Of course, the Side-Arc session of last night was a lot of fun to play!
Up until the video chats dropped five times in a row, and my image froze on my players’ screen.
The bard is annoyed.
Turns out that the tablet was needing four different updates, which is surprising since I thought I set it up to update automatically. But if you don’t let the thing shut down occasionally (such as when you keep trying to finish a story and have to close the tablet for travel), it never gets updated until it flat-out tells you it needs it.
So, the Side-Arc session didn’t get as far as I had wanted, but we stopped at a good rest point and I can wrap up that adventure in under an hour (or over an hour if I get obsessive and add details), so I’m keeping an eye on my Session Schedule for when that player will be free next.
Today, however, is Sunday, and that is a day of rest (chores)! Time I went off to house-spouse and try to get through my “Three chores and 30 minutes of Writing” routine.
As I was leaving the house for work, my daughter asked if the sky would ‘be good mailman weather’, which tells me she pays more attention to what I say than I have realized and that I’ve found the possible source of her sarcastic Parthian shots (she doesn’t realize she does them, just destroys a conversation as she leaves a room).
“The weather should be perfect for work today,” I said. She brightened. “Get a good picture for today!” she called as I rolled the lunchbox out the door.
Well, I’m a word of my word, so I kept an eye on the sky for a good photo. She approved of two, but chose one for today’s post.
She says I’m getting better at taking these.
It turned out to be a great day for the weather, but not so for the postal vehicle. The truck broke down and I was left out on the route for nearly an hour before I could resume delivery.
Meaning I was paid for nearly an hour at postal rates to write Star Wars fan-fiction! *cackle*
Tonight we have a Side-Arc session! I’m going to be working ‘overtime’ to get the rest of my sessions finished before my End-of-Year date, so there will most likely be technical problems that disrupt every damn game night.
*This post will be updated in the evening, after the session*
It’s Friday morning and I’ll be meeting a new player this evening!
What’s more, this player has little experience with tabletop gaming! Huzzah!
If there’s one thing I enjoy more than telling a story through an RPG, it’s teaching people how to play. I may be strict about adhering to the rulebooks (when it isn’t inconvenient and provides the information I need, otherwise I try my best to make a good judgement call), but I also get to see these players reflect on their choices and enjoy their independence with character creation.
I genuinely want players to enjoy my stories, but what’s more important is that they tell their stories within my campaign. If there’s something they’ve always wanted to read about but never find it on the bookshelves, they get their chance via a character sheet and a d20.
Let’s see what he comes up with.
Stay safe out there, readers!
-JB Swift
*Update* We have a new character! I now have new homework!
His character design is intriguing, and it’ll take time in both the real world and the campaign to fully develop, but I’m excited to see how his story comes about. Plus, I get to make a new Character Archetype!
Being a millennial, I’m used to the concept of people “ghosting”, or expressing interest in joining something and then disappearing when it’s time to schedule an event or the event starts.
Being an introverted and socially awkward person, I’m also accepting of the concept. I understand that there are times when someone’s social battery is depleted and they just don’t want to deal with people. I deal with that regularly, myself.
The frustration comes in when I do my utmost to be welcoming to new people, especially with my ‘gaming table’, and the ghosting occurs. The reasons for it can be quite legitimate, but it also worries me about how I’m perceived by these new people.
I’m an excitable GameMaster, I know. When someone says they’re interested in joining, I go all out to make them feel welcome. I send invites, give primers for the setting, and provide extraneous details that have otherwise not been noted in the rulebooks. In terms of introverted nerd, I can get overbearing in my attempts to be welcoming.
There are two ways to react to this sort of behavior: accept the sheer nerdiness or run away from the overeager weirdo.
(This is not talking about the upcoming New Player session happening this week, but a different person altogether. The New Player has shown enthusiasm for the campaign and seems excited to try his story. I’m looking forward to his session!)
I’ll have to work at reining myself in when talking to potential players, but I know myself well enough to understand that some folks will be driven off by this behavior.
To those players: I apologize. I know I’m weird, but I’m really just excited to tell a story.
Stay safe out there, readers! I’m off to sling letters.
In what appears to be an ongoing theme, my Murphionic Field struck again.
I returned to the mail route today after several days of being at home and minding my family. I had fully expected to be back in the routine of gallumphing down the walking path until the lunch break, where I would sit in the back of the Promaster, side door open to let in sunlight and air, and whittle away at my stories like a proper nerd.
Only to discover that I never put the tablet on the charger.
sigh…
But the phone has Microsoft Word as an app, and my subscription is up to date so I can ‘type’ while looking to the world like any other millennial who is obsessed with their phone.
I can’t have multiple tabs open and that bothers me way more than it should.
But at least I’m making progress! Via the phone, I can get somewhere near 350 words in a half-hour lunch. So long as I accept that I will eventually be in front of a computer and able to fix all of the autocorrects.
