged in" to the same thing so it's hard not to be paying attention to it. Attendance might actually be a bit higher, and the amount of time it takes "to play" doesn't actually take the time investment of attending a RL game (which would include travel time + time spent talking about all the other stuff in life).

The biggest drawback to me is if you get more than 3 other people on a Discord call, then you start getting people talking over one another and it can be frustrating. I play a game with 1 gentleman who cannot seem to allow "dead air" to happen, as he perceives it, which makes it hell trying to get a word in edgewise with him sometimes. It also means you don't have the visual cues you get from face to face, so someone might be acting like a dick (but not intending to be) or the "IC" vs "OOC" might get confusing.

I play online tabletop every other week, my husband plays in them several days a week. We use a combination of Discord/Fantasy Grounds for our stuff. (And Hero Labs to make PCs on.) We have D&D, Savage Worlds (variations) and a 2300 game off of those.

I do writing. Most of my current writing is work-related news paper articles that I have to send in twice a month. But I've also go a couple short stories (for contests I mean to enter) and more than a few gaming related projects to "write" on. And I'm always up for writing buddy-ness.

Carol Channing

@ortallus I actually had no idea what your orginal post was and was largely remarking on just the general direction this thread went. Your original post was showing as "Deleted" by the time that I looked at this threat this morning. (Shocking as it might seem, I don't typically get on here during the weekend.)

I worked as a 911 operator for several years, adults do A LOT MORE stupid shit than teens do. But, as said earlier, it's a generational thing to bitch about the generations that come after.

@thenomain Speaking of contacting you on Discord - I'd like to contact you on Discord about something (I'll provide you a detailed list of how you know me!), if you wouldn't mind PMing me the handle?

Sure, why not! I enjoy "get to know you"s.

• I am also one of those people who would happily eat the exact same things at every meal and in every restaurant, because I have found the things I like and I'm perfectly happy with it. (And there is enough variety in what I eat that you're not going to convince me that is unhealthy.)

• I absolutely hate "sweet tea" and will not consume it. But I live on strong, unsweet black teas (hot and cold).

• I collect "antique handkerchiefs" of the sort that someone has crocheted lace around. I probably have hundreds of them. (I also collect comic books, Fiestaware (but only in the antique medium green and daffodil), Trixie Belden books and Lady of Shalott art.)

• Movie theater "butter" makes me vomit. I also prefer my potato chips plain and the original "nacho" flavor of Doritos. I don't like weird flavors.

• I am terrible at reading a map. Despite loving to hike and travel, and even play games that involve looking at maps - I'm awful at it. I get lost every time.

• I'm the oldest of 6 children, and quite a bit older than some of them. And my childhood could have been an episode of Jerry Springer, including an experience where two of my brothers (at ages 9 and 5 at the time) and one of my sisters (at age 6) and I were kidnapped in the course of a custody dispute and and transported in a 14 hour car trip when I was 12. Some day I may need to write a book about it.

• I used to practically live on roller skates or my bike. I spent years studying ninpo taijutsu and western martial arts, mostly German and Viking swordmanship. It probably helped me adapt around the fact that I'm also a major klutz and am lucky I've survived into adulthood.

• I'm a cat person.

• I clean things when I'm stressed or upset. In a somewhat OCD fashion.

Oh no. That's terrible news.

@ganymede said in Bloopers:

@2mspris said in Bloopers:

... encourage them to come play.

Maved a guest an extremely graphic TS pose.

Two points:

• I can't think of anything more welcoming.
• Hurr hurr, you said "come play."

Well the guest in question did immediately make themself a PC bit and joined the game. The person that the pose was meant for had way too much fun with that for the rest of the time I was on that game, every time a new person showed up they encouraged them to page me.

Over twenty years ago now, but I was one part of the "welcome committee" on a superhero game. Tasked with paging guests/brand new people to answer questions, tell them about the game, encourage them to come play.

Maved a guest an extremely graphic TS pose.

I've participated in it the last 3 years but this year I'm doubtful that I will be able to. My oldest son is a senior in high school, and has exactly 27 days to finish his Eagle Scout project and that's been the all consuming time investment this year. By the time I get through that all I might have the brain capacity for is sleeping through the rest of the year.

I stubbornly embraced a RL nickname I was given by someone who was trying to give me a hard time. I "owned that shit" as it were, it became the online username I use in most arenas.

On the original SWORA I used Mspris, somewhere between there are WORA it went to 2mspris which is what I've used since then.

I have created and played a number of characters that I count as my favorites, easily a dozen of them over the many years that I mushed. In the course of it, some of them even taught me a few lessons in the playing of them!

