Exchange of Realities

Inspired by this post.

I said I wouldn’t get personal after my 100^th post piece, but I really can’t talk about this one without a personal element.

We bloggers, as a class, wish to be heard. We might tell ourselves otherwise; heck, when I first set this blog up, I thought I was doing it as an extra source of income to make up for a nasty job market. But I realized, soon after I started, that that wasn’t why I was keeping going, and it certainly didn’t explain the time I spent cleaving to my schedule and advertising.

I think I understand, though. In every internet community, there are a few names everyone knows. My first, the Zompist BBoard, had the founder himself, and a host of other linguists who had eked out places one way or another—one for quantity of well-thought-out posts, one for a level head and good writing skill, one for being the Den Mother of Newbies, a few for particularly interesting languages, one even for creating a thread that was made entirely of adorable pictures. My second, the Giant in the Playground Forums, featured quite a few of such names as well. Along with the mods, everyone knew about the Vorpal Tribble and his homebrew menagerie, about AKA_Bait’s Guide to Being a DM, about the Logic Ninja’s Guide to the Batman Wizard (which stayed on the board long after he was removed), about That Lanky Bugger’s legendary Worst Game Session Ever (who doesn’t?), and a host of others.

I always dreamed of being one of those Names, and still do. Don’t we all, really? I still want to trace back a referring link to find that someone considers my “0 and 1” to be the definitive word on why combat needs to be shaken up, or that my character-building suite is required reading for someone’s play by post, or that someone in another Paolini debate would back up why the criticism can’t stop flowing with “The Problem With Speculative Fiction”. I don’t see it as counting when I do it; any fool can play up her own work. Even now, it seems that being referenced like that is the purview of big blogs like Dungeon Mastering or Musings of the Chatty DM.

But now, we get our chance. Introduced by Jonathan from The Core Mechanic, the Open Game Table would be a compilation of the best and most useful RPG blog posts from 2008. The initial post talks up getting outsiders into the community by showing them we’re out there, but I really don’t think that’s what’s going to do it for us. What we get is a within-community benefit: the chance to find ourselves or those we respect to be the Name to Quote on a topic. To make sure that classics like the Types of Metagame Fun or the School of Entertain the GM, Gygaxian Naturalism or Roleplaying With Royalty, are there for our community to find and reference and point each other to, part of the lore and part of the language. To give ourselves a name that might still go on even if Real Life overwhelms us and our blogs are lost in the confusion.

We may all be silhouettes hiding behind colorful names in the far reaches of The Tubez. But we can still be remembered this way, and what is remembered is immortal. And this is just as important a reason to support the Table as any other. This is what it can be for.

Let’s give it our all.