Articles by Berin Kinsman
UncleBear is a guest blogger who normally blogs at UncleBear and is the Phoenix RPG Examiner.
Review: Omnifray
It’s taken me a long time to review this product, because it’s so obviously a labor of love. It takes dedication to write tens of thousands of words about your game setting and your system, then put it all together into not one but two books, and amazing amount of courage to put it out there in the world and hope that people will like it and play it. I commend and support that kind of initiative. Roleplaying has always been a creative, Do-It-Yourself kind of hobby and it’s one of the things I love most about it.
That’s what makes this hard for me to review. Because when someone like Matt West, the creator of Omnifray, has made this kind of commitment and clearly has such a strong belief about his baby, it’s hard to say anything negative without feeling like a jerk. [Read the rest of this article]
Get Your Dice Off My Lawn!
Another Guest Blog Post by Berin Kinsman of UncleBear.
You kids today think you have it so rough. The D&D Online Tools aren’t ready yet! I can’t play a Bard or a Druid in 4e! I don’t have a flying car to take me to my game session! Spoiled, whining brats, I tell ya!
When I was your age, we didn’t even have dice! My first D&D boxed set had a sheet of cardboard with numbers printed on it that we had to cut up into chits, and we drew numbers out of a cup! We took turns shaking the paper cup and tried to avoid paper cuts! And we had to reload the cup for every die type! Just “rolled” a d20? Now you need you roll a d4? Dump out the 20 chits and put in the 4. Now you need a d6? Dump the 4 and put the 6 in. We had little piles on the table for each die, and had to keep them separated.
And when we did finally get dice, they were crap! They were made out of the lowest grade plastic and were probably toxic, and they crumbled like hard cheese when you rolled them. I had a d20 that only rolled 7 and 13 because most of the corners were sheered off. It was like rolling initiative with a marble. One guy I know got to a game session and his dice bag with filled with nothing but plastic grit, because his books had crushed his dice to powder inside his backpack. You think old grognards won’t let you touch our dice because we’re superstitious? It’s because we’re afraid you’re going to break them!
Those dice didn’t come in all kinds of fancy colors, either. Everyone I know had pale blue dice, because that was all the hobby store sold. By hobby store I don’t mean game store or comic shop, because there weren’t a lot of those around back then. I mean a place that sold model kits and Lionel trains. And balsa wood. Aisles and aisles of balsa wood and dowel rods. It was like buying dice at a tiny, tiny lumber yard. People back then needed a lot of balsa wood and dowel rods, unlike today when all you kids do is play video games and never go outside in the fresh air!
Dice didn’t come with the numbers painted on so you could read them easily, no sir! They were blank plastic. You had to use a crayon to color in the grooves so you could read the numbers without picking the dice up and squinting. Buying the deluxe dice meant the crayon was included and you didn’t have to supply your own.
There were no 10-sided dice. Those weren’t invented until later. The d20 was numbered 0-9, twice. You used two different crayons and declared one color “high” and the other “low”. If you used red and blue, for example, and declared red high, a red 7 was 17 and a blue 7 was just 7. To roll a percentile we rolled the d20 twice, the first time for 10′s and the second time for 1′s, because few people had two 20s at a time. Not that we didn’t buy them, they just disintegrated from use and you couldn’t buy just one die, you have to buy a whole new set. So you’d end up with 47 d6′s and 22 d8′s and only 1 d20.
And as for your lack of flying cars, we had to ride dinosaurs to our game sessions! Uphill! Both ways! In a snow storm! It was an ice age back then. You kids should make the most of your global warming and all the nice weather. Now get off my lawn!
Boy, I sure do miss the good old days…
So You Wanna Write a RPG Blog? What NOT To Do
Hi folks! My name is Berin Kinsman, and I’ll be guest blogging here while our beloved Chatty DM is off vacationing in the wilderness. I’ve been a roleplayer since 1978, which officially makes me an old grognard. I’ve been writing about gaming on my own site, UncleBear, since 1996, long before the word “blog” was coined and tools like Blogger, WordPress and Livejournal were available. I’ve been doing this before a lot of what’s now conventional wisdom became conventional. What I want to do is pass along some of the mistakes I’ve made over the years, to help you avoid some of the pitfalls I experienced.
Don’t Lose Focus
Complete this sentence: My blog is about _____________ . At least 95% of the posts you make on your blog should be about whatever you filling in that blank with. The other 5% should tie into that topic. If you’re writing about D&D, write about D&D. If you suddenly want to write about religion and politics, it had better tie into D&D somehow. The most successful blogs avoid topic drift.
