The Echo Chamber: 10 worst reasons to blog, Part 2
I’m dead tired, so I’ll tackle this instead on writing a sub-par Session report of our Pathfinder for newbies game (which went well for all except PM, he sucks at dice, period!)
See part 1 here.
The List is taken from Geeks are Sexy and posted by Piggybankpie‘s Patrick.
Let’s continue, shall we?
6. Busted by Crappy Reference Program
I don’t use reference programs to increase traffic. I think linking to other blogs, commenting on them and making post that link to good posts of other bloggers is the slower but stronger way to go.
I did like the ‘link exchange’ proposal I got from Trask over at LivingDice.com and I did the same with Evil DM yesterday because I have been on his for quite some time….
BTW Evil DM was one of the earliest bloggers to take notice of mine! Thanks Jeff. (Go click his ads , Jeff wants to buy Hollow Earth Expedition).
7. RSS subscribers too long to increase.
Well I creased the 100 point a few weeks ago, and am now sitting at around 170. This is a slow progress but that’s the only way to go at it I think. My big break came with Yax pimping me in his top 50 RPG sites, guest posting on Johnn Four’s Newsletter and getting a shoutout or two by high volume blogger Shamus Young. (See what I’m doing here? This is always appreciated by bloggers and it fosters a stronger community spirit)
8. Your WordPress theme sucks
I can attest that lot of the free WP themes are rather lame. (And let’s not get into Blogger). But when I look back at it, people want quality content first (without, if possible, having their eyes bleeding while reading them). I was incredibly lucky to have Graham help me by finding a sweet theme and hacking in the color schemes, Banner and the various plugins we wanted to have around here.
Oh and just so you know, Graham and I have never seen each other or spoken. We became buddies through the blog. I can say the same for a lot of the people that now feature on my blogroll. So blogging can be a very rewarding experience!
9. Not Enough Traffic.
Well I can’t complain here… I average about 300-500 page views a day from 100-200 unique visitors.
But when you start, seeing that 95% of your traffic comes from your own IP is a bit of a bummer.
Here’s a trick I already touched on earlier here (apart from the 2 golden standard of ‘write interesting things’ and ‘master enough English to be readable’). Link to other blog post… it’s blogger’s honey that brings them to your post real fast.
Look at Kiltak, chief blogger of Geeks are Sexy . He dropped by from yesterday’s post, so it does work!
10. You got banned from Social Media Sites.
There is a fine line to walk between submitting your own posts to social media and shilling shamelessly your twitter updates. I used to Stumble a few of my posts, and I must be honest that the few multi-thousand spikes I got were from posts I submitted. I stopped since, but I’d say go ahead, but do it sparingly. If a post of yours gather a few comments and fosters good discussions, go ahead and submit it yourself. I certainly will Stumble my Overlord and Magnificent Bastard posts in the near future.
There you have it, my dose of meta-blogging. Tomorrow evening I’ll be back with an adventure post and will revert later with this week’s adventure prep for my Ptolus campaign and taking another stab at the Silvervine review.
Happy B' Day Mr. Washington
As I can see from the vertiginous drop in readership, this be a long weekend for my American readers.
Wikipedia graciously informed me that this holiday is actually to commemorate George Washington’s B’day (do note that American History is not taught up here in Canuck land).
Well, enjoy your day off one and all. I’m sure you deserve it and a holiday in February is a great idea!
I’ll see you tomorrow morning!
Inq. of the Week: Summer Movies '08
Who would have thought that in such a innuendo laden poll that Portable Hole would be the most popular choice? Thankfully the Rod of Splendor and Holy Avenger tied at second place, but I was still very surprised that the ever vigilant Immovable Rod didn’t attract more people.
This week we’re all pretty excited after seeing the new Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull trailer. It’s really one of the last trailers in a series of what look to be entertaining and hopefully good movies throughout the summer months. We have a few sequels that are shaping up to be better than the originals in Hellboy II, The Dark Knight, and Prince Caspian. Some new faces to the cinema that look promising like Iron Man, Speed Racer, Wanted, and Pixar’s WALL-E.