Hannah@Due Rewards has to be at the top of my list of favorites, even if that was some 17+ years ago that I played her. Hannah was my first character to genuinely be a villain on a mush, and the first character that I played who looked at a long-view. She plotted, planned and schemed to a level that I hadn't really tried to do before in a mush. But honestly, those things aren't what puts her at the top of the list for me.

Before playing Hannah I had usually picked up 1 or 2 people that I enjoyed RPing with and created character connections to, but it had always been rather minor story and wouldn't have really fallen into a genuine character developing change. With Hannah, who was the Tremere Regent/Primogen I gradually built up a great Tremere Chantry with a dozen people that became an integral part of that character's story and when I remember how much I enjoyed that character I don't remember it for the stats that she had (And she was honestly a pretty beefy 8th Gen Tremere.), what I remember is the fun I had as she tormented her ghouls, as she scolded and lectured the "younger" vampires she was trying to teach and train and in her interacting with the others (even though I generally wasn't much of a fan of the politics).

I think I could go on and on listing the fond memories I have of that character but the fact that they are memories I really owe to all those people that I played with on Due Rewards, even the ones I didn't get along with. Hannah was the first character that I played that really taught me that lesson as a gamer.

After her I would be hard pressed to decide who was my next most enjoyable, Jenny@Denver, Crystal@TR, Cierra or Panthea@DC or Lucy@TR are all on the top of my list for different reasons in each case.

@Thenomain said in Raising Baby Gamers:

This caught me off guard because I was allowed a ton of screen time as a kid, and I'm middle-class white from a nice safe neighborhood. This was back when TV Was Ruining Our Society.

It gave me a moment of pause as well, to be honest. I was also allowed basically as much screen time as I wanted when I was a kid, once we had a tv in our home (I was in 2nd grade when that happened.) but certainly as much as I wanted at my grandparents. And I grew up a white farm kid that yo-yo-ed from middle class to lower class to middle classes until my teens. I've noticed a weird generational thing about tv/screen times, or maybe it's just poor long term memory. As an example, my parents were very free with how much tv we could watch when I was growing up. Not just tv programs though. Beginning with the first Nintendo that came out, my dad had one and he'd play that thing for HOURS while my brothers sat and just stared at the tv, watching him play the games he had. These days, most of the young kids that I know if you ask them what they want to do - they want to either watch YouTube (to watch other people playing video games) or "be a YouTuber". My youngest son often has that response, while my oldest son does post videos and livestreams himself playing games. And my parents harp on and on about this. This is terrible parenting, how can I let them waste time like that, why aren't they outside playing - "When you kids were growing up we would never have let you just sit on those videos like that!" (Exact quote that has been said to me several times now.)

Of course, then they get mad when I laugh at them, and it just goes to show what poor parenting choices I am making...

I thought I would share a bit of the latest from the little Dungeons & Dragons group I had previously mentioned.

This particular roleplaying group (of 4th - 6th graders) has dubbed themselves the H.A.K. Club (Heroic Adventure Kids). We're up to 8 players now, an even split of boys and girls, though for the last couple weeks they aren't all there at once - so adventures happen for the characters who are there and they are all part of an adventuring company that works together. And I can tell you that these 8 players have rounded out 8 very unique and entertaining characters.

Gandalf the Brown - A human male wizard who likes to chew on mushrooms, smoke strange things and while being very smart has a charisma of 8 (because he smells bad).

Bob - A human female druid, one of the co-leaders of the group, she's never met a captive animal she wasn't willing to turn loose (which works out great in the wild but less so in town).

George - A human male fighter who is very likable, incredibly clumsy and thinks he's a great tracker. (He isn't.)

Puff - A dragonborn female fighter, she is the sworn protector of Bob, doesn't really talk much at all and is the group's "tank".

Seth-Shadow - A male half-elf bard, who is more of a jester than he is a singer. He tells jokes and puns almost constantly and now has a chicken animal companion because he cast "speak with animal" on it so many times, and kept feeding it, that the chicken now loyally follows him everywhere and even tries to defend him in a fight.

May - A female halfling ranger, the group's other leader, a position she earned by being the one who would IC jump in to talk and take charge during the games so it just kind of fell to her. (This is the youngest player in our group but one of the one's who has really jumped into this. She started writing "journal" stories about her own character after they would play.)

Raid - A female halfling thief. She's very loyal to the group, but very much one of those "not exactly a good thief". (She is our oldest player, and to a tiny extent she has her own agenda, but she plays the character as also kept in check by May and the bard.)

