Coping Mechanism Activate!

There used to be some stuff here about my divorce and Facebook, this isn't a personal life blog though. Strictly a hobby and rpg blog, except where those things intersect with my personal life, which I guess is a lot. Heh. However, when I talked about the divorce I talked about Facebook for a minute and came up with this: "...The Book of Faces (which is now a magical artifact that steals souls in Hekinoe and allows the user to take on the faces and personalities on the pages like some sort of doppelganger)."

Anyway, once more,  I want to write about why DnD is so important to me.

So DnD. I am into it hardcore, you may have read the My Life In Gaming post and how much effort it has taken for me to just have the right and capability to game. Very few people I know in real life can keep pace with me and my knowledge and love of the game and the genre and the hobby in general. It is my main interest in life, the focus of basically all my hobby related energy. Perhaps that is unhealthy, and I know this and accept it. When I started playing this previous campaign, I fell in love with Hekinoe in a way I never have before with a campaign setting. I know sometimes I type angry and passive aggressive things on the blog here, but it does not hold a candle to what I felt during Shadow Chasers or Orsus. I know it doesn't seem like it at times, but I willingly gave up my DM's rage. I decided that I cared about the story and the place and the characters far more than I did about attendance and problem players and feeling like my players respected me. I flipped a switch into the on position and I have since welded it into that position and submerged it in an ocean within an adamantine chamber. Then I dropped a kraken on it.

On a side note, the original Clash of the Titans beats the ever loving piss out of the newer version.

I have dug too deep and too greedily, and I don't think I will ever see the light of day again. Part of me needs to game, part of me truly does love the game too much, it is my passion. I could stop playing video games, I could sell my revolver, I could sell my magic cards and paints and models and not flinch. To not game would be, I dunno. It would suck.

I am a storyteller. I like to create worlds and characters and stories. I have a lot of imaginative and creative potential in my head. When I was in elementary school and younger, I used to tell myself stories in bed. I would lay awake at night and just tell myself stories about whatever popped into my head. Later, that developed into a weird thing where I would talk and mumble weird stuff in my sleep, but as far as I know, I stopped doing that in high school.

Anyway, I crave the creation of the narrative, the creation of the fantastical realm and the adventures found within it. It isn't merely that I like characters or making neat descriptions. It isn't that I long to sweat and bleed on a battlefield. It is the creation of the whole shebang that drives me. I am a world builder and a narrative builder. I can't help it, I love it. I think you get the picture at this point.

I love to write as well, like story stories, not DnD scenarios and plots. For a while now, I've felt that I haven't been doing enough of that. DnD is writing, and my plots and descriptions and narratives do get extensive, but it isn't writing in the conventional sense. Part of it being unconventional writing is why I love it so much more than I used to nowadays.

Gaming has always been tied to my friends and sort of a group adventure. Everyone games, even if they only do so because it is a social group thing. We get together and roll dice with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Gaming is so important to me because of this. We are together and having fun and experiencing a story of mine. They're not merely reading my story and telling me they like it, despite its many flaws. They are actually in my story, interacting with it, changing it and remaking it based on their actions. I love gaming so much because it is literally, to me at least, me and some of my best friends in the world, my brothers, sitting down to write a story together in real time, and words cannot express how much I treasure gaming for that reason. 

To switch back to the whole "real" writing thing. For a while I've been wanting to get back to doing that on a more regular basis. In previous eras of life, I have always used blogging or writing stories to cope with a breakup (I have written some truly bad stories in these times). It helps me get my thoughts out and helps me excise the pain or some shit. Anyway, I'm not saying I intend on doing that and writing bad fiction about thinly disguised avatars of Heather and I (again), but I do want to write more. I keep wanting to rewrite my The Last Blade novel and my aborted North Story, maybe it might be time to try it. 

Just a bunch of thoughts DnD I guess.

Music: Hey Pete - Type O Negative

Edit After The Fact: I only include the whole divorce thing so The Book of Faces thing makes sense to be here in this post. I thought it was a neat idea and wanted to mention it.