Toot toot! A Special Announcement!

This is now my only blog.  Aldeboran has been shut down. Two blogs were two too many for my pointless pontificating and chest thumping — most of the content could have gone either place and I ended up cross posting a lot of stuff anyway — so to hell with it.

To celebrate the occasion, I dug out one of my favorite bits of medieval marginalia — the butt trumpet!  I especially like the trumpet player’s bored expression.

‘Deleting your Blog is a dick move.’

A while back, -C posted On Blogging: A Selfish Message on his blog, Hack & Slash. Among other points, -C asks bloggers not to delete their blogs if they decide to give up blogging. He says, “Is it your right to do what you wish with your blog? Well, if you buy and own rare copies of books and then set them on fire, it may be legal, but it’s still a dick move.”
Thinking of specifics, well known bloggers like Chgowiz recently decided to get out of blogging. Chgowiz didn’t delete his whole blog, just some of it. I’m not going to speculate on his reasons for doing so, but everyone and his brother chimed in with an opinion over whether or not a blogger ought to delete their blog if they decide to leave the scene. I respect -C’s opinion, but feel differently on this issue. I think if a blogger decides to nuke their blog, for whatever reason (ranging from, “I’m sick of being criticized by strangers for some remark on my blog,” to, “I just don’t want to be bothered anymore“), we ought to just admit to ourselves that it is the blogger’s decision. If they want to come back, they will. If they don’t, well, enjoy it while it lasts and don’t forget to save a copy if you want to reference it in the future.
The advice that “if you put something up, you ought to leave it up because deleting it is a dick move” feels somewhat in conflict to the other frequently given bit of advice about life on the internet, which is, “No one is really your friend on the internet.” When I’ve gotten pissed of because of being trolled or harassed or annoyed by the behavior of other netizens, people have always been quick to point out, “Well, it’s your own fault for getting bugged because no one is really your friend on the web so that’s what happens.” The unspoken rule zero of the internet seems to be, “If you can’t stand the heat, you are too much of a pussy for the world wide web.” That might be true, but I still don’t like it.
If no one is really my friend on the web, then it shouldn’t matter if I yank my contribution anytime I feel like it, dick move or not. If, on the other hand, I owe people continued access to content I might have once made available, then I am being required to be ‘friend-like’ to other cyber people who are not my friend anyway — which seems like setting myself up for exploitation and disappointment.
So, which is it?

Monsters & Manuals: "TRPBTNTWAs" coat-tails post

Once again it is time for me to ride on someone else’s coat-tails by posting a follow-up to something THEY posted on THEIR blog to my blog. Call it a ‘tribute’ or ‘having an ear for the zeitgeist’ if you like me and ‘attention whoring and me-tooism’ if you hate me.

Noisms at “Monsters & Manuals” posted a list of questions he thinks don’t get enough traction. He calls them “TRPBTNTWAs, or, Things Role Playing Bloggers Tend Not To Write About”

Here they are (with my answers):

Book binding. (I can’t be the only person who bemoans the way new rulebooks tend to fall apart like a sheaf of dry leaves after about 5 seconds of use).

I hate to be such a predictable snooty “I played D&D back in the day when it was still cool” shit head, but, well, I guess you can’t fight your own nature. My AD&D PHB, Monster Manual and DMG (which are 30+ years old I guess) are totally trashed from use, but the pages are still in them. I hate ‘perfect bound’ stuff, because when teenage me wanted to read the names of all of the different polearms or rub one off over the succubus, I wanted to lay the book out flat. Do that with one of these ‘perfect bound’ books and the glue cracks and the pages fall out.
Currently my position is that no role playing game book should be so long as to require binding beyond staples (like an old fashioned honest-to-god comic book). If you need more pages than a comic book binding can handle, your book is too long… unless your book is ‘Exquisite Corpses,’ in which case it is a spiral bound work of genius.

“Doing a voice”. How many people “do voices”? Should they? How do you get better at “doing a voice” if that’s your thing?

I only do voices for comedic effect because I am a shitty actor and too self conscious to try to seriously play the part. Fake English accents are horrible. I once did a politically very incorrect rug merchant NPC simply by trying to do an imitation of that Indian guy from the Simpsons. My favorite NPC was a goblin who had been hired on by the party as a guide. I just imitated ‘Borat.’

Breaks. How often do you have breaks within sessions?

As needed. It’s been a while since I have been able to attend, so

• Description. Exactly how florid are your descriptions?
• Where do you strike the balance between “doing what your character would do” and “acting like a dickhead”?
• PC-on-PC violence. Do your players tend to avoid it, or do you ban it? Or does anything go?
• How do you explain what a role playing game is to a stranger who is also a non-player? (Real life example: my friends and I were playing in the local M:tG club space. A M:tG groupie teenage goth girl came over and asked, “What are you playing?” “[We answered.]” “Sounds kind of gay.”)
• Alchohol at the table?
• What’s acceptable to do to a PC whose player is absent from the session? Is whatever happens their fault for not being there, or are there some limits?