The movies are scheduled to release on:
Iron Man – 5/2/08
Speed Racer – 5/9/08
Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian – 5/16/08
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – 5/22/08
WALL-E – 6/27/08
Wanted – 6/27/08
Hellboy II: The Golden Army – 7/11/08
The Dark Knight – 7/18/08
The question that we’d like to have answered is…
Loading ...The Echo Chamber: 10 worst reasons to blog, Part 1
Totally unrelated to RPGs, this is a pure Meta-blogging post. Still it will be of interest to RPG bloggers.
Towards the end of the week, Graham sent me a cool link. It’s a guest post on Geeks are Sexy by Montreal-based blogger Patrick who runs the PiggyBankPie blog/project.
This very funny and eerily accurate article was entitled 10 Reasons Why Bloggers Hate Blogging. While it takes the negative approach, it does contains quite a lot of useful insights for successful blogging.
In order to actually add content here and not just regurgitate it all, here’s a few thoughts on each point based on my own 6 months experience.
1) Blogging for Money
It was never my initial intention to blog for money. Tabletop RPGs are too much of a narrow niche to bring in the kind of advertising money that you see on some wider subject blogs (like those in #2). As mentioned before, I put up ads here and on the forum to help me pay for the blog’s upkeep.
2 ) Blogging in the make money online niche
Yeah, I’m not there and never will.
3) Niche Blogging
This actually means writing about a subject to drive search engine results to your site to maximize advertisement revenues. Writing passionately about my RPGs experiences, and Tropes in particular, has given me my very own niche and place on the web. Luckily I love doing it and so it’s a reason why I love blogging.
4 ) The pressure of Producing Quality Content Regularly
I’m caught in the very addictive “write to bring people and get feedback that makes you write again” loop. There is a form of self-imposed pressure that comes from watching the readership grow and wanting to sustain that growth.
I fully realize that this pressure is what leads to blogging burnout and I really try to write only when a good idea pops up or I have a project/series to advance.
5) You feel Google adsense is like a bad Mastercard ad.
I’ll leave you here by reprinting the text verbatim because it’s sooooo me…
- Hosting fees: $10 a month (I’m at 6$ but still)
- Domain Registration: $10 a year
- WordPress For Dummies: $15 (I owe Graham a CD)
- Customized Logo: $100 (That’s close, thanks Veronica!)
- Customized WordPress Theme: $500 (And a XBox 360… sigh)
- Clicking your own Google AdSense banner to increment your total revenues to 1¢ on a payout of $100: Priceless. (Note: Doing this is strictly forbidden by Adsense’s TOS, so don’t do it!) (Thank god Project Wonderful is Cost per Day)
Part 2 later this week… time for Dim Sun/Anime/Pathfinder all day geekfest!
Thanks for being there!
Mining Tropes for RPG Nuggets: Have Time, Will Travel.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the Bronze Dragon flying toward the sunset. In that post I challenged readers with a stupid question and the winner(s) could chose the subject of a Trope in RPG post.
Davetrollkin stepped up first and requested I tackle Time Travel. Since time travel, much like the Rule of Cool is such a massive trope, I called a few of my fellow bloggers for help. We’ll see who turns to take the challenge…. and you, would you be up to it?
This post is the introduction to the series and my tackling of one subtrope.
According to the TV Tropes Wiki, Time Travel stories usually belong to one of the following categories:
- You Cant Fight Fate : Visit the horrible Future, then come back to try to prevent it!
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Go to the Past to fix the horrible horrible Present!
- Stable Time Loop: Go to the past to fix a problem, come back and realize you created the problem then!
- Temporal Paradox: Go to the past and screw everything up, destroying your future existence. Think Butterfly of Doom.
- Connecticut Yankee: Characters gets stuck in past, adapts or exploit knowledge of future to live the good life or find way ‘home’. [Read the rest of this article]
Adventure Prep: The Newbie group, an Encore
Back in late October I posted an adventure prep article about doing a Demo D&D game for a group mostly made of D&D newbies based on Paizo’s Pathfinder #1 : Burnt Offering.
