Month: February 2022

Playing in some games, especially with new people, I am often struck by the different styles of play that are presented at the table. At these moments, the various suggestions about player taxonomy I’ve encountered through the years truly come to the fore.

I am an active player – what Jamison calls “Action Camp”, as opposed to the “Acting Camp” – and it is always stunning to me that another player might derive deep satisfaction from (say) going to buy a cloak at the town store and acting out the whole scene.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that we all come to the table for different reasons. While I am grinding my teeth with impatience in the fantasy shop, another player might be deeply immersed in the scene. I have had to learn to practice patience…

Cullen, Atticus, Ozric, Quintus go back to the second level of Zeleska’s Hypogeum

• The party snuck through the ruins on their way to the hypogeum. Cullen noticed a pile of rocks moving. It was some sort of earth elemental creature, roughly in the shape of a weasel with tufts of grass and weeds growing on its back and head. The party avoided it.
• The party enter the 2nd level and enter the main room full of rotting hyena-man corpses. They notice that they appear to have been gnawed on.
• The party starts exploring the side passages.
• The party comes to a heavy metal door that is locked. They are unable to open it without making a lot of noise and taking a lot of time. They’ll come back to it later.
• They continue on and encounter a ghoul. Atticus uses the magical trinket to drive it back. Cullen and Quintus…

As many readers and listeners will know, I have a diagnosis for social anxiety. On the surface, it might seem a little odd that a person with anxieties around social interaction would record a podcast and run games for groups of people both online and face-to-face. Why would a socially anxious person become a teacher?

Well, let’s begin with this: when I am in the moment of teaching, gaming, or recording there is no anxiety.

The action, of beginning and working through the process, is how I have learned to manage the anxieties that I experience. That the cure for the fear is to focus on the process and action rather than the outcomes or people’s opinions.

Today, I am playing in a game. Over the past few months, I have evolved a process for preparing myself to play and then actually turning up to do the playing. Maybe it’ll…

I showed up to the session 45 minutes late and it didn’t matter because the guys were (as usual) still talking about the entire campaign map and all the things we could do. This session is late at night for some of us, so we tend to press for simple out and back raids now.

We opted for the Ragnar group which included an assassin, a magic-user, a druid, a ranger/cleric, and a ranger. I egged people on to try to take out a fire giant, but cooler heads prevailed, and I was talked back down into settling for taking out some ogres.

One thing that was suggested was that if we just moved forward in time a bit, some other character would have time to train or something. The Trollopulous veterans all harumphed this down. #NotAtMyTable! (Or in this case, #NotAtMyDMsTable.)

Heading into the mountain terrain, the DM noted…