Merlin - A male dragonborn sorcerer with wild magic. This is the newest character to join the group and in today's game, the very first roll for a spell he did went wild and he ended up with a third eye opening up in his forehead.

We're still working out how we want to chronicle the adventures these kids have - blog posts and some youtube videos is the current preference of the kids, but a final decision hasn't been made yet. In the mean time, the library where I work ended it's summer reading program for this summer (and started the kick off for a "year round" program, which is why this was such a short summer) which always ends with prizes given to people who participate in things. One of the prizes that I was able to arrange is a D&D 5e Player's Guide went home with the player of May the Ranger. You would have thought that little girl won a trip to Disney World. She squealed, jumped into the air and then hugged that book all night after it was given to her. Her mom said she kept it with her everywhere she went and today when she came to the game, she marched in carrying that book of hers.

It was another one of those "good feeling" moments.

I put in a request for Smarter Than you Think, too! Hopefully that'll be in soon.

I was recently referred to the book Dragons in the Stacks: A Teen Librarian's Guide to Tabletop Role-Playing which I've also requested, mostly for curiosity sake. I've had mixed results with librarian reference material like this, usually I do better going with personal experience but it's always good to get more perspectives!

We don't actually circulate our D&D (and Pathfinder) books, they are kept in the library as reference materials. It hasn't saved a few from being stolen in the last couple of years, but that happens.

@Gingerlily I've always backed that adage that to become an expert with something it requires "10 thousand hours" of experience with it. I wouldn't be surprised if my oldest son hasn't had that amount of time or more towards computer use/building/repairing and coding. There's a reason that he's the "go to" kid at his school when people have a computer issue - and that I once had to go into the school to tell the administration that "No, the teachers at the school cannot send their laptops home with my kid for free computer repairs." after he kept bringing them home. That is his skill set and what he's good with, I would no more cut him off from that than I would tell the prospective future athlete that he can't play the sport he loves - or tell the future scientist he can't do science experiments.

My parents used to regularly send me news articles about the dangers of "too much screen time" when he was little. It's possible I sent them one back, with relish, when they released findings about the benefits of a lot of computer game play.

I have presented to other librarians a few times (I did a webinar on the topic and a few panel discussions, my next one is going to be participating in a panel of Indiana librarians about gaming in libraries at GenCon.) about the benefits in development of children (and even teenagers) where it comes to learning to play roleplaying games. Those are all things that are included in the discussions that happen over the course of the topic. But I've also found the strongest support for it comes from something summarized very well by Ethan Gilsdorf's article from a couple of years ago: 'All I needed to know about life I learned from “Dungeons & Dragons”.' It makes for a list of compelling points to support teaching kids the hobby.

@Gingerlily I have had a good bit of experience with that as well and honestly I think it depends upon the kid, it depends upon the game and it depends upon the parent(s). I have two sons, the oldest of them has always been a bit of a computer nut. When he was about 6-7 years old he was already into MMOs, specifically he got into one called Toon Town (No idea if that game is still around these days or not, we let him play it off and on with close supervision for about a year before there started to be some things that caused us to take it away.). If you can find an MMO that has a closely monitored age limit and is meant to be a kids game, that's great, but it's not a guarantee that there aren't adults creeping on the game. That son is now 16 years old and running guilds on numerous MMOs, while his younger brother (who's 10 currently) is allowed online social games - but only when he's playing with a member of our family or is being closely monitored (plays it sitting in the same room as one of his parents or his brother) because he's far more trusting of people than we're comfortable with him being online.

Meanwhile I also know people who absolutely refuse their kids anything to do with the internet, games or not. And we got quite a bit of flack from family for how much gaming we allowed our oldest with it often being presumed that letting him do some things must mean we weren't watching or aware of what he was doing.

@Thenomain We've discussed doing that yes, we're trying to decide the best way to do it. There has been talk of videoing the sessions so that they can be viewed by other people. We've also talked to the kids about them doing journals about what their characters are doing. The idea of giving the kids something to motivate them long term for playing, as well as making something that they can look back at, especially if they keep with the hobby is appealing.

I'd originally tried to build a gaming group of local teens but while there was a lot of talk from teenagers wanting it, motivating them to come in and participate was a struggle. They weren't already hooked to make it any sort of priority. So by starting younger this might make it a higher priority to be involved with as they grow up because they will have a familiarity that the older kids lacked.

I'll let you know what we come up with though! We did come to the decision today that among the various "I participated in a summer reading program" prizes that we'll give to people at the end of the year through the library, we're going to have a drawing that one of these kids is going to win their own copy of the D&D 5th edition Player's Guide. We have copies that they use through the library, but there's something to be said for having your own gaming books.