Let’s go back to yesterday. I’m taking advantage of the kids going to their grandparents for the day so I can handle up on chores, when one of my players sends me a message:
“Just so you know, the website hasn’t been updated since Tuesday.”
I take a moment to consider this message and go online. I had scheduled a post for Saturday to go online around noon that day, and it had been a couple of hours since. But instead of seeing my “Posting Calendar” full for the week and a couple paragraphs of nerdy excitement at seeing my players go through their strategies, I find a list of posts sitting in the “Drafts” section.
As I told the player, I need a gif of someone flipping over fruit stands to properly express my frustration. Now, why is this happening, you may ask? After an hour of troubleshooting, I think I’ve figured it out.
I have a second website set to come online in a few weeks, provided that it is approved by my unions’ local at the next meeting. I’m adding on to that website a little every day, and it had a ton of information in the “Drafts” section, and I had set that up to be automatic, so I would avoid the headache of accidentally publishing pages that could be searchable by my union members. I didn’t want my coworkers, who have heard about the upcoming website, to go searching for it and see a “404” message. That’d be frustrating for them and mildly embarrassing for me.
Apparently, I had set that up via my whole profile, so both websites kept sending posts and pages to “Drafts”.
This is way more applicable to me than I care to admit.
So, my morning chore for Sunday, which was going to be mowing the play-yard and picking up the kids’ toys, was replaced on the list with fixing this and updating the thing. Will that actually fix the postings problems?
Most likely not, to be honest. For one, as much as it annoys me, the automatic saving to “Drafts” does give me the chance to check over posts for grammatical errors before I post them and let all of you smile at my mindset of “posting too fast in my excitement to write” and give you a semi-professional article of my life to read.
For two, as I’ve said time and time again, technology just doesn’t like me. My Murphionic Field, as Sarah calls it, is extensive and has odd effects on nearby tech. I can somehow turn off the backroom television by waving at it.
It looks cool, but when you’re trying to rewatch “Bleach” and turn the whole damn thing off because you saw a moth and thought it a wasp makes for an annoying evening.
But the things are up! The posts are fixed, and for now, the headache is abated. I have a list of chores I want to get through before I sit back down and write the day away. Time I went about it.
I am both exhausted and excited. It’s Saturday, so it’s Game Night!
It’s also the third Game Night in a row, and I’m realizing exactly why I am so strict about my Session Schedule holding to a bi-weekly schedule.
I’m tired and getting grumpy. I don’t like that aspect of myself showing itself in my sessions, and I worry that my players would see this as resentment or disinterest. If the past year has been any indication, I’ve wanted one thing to come across: I love being a writer and RPG storyteller. Not only is it fun, but it’s also a personal enjoyment and challenge.
(There’s a voice I’m looking forward to trying out. After hearing other Narrators try their Bith voices, which always sound like Kermit the Frog if he had espresso, I wrote a Bith into the session so I could try it out myself. It’s not great, but damn is it entertaining. Pity the players who have to indulge me.)
That said, I’m looking at the calendar and having to make a hard decision. We’re officially in USPS’ “Heavy Season”, so the mail is picking up and the parcel count is hitting offensive levels. I’m going to be extremely busy during the ‘winter months’.
For those readers who are not familiar with the Southern United States, our winter months are still warm and humid, with occasional patches of “Why is it this cold?! It’s only 50 degrees out here! Damn humidity!”
I don’t want to push myself to the point of burnout, so in the interest of keeping the campaigns going, I’m ending my Main Arc Sessions for the year on November 12th, and my Side-Arc availability on November 19th. I’ll start back up January 7th 2023 for both.
That gives me two Main Arc Session nights left for the year after tonight. I wrote this adventure to be full of interesting details and notes for the players to investigate, and the last session showed me that they’re going about the adventure with intellect and patience. Other players in the main group, those who haven’t been able to join the sessions due to their own exhaustion (two of them have infants, so their exhaustion is absolutely valid) chime in with questions over the recordings and mapping out their decisions from ‘behind the scenes’. I’ve also been complimented by how faithful I’ve been to NPCing those characters.
I am enjoying this group far too much to let simple exhaustion from me drive them away from the table.
This is also to say that though I will be closing down my Sessions in mid-November, I will still be (trying) to make daily posts and adding on to the pages for the campaign throughout the Heavy Season. It’s a bit like therapy for me to sit down and add to a universe instead of stewing on the antics of management.
Don’t worry, I won’t take the remainder of the year off from writing altogether. I might have my month off in April next year, but I won’t know until next March and see what Tax Season looks like.
I’m off to handle up on house chores and finalizing details for tonight. I’ve asked Old Man Casey what he’s thought of my challenges so far:
I moved the dog bed to the office for while I’m off work. He approves.
He’s unimpressed and wishes luck to my players. I think.
If there’s anything that catches my attention on the Internet, it’s reading posts by people who are looking to join a campaign.
