do you play d&d or any other trpg? if so, what's your favorite class or race to play?
I am doing so right now, in fact—or kind of. I’m not playing: I’m DMing. It’s the first time I’ve ever DMd, and also the first time I’ve ever enjoyed tabletop RPGs. In the old days, I played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (yes, it had its own tabletop RPG), and I played the superhero one for a little while. My friends got big into Rift and then AD&D, but I never did. I always got bored. I liked to be able to see things, and I felt silly pretending to be someone I’m not, and to act out doing things that I just wanted to happen (like asking a shopkeeper if they have leather armor. Just gimme the armor, dammit!)
Being a DM, though, it’s kind of like it has a purpose. I’m being the characters for the benefit of the players. They can interact how they want to, but I’m the one who’s making sure everything runs, so I have a responsibility to do it right, which licenses it—and can also do it how I like. A lot of times the DMs I’ve seen are over serious, and are all hyped up to be like, “I am LORD neFARIOUS, and YOU must do MY bidding!”, and I’m just like…nah. It’s either super serious like that, or poop jokes (or worse), with nothing in between. Plus, the language work is just…abominable. The nice thing about being a DM is it’s giving me an excuse to keep building the vocabularies of languages that are off-season, which I usually don’t have time to do. (I’m using Shivaisith from Thor: The Dark World, Bodzvokhan and Övüsi from Bright, and also an old language of mine as languages in this one.)
The one time I did play D&D for a stretch I nearly broke the game. I made a Dragonborn bard who had an 18 in charisma at level 1 (I improved it to a natural 20 by level 3). Whenever something happened I didn’t like, I just persuaded the characters around me to fix things for me. It was amazing. I enjoyed it mightily. Bards can also find an audience and play a show anywhere. That’s how you make money! Unfortunately that group fell apart. It’s fine, though. I like DMing better, even though it’s a ton of work, and, being a first timer, I’m making tons of mistakes.
Oh, you know what really screwed me up? World of Warcraft has a monetary system inspired by D&D it works like this:
Nice and simple! I get to D&D, and I see copper, silver, and gold, plus a couple others (electrum and platinum), and I assumed it worked the same way. It does not! It works like this:
Say whaaaaaaa…?! Who dreamt that up?! I totally flubbed up prices initially, because I was basically using WoW’s system. So if I wanted something to cost a little bit more than a gold, I’d say it was 1 gold, 20 silver. That’s basically like saying, “That will be 1 gold and 2 gold, please!” It’s already hard to keep track of money in that game (btw if anyone as advice on that, it would be greatly appreciated! Some sort of app, maybe?), so this just threw everything into confusion. All my fault.
The only big issue with DMing is that it’s hard to tell if the players are actually enjoying it or not—or even if they are, if they’re enjoying some parts more than others. It seems to be going well, but you never know…
Anyway, if I were to play again, no question, I’m getting my Dragonborn bard back. I’d be nothing else. He’s perfect. I love him and his easygoing style. He doesn’t issue commands: He makes suggestions—and they’re all terribly convincing! Yeah, if a DM wants to combat his awesomeness, he better send a bunch of enemies he can’t talk to at all and prevent me from using persuasion on my own party members (because, man, it is awesome persuading people to jump into battle for you, give you their money, carry you about on their shoulders…).
