Staying Busy with TTRPG Things!
I feel like I should also use the word “delve” in the title, but nah. Honestly, I’ve been struggling a little bit to write anything over here lately. Some feelings of… not inadequacy, really, but just… what am I doing? In the TTRPG space (and industry, I suppose), especially.
But then I started updating my about page, where I keep a list of things I’ve done, and it made me feel a little better. I don’t think I’m ever going to be a TTRPG or Actual Play “celebrity” but I like what I’ve gotten to do and play and I always look forward to more events.
So consider this post a bottle, recap, flashback, or clip post–look all those up on TV Tropes–because it’s been a fun Spring so far being able to do some panels, and charity streams.
Right before heading to Toronto for Breakout Con, I took part in Roll For Palestine, a weekend-long charity event of TTRPG one-shots to benefit non-profit org Care for Gaza. For our game, we played a bunch of Kobolds, something I hadn’t played before, as Robo DM’d us through a sort of Sliders/Time Tunnel of different TTRPG settings as we were trying to help keep the multiverse safe from an imminent threat to all of our realities. Our characters also got to enjoy really good food and drink, which is always a plus.
Roll For Palestine: Across the Koboldverse
(Twitch/TTRPGifs)
Later in March, I participated in Streaming for Survivors to benefit Salal Sexual Violence Support Centre and in addition to running fundraising streams of my own, I was also invited to speak on a 101 panel about D&D where I joined Lauren Urban, Vee Mus’e and Carolyn Page as moderator Alysha Hira asked us about D&D, what it’s all about, how we all came to the hobby and how playing and sharing the hobby has affected us and our communities.
D&D 101: It’s More Than A Game!
(Twitch/SalalSVSC)
I confess that I still suffer from, “What am I doing here with these awesome people?” but it was nice to have a bunch of different perspectives on the game and hobby and I was happy to be invited. The best part was that we got to follow it up with a one-shot, DM’d by Holly Conrad and our characters had some adventures during a bottomless brunch day in Sigil.
A Courageous Coo
(Twitch/HeroForge)
As much as I miss being on a long-running series, one shots are just delightful silly fun. Whether played silly or serious, you generally know the structure of the game because when it ends, it ends. Stakes may be high, but unless it purposely ends unresolved, you know that the GM will bring everything around to somewhat of a satisfying ending. (Whether it’s satisfying for the players vs. the characters, who can say?)
And speaking of one-shots having a satisfying ending, but also not… the first weekend of April, I participated in yet another charity one-shot. What can I say, getting me to say yes to a charity game is pretty easy. It was the 5th year of Mercy Road, a 24-hour D&D charity marathon benefitting Child’s Play Charity. All DM’d by Saucefire with 8 tables and 8 games for the duration. I still don’t know how he does it.
Mercy Road 5: Future Perfect
(Twitch/Saucefire)
Sauce effortlessly weaves in different tables, each with their own cast and game into the larger story as a whole and while I couldn’t stay up to watch the entire marathon, it was fun to pop back in over the weekend to see how each team was dealing with this year’s MacGuffin. I also confess to being both honored and embarrassed that the background event for all of the stories was a festival named after my character.
Ok, wow, that is a lot of Twitch embeds for one post, and I still have one more charity game this month. So I should probably take it a little easier on myself when I feel like I’m not doing anything or enough or that I’m not on people’s “to ask” list because while I am keeping to my “only 2 events per month” rule for the most part, I am keeping busy and it’s all for good causes.
And one last thing because I just saw it online and it’s really cool. An HTML-embeddable inline dice roller script.
I could see people adding this to their webpage for inline clicks, stat rolling, some “choose your own adventure” style fiction. I’m not a proficient JavaScript programmer, but being able to capture the final value to place somewhere else on an interactive page would be cool. No one’s coming for virtual tabletop (VTT) yet, but being able to make a quick little homebrew random value could be a very nice touch.
Be sure to support the developer as this is something I’d love to see expand in both ease of use and functionality. Some examples:
- Roll 3d4:
3d4 - Roll 10d8:
10d8 - Roll 1d20:
1d20 - Roll 1d100:
1d100 - Roll 1d47:
1d47
(If you know, you know…)
As someone who plays online without a traditional desk or tabletop surface, I love using digital dice as much as physical dice. And with a script like this, I could even make my own local webpage version of a character sheet if need be, especially for systems that aren’t integrated with VTT but still keep to the “you roll dice to determine this or that.”
So that’s what’s been going on in the TTRPG world for me. Otherwise Spring has definitely sprung, I’m feeling the allergies return but I am getting outside a bit more, so keeping busy but not overbooked for charity events feels like a good thing. I hope the season is starting well for everyone and that if you got any powers from the eclipse that they were good ones. 💖