* Corollary A: Don’t Make the Topic Too Narrow
If you decide you’re blog is going to be about clerics in 2nd Edition D&D, you may be restricting yourself. You’ll find you want to talk about other things, but it’s hard to do in the context of your chosen topic. Topic drift will happen. It’s okay to expand your blog’s focus as you go along, but it’s better if you start off at the right level of granularity
* Corollary B: Don’t Make the Topic Too Broad
If you’re going to cover all things roleplaying, you had better cover all things roleplaying. Don’t ignore the 800 lb. gorillas in the room. If you spend most of your time writing about [Your Favorite Game] and little else, then you’ve got a blog about [Your Favorite Game].
Don’t Give Rude People An Inch
There is a broad gap between respectful disagreement and a flaming troll, but I’ve sometimes been too nice for my own good and given the latter the benefit of the doubt. Don’t. Not ever. You can set your own rules about issuing warnings, banning people from leaving comments, and so forth, but the very first time someone does something uncool you’ve got to nip it in the bud. Once you’ve got an established community your regulars will often do it for you, but as you’re ramping up one of two things will happen: the jerk will inspire others to imitate his behavior, and/or the nice people will free to politer ground.
* Corollary A: Don’t Take It Offline If You Don’t Have To
If the jerk says it in your comments section, address it there. Whether you’re posting a polite “yeah, uncool, chill” or putting someone’s head on a pike, it establishes the ground rules for other readers/commenters and shows that you’re in control.
I have two or three regular readers who never leave comments on the page, but send me emails taking me to task about something-or-other that I posted. A one-off note to point out an error and help me save face is cool, but these folk want to engage me in private debate. My policy is to not respond to negative comments from people I don’t know (and if you’re a regular commenter, I “know” you for purposes of this rule whether we’ve ever met face-to-face or not). If you want to engage me, do it in public. Often they want to remain in email because they know they’d look foolish in a public forum, or that other readers would rise up to back me. Don’t take the flame bait.
Don’t Blog in an Altered Mental State
This is an extension of the Chatty DM’s Golden Rule of Blogging. My two personal caveats are Don’t Blog Angry (I tend to say things I regret later) and Don’t Blog Bummed Out (I whine. A lot). I’m not saying don’t write it; you probably need to get it out of your system, and you can probably edit and salvage something useful from it later. Just don’t post it until you’re in a better place and have had a chance to think about what you’re putting out into the world.
I’ve extended this to include blogging while under the influence of controlled substances, including prescription medications and over-the-counter cold medicine. I’ve never done it (okay, I’ve blogged on NyQil a few times) but I know people who do, and their posts run the gamut from incomprehensible to painfully embarrassing. You just hurt your credibility and lose readers.
Don’t Stop Playing
Most of you are probably looking at me funny, but this is gospel truth: there was a two-year period where I was neither running nor playing in a game, but I was still writing about it. It was frustration for me, to say the least, and it came across in my writing no matter how neutral or upbeat I tried to be. I became very disconnected from the roleplaying community and started to veer off into my own orbit. Because I wasn’t gaming, topic drift set in and I was violating Rule#1.
Don’t Fear the Reruns
If you’re going to be away from the blog for a few days, rerun some best-of posts. It’s easy when using tools like WordPress; just change the post date, and it will keep the same URL so links to the post won’t get screwed up and all the original comments will remain intact. I usually put a new note at the top, indicating the date it was originally run. Reruns don’t have to be your most popular posts; they may be something you’re proud of writing that wasn’t appreciated at the time, or something that’s suddenly topical again. It’s quick filler, if nothing else. You’re not cheating. No one will pelt you with fish for doing it.
Don’t Lose Touch with Regulars
As stated in Rule #2, if someone regularly posts comments on your blog, odds are you “know” them to some degree. They’re also likely registered on the site, so you have their email address. If they suddenly stop posting, after a few days you should drop them a line and find out why. They may have found some cool new spot to hang that you might also like (or need to compete against, or join forces with). You, or another regular, may have inadvertently offended them. They may have lost interest, and you really want to find out why so you can improve your blogging.
In my case, I had a regular vanish for months and while I thought about following up I didn’t, because I didn’t want to violate their privacy. When they reappeared it turned out they were having trouble, and that I might have been able to help them. I still feel guilty about that. You don’t have to hold a huge fun raiser to help people with their medical bill or anything like that; just letter a member of your community know that you’ve noticed their absence and miss them can have a huge effect when they’re having a tough time.
Well folks, thanks for the soap box. I hope that this was useful to you, and that it helps you avoid some of the trials and tribulations I went through to build a blog and a community that I’m proud of.
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