The game was very entertaining, featuring crazy stupid goblins and some of the worse dice-craft I had ever seen in a game.
A few weeks ago, PM and I were discussing our favorite, geekiest hobbies and were bemoaning the fact that we do not have enough time to partake in them to satiety (that word exists in English? Hurrah for borrowed words!).
PM loves to eat Dim Sum and watch uninitiated people try to navigate the delicate social dimension of that activity(He’s my crowd’s evil mastermind). He also loves Movies and Anime shows and, predictably, watch his buddies’ reactions to what happens on-screen
(Dude, you’re now the Watcher Minion!).
Whereas I, as you may have gathered from this site in the last 6 months, really like RPGs!
So I mentioned that we could do a monthly Dim-Sunday that starts with a Dim Sum meal, then followed by a few hours of Anime/movies and finishing with a RPG game session.
When the idea caught fire, I suggested we could start by re-visiting the Pathfinder game we tried, with all new characters and then, in future months, play Franky’s Monte Cook’s World of Darkness game.
So PM, Franky and his brother Mike agreed to join us this Sunday. We invited Yan to stand in for Vince, the 4th player who won’t join us in our geeky project.
In terms of game preparation, I don’t have a lot to plan for. I’m taking the adventure straight (with minor fixes based on what I’ve read of it).
I will introduce the battlemap and the movement rules because part some encounters feature complex tactical situations that make a map very useful (read ‘monsters with special movement’).
I intend to pick up where the last game ended (at the end of part 2) although with new characters. A ret-con was announced where we assume that all new characters went through the encounters in pretty much the same way the pre-generated ones did in the last session.
As I invited all players to create new characters, I opened-up character generation options as wide as possible. First I wanted to give each player the class they wanted and second, with D&D 3.5 drawing to a close I’m determined to squeeze as much juice from my multi-hundred dollars book collection. So here’s what the players want to play:
- PM will play a Favored Soul (Think Sorcerer-like cleric from Complete Divine) with a nice fluffy twist.
- Yan is going for a Samurai-flavored mercenary Warblade (Book of 9 sword Barbarian-like martial adept)
- Mike will go for the classic Ninja (Complete Adventurer)
- Franky will explore the Totemist ( a self-buffer from Magic of Incarnum).
All 1st levels. The game will see a level-up to 2nd and will teach Mike and PM of the wonders of leveling up!
I’m really am looking forward to that geek fest! ‘ll let you know how the whole day turned out.
Have a nice weekend all.
Let the selling out begin
Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is due out in June. This confirms rumors that Guitar Hero is releasing a few versions focusing around one band per game (though the initial rumor was U2.)
Are there really big enough Aerosmith fans who want to buy a whole game of their stuff? Why isn’t this just extra downloadable content for GH3? Does anyone really want to see a rendered Steven Tyler? Wouldn’t this be better for Rock Band?
Color me unimpressed.
Pathfinder #5 preview: Crawl that Dungeon!
Tonight features a double post because I’m taking off tomorrow night… It’s Valentine’s Day!
(No I still haven’t received #4 if you were wondering)
The fifth Installment of Paizo’s Pathfinder series, Sins of the Savios sets out to recreate the high-level massive dungeon crawl experience of classic D&D adventures.
It features a multi-part dungeon based on the 6 major sins on which the ancient Thassilonian empire was built on. The adventure’s focus, as the title suggests, is ‘will the heroes indulge in their darker, dangerous side in order to achieve thier goals’. The adventure is for 4 level 12 PCs and should bring them to level 15.
The magazine is divided as such:
- Introduction by F. Wesley Schnieder: Where the Managing editor explains that each of the 6 issues of the 1st adventure path set out to answer a specific question about the ways of playing the d20 Fantasy game (Paizo can’t say Dungeons and Dragons anymore).
- Sins of the Savior by Stephen S. Greer. A 50 page adventure where the PC’s learn of a huge underground complex called Runeforge and investgate it. It features a fight against an old White Dragon and a Cage of lust under the whip of a Succubus! (Caveat, Mr. Greer co wrote the Seeds of Sehan campaign arc in Dungeon magazine, that I played through and as written, that was a rather ordinary and very deadly set of adventures… I fear this dungeoncrawl may be quite an ordeal for PCs)
- Magic of Thassilon (by too many to name), an 8 page treaty on Sin magic with sample spells of each ‘sin school’.
