Watcha Playin’?-Dungeons & Dragons

As of this week, the secret is completely out, I’m part of a Dungeons & Dragons podcast. We’re gonna start with the shameless self-promotion to get it out of the way now. It’s called Slay: A Lady-Led Tabletop Podcast, and you can listen to the character and world minisodes over on SoundCloud & iTunes. If you’re not a Patron, by the time you read this the very first real episode will be up for listening!

We played our very first session this past weekend and it was fantastic. Getting the chance to be so creative with friends is an experience that reminded me of my old forum rp days. Get ready for some real nerd shit here.

Back in middle school, I really loved the Warriors books by Erin Hunter, and in my quest to find everything possible on them, I stumbled across roleplaying forums. I joined a few, but didn’t like the rules a lot of the time, so I decided to start my own. It ran for a while before I eventually got too busy to keep it going, but that love of online role playing never went away. My senior year of high school, I had a similar incident with Dragon Age. Soon I found myself in two Dragon Age RP groups on tumblr and I absolutely loved it. Which is why it was crushing to have them both eventually shut down my freshman year of college.

I never really thought I’d get the feeling of being in those groups back, but playing this weekend brought me right back. It was even better because I could see the people I was playing with and hear their voices. I got roll my eyes at Kaylie for being ridiculous, knowing she’d see it, and fawn over Erin’s cute accent, and it was just…really nice.

I’ve stepped away from creative writing pretty significantly in the past couple of years so I haven’t been using my imagination as much as I used to or would still like to. But with this campaign, I’ve gotten to do that again. Creating Aera helped me flex those muscles and I genuinely loved stepping into her shoes to try to find creative solutions to the problems we encountered.

It’s also been really cool to be learning the systems. My days are pretty routine so unless it’s stuff I’m doing on my own for the blog, I don’t really learn new things that often. Learning the rules of the game and how to use them most effectively has been really fun and stimulating. I’m trying to start actually studying my handbook in the next few days so I can be better versed in everything for next session.