Also animal videos. They’re adorable and I won’t budge on this exposing of my sensitive side.
I was scrolling through Reddit when I came across an example of the former. A player was looking for a group to join! I let him know about this place and explained my rules/expectations. He, in turn, told me what he wanted to try out.
I won’t spoil the details, but when he’s introduced to the campaign, I’ll write up a Biography Page for him. For now, I’m wandering the route with my Campaign’s Notebook and plotting out new concepts to add in the timeline.
While I’m enjoying my nerdiness, I’m also enjoying the looks on the faces of management as I remind them about the multitude of contracts and manuals that they should be following when giving me orders concerning the mail. It’s a sort of perverse pleasure to explain to someone who technically outranks me that they need to pay attention to a set of forms that they do everything in their power to avoid.
I’m a nerd. I’m also a bureaucrat. I like going through books for references and having paperwork in proper order. It also annoys management because they can’t issue discipline just because I’m following rules that they find annoying. This is why I support unions.
Stay safe out there, readers! I’m off to make a supervisor sign off on six pages of paperwork. *Mad cackling ensues.*
I always feel slightly awkward when, on my half-days, I stay in the parking lot while my son is at his appointment. I get that the other parents do the same thing, but they also look like normal folks.
Whereas I, in one of my rare moments of being aware of my image, look like an oddball.
I know I’m weird, but I’m also lazy about my appearance, so I can’t just say I’m eccentric. too honest, not enough money.
But I take advantage of the moment of forced idleness to write, so while the other parents are staring at their phones, I’m leaned back in my seat with the tablet and notebooks spread out around me in an impromptu desk, plunking away at the stories and just adding on to the whole “that guy’s a weirdo” vibe.
But hey, it’s an hour out of the day that I can write without interruption from other chores! No pesky adult responsibilities!
This means I’ve most likely forgotten something.
Stay safe out there, readers. Gonna keep working on Mardek’s Side-Arc.
To my players and readers, you’ll be happy to know that for the first time in over a month, I’ve had a full-nights’ sleep.
To Votosh Khall (played by Ben): I’ve rested, now stop worrying about me and let me go about my terrible habits of pushing myself too hard.
That said, it’s Columbus Day here in the United States. If you’ve studied enough history, or if you know enough history from the Native American tribes in the Indies and Eastern United States, you’d refer to today as Indigenous People’s Day.
Brady and I used to love debates about this holiday, namely because we did know a lot of the history surrounding this holiday and Christopher Columbus.
Trust me: it’s Indigenous People’s Day. I’d rather have a day to honor the People than that greedy goof.
On a purely practical matter, however, it’s a Federal Holiday in the United States. As a Federal Person, I’m allowed a day off! And management can’t say a damn thing about it. Granted, that means Tuesday will be horrendous as the mail actually does stop for the day, but as it’s also a half-day for me tomorrow (thanks to a prodigious amount of paperwork), I can avoid that headache after 1:30PM tomorrow!
Now, what do I do on such a day? Apparently, it’s sleep for nearly 11 hours straight. Even the kids respected this. That’s should tell me something, but I’m electing to ignore it.
What I will be doing is catching up on the vast number of chores the house needs, including the writing here at my desk. Mardek’s Side-Arc needs finishing, and I’ll be plunking away at it before I get to anything else in my “Writing List”, including the plot for the upcoming Main Arc Session this Saturday.
Yes, my handwriting is terrible. I write too fast for penmanship.
This is to mean: if I don’t, I’ll be winging it on Saturday and you should pray for my players. Me telling a story that I haven’t thought out fully beforehand is… well, dangerous for those involved.
Sidenote: the “Post Updates” project was accidentally done first, as I logged on to see that the last week of posts had formatting issues and stayed in the “Drafts” section. But they were easily fixed in way less than an hour and published in order. Apparently, there’s a problem between uploading pictures from my phones’ camera roll to my blog posts and writing out the posts themselves on the tablet. That’s just my luck with technology.
This list will be added on to throughout the day as I find other sections that need writing out, but that’s only a small part of what needs doing today. The yard needs cleaning up, the floors need sweeping (daily, really, as this house is a house of shedding, be it dogs, cats, or the hamster), and the Old 4Runner needs maintenance.
Lots to do, and I’m too damn cheap to pay somebody else to do any of it. So, off to work (housework) I go!
As a consolation prize to everyone who wanted to read through my hyping myself up for my house-spouse duties, I’ve snagged a couple photos of Old Man Casey.
He only looks sleepy, when really he’s just old and reluctant to be far from me on a day off.
He’s still playful, but when you’re an 11-year-old dog, the playing is a bit low-key.
“Don’t wanna chase the ball, so I’ll just grab at Swift’s hand while I lay on his foot.” -Casey
To think that I’ve tried to take this dog camping. He’d rather a couch and Netflix.
Stay safe out there, readers. Happy Indigenous People’s Day.
Swift's Corner 