- Lamasthu by Sean K. Reyknold: A 10 page writeup of the Demon goddess of monsters, the Big Bad deity behind a lot of the evil NPC of this Adventure path.
- The monthly fluffy serving of the Pathfinder’s journal by Mike McArtor and James L. Sutter.
- The Beastiary that features a large multicolored bird (Meh), a Giant (With Spell-like abilties like Bestow Curse and Augury), a green flaming crone undead that throws gobs of range touch attack fire that deals 8d6, a Gargantuan massive Wolf/Mantis demon (Woot a gargantuan monster!!!), a Huge Outsider Moth of goodness and Dog-Snake bat-winged chimera demon.
The adventure features a pool that can, provided the player rolls adequately, fully recharge a magic Item… repeatedly.
I’ll let you mull that one over… 
As usual, the magazine is topnotch.
Overall I’m pleased with the products and they are well worth the price, there’s always something useful to use in my games. However, I find that the adventures go all over the place in terms of game style and I’m not sure a huge Dungeon Crawl, so late in the Adventure Path will be well received by players who’ve invested a lot of time getting from level 1 to level 15.
DM Chronicles, Session 11: When the stars are right, we get Planar Awesomeness! Part 3
See part 1 here and part 2 here… this is the last part I swear…
(I’ll have spent more time writing this session log than actually playing it!)
The PCs followed the Wolf lord to meet with Kharasutra’s General.
While dodging troupes of Armanites (Centaur Demons, a shoutout to my buddy Cayzle) and buzzing Chasme fly-demons, the heroes were brought to a burnt-out groove where a Dire Bear was having a war council with various denizens of the plane (Displacer beasts, Owlbears, Blink Dogs, you name it).
More Jungle Book-style roleplaying was had (although no one dared calling the General” Baloo”) and the heroes agreed to raid an ancient ruin where a recently captured werebear guardian was being kept.
Thus, the PCs would proove thier worth to the Animal Lords and be told where the legendary sword was and be allowed to attempt to recover it.
At that point I told Cruguer that he was already pretty sure where the sword was. The whispering in his mind was growing stronger and stronger, constantly calling him to rejoin once again.
The party set out to the ruins in the perpetually dark landscape leading them to a ruined keep that was occupied by 4 Amaranites keeping a battered and wounded werebear prisoner.
That confrontation turned out to be one of the best D&D fights we’ve had in a long time. [Read the rest of this article]
The World is Full of Dungeons
We’ve recently been having some long discussions that essentially started as, “OMG Dungeons and Dragons 4th Ed. is just WoW!!!11!” I was very surprised when I was reading the 4th Ed. preview books I saw an acknowledgement of the influences of recent games like World of Warcraft on the tabletop genre. Dave’s number one response to any complaints about this is that good design elements help games, no matter where they’re taken from. What you have to remember is that WoW definitely isn’t the first MMO game, it definitely did not invent much of the aspects it uses, and the entire genre of MMO games were invented based on ideas presented in MUDs and before that games like D&D.
What I’d like to do now is look at many of the elements which are causing people to think that 4th Edition is just ripping off of WoW, what they will add to the game, and how they existed even before MMO’s started using them.
- Identified Class Roles: Including in the basic rules suggestions that a party include classes which fill basic requirements – Defender, Striker, Controller, and Leader. This existed in 3rd Edition, it was simply an implicit factor of the game design and now they are improving the mechanics by including it. You can’t tell me that Challenge Ratings were set up to be balanced for fighting a group of 4 Wizards.
- Tieflings essentially look like Dranei: The Tiefling race has had their devil-like features exaggerated.Tieflings are half-devil humanoids with horns, tails, etc. Dranei are half-demon humanoids with horns, tails, etc. Who ripped off of who now?
- Talent Trees: Classes will have the equivalent of talent trees in addition to feats, etc. [Read the rest of this article]
