Double Post

I actually meant to post yesterday, but I was just enjoying my Sunday laziness a bit too much. So instead, enjoy two posts for the price of one! Had a great weekend overall. I was able to exercise each day and even shoveled my driveway on Sunday!

Saturday afternoon, Andrea and I got to check out Pan's Labyrinth, an independent movie that didn't make it to wide release. It finally premiered this weekend at one theater in Uptown. I really enjoyed it, there was a great story with excellent makeup and costumes. Only problem was the theater had ZERO heating, and I froze my ass off the entire time. It wasn't just a bit cold, it seriously could not have been much more then 50 degrees in there.

To shift gears, I've been wanting to post more about Dungeons and Dragons, but in a way that would be readable to a wider audience. So I thought I'd start by discussing the basic reasons for why I play D&D.

Currently, in D&D I play the role of DM or "Dungeon Master". I'm responsible for running the sessions and creating the imaginary world the players interact with. From people, places and things, to exciting storybook adventures. The goal of all that? To make the game fun for the players and myself. But that still doesn't answer the basic question of "Why D&D? Why not just get together and play cards, that's a fun game." To answer that, I wanted to post this quote I found in a recent D&D book I've been reading.

Running a game can be an intimidating task that calls on a huge variety of unrelated skills: memory for rules, a head for numbers, imagination, verbal agility, and sensitivity to group moods. Most dauntingly, it requires the confidence to take center stage in front of a group - an act that terrifies many self-assured people. Anyone who does even a half-decent job of DMing should be congratulated just for trying to marshal these skills.

Those skills are not only hard to marshal, they are skills most people don't get to practice on a daily basis. Verbal agility? I can sometimes go through an entire day at work only verbalizing two or three times. Imagination? Not much required as a software engineer who is fed direction by the business. D&D is a place for me to explore and practice these skills.

Could I practice these things in a more productive manner, maybe even find a career that forces me to? Probably, but then it would no longer fall under the definition of "fun" and "entertainment". The fact is, the key ingredient is that I get to practice these skills in a way that is really fun for me: with a group of like minded people talking about one of my favorite forms of entertainment, fantasy fiction.

So sure, I could get together with a group of people and play some cards or some other random board game that doesn't require much in the way of interaction. But I can get that type of entertainment in any number of other sources, from TV, video games, or watching Fight Club for the 84th time. If there is one thing I have enjoyed about my recent run of D&D, is that every session can and probably will present different challenges that I learn from to make the next session that much more fun and entertaining for everyone.