Exchange of Realities

This week will conclude my first year as a blogger; as a result, I’m focusing on blogging-related topics.

Rare is the RPG blogger who hasn’t at some point written about a campaign he or she is either running or playing in. Some, myself included, even use such things as a regular post topic. After all, they’re a near-infinite source of material, lasting as long as the game runs and possibly beyond.

But I wonder, at times, if people are really that interested in game summaries. Certainly, Saturday, when I do my “what I did in my game at some point in time”, is generally a slow day for me, both in terms of hits and comments. And while I’ve always been fond of learning through real life examples, I tend not to pay much attention to campaign journal posts.

Some, usually the player-perspective ones, are close-focus, how the character sees what’s going on riffs. In general, I like the style; it gives it a sort of realism and interest that a lot of things don’t have. But there are issues with context due to the nature of the medium. It’s hard to just pick up on something in the middle if you haven’t been following the story for a while; imagine having a friend pop up and start telling you about what happened in the sixteenth episode of a TV series you’ve barely heard of and have little to no investment in. Who are these people? What are they doing? Why should I be interested? I think a way to work around that is backlinking, and making sure any character featured at least has name and memorable role mentioned.

Other people are more concerned with the mechanics. I can see the uses of the posts, telling people what worked and what didn’t, whether a certain set of houserules is functional or a given supplement blends well—it’s nice practical knowledge. Certainly, it satisfies people who are more concerned with material they can get use out of than finding out things that happened, getting strong images of the game or getting inside the heads of imaginary people. But if you don’t play the game, or you aren’t really concerned with mechanics for whatever reason—yeah, hi—it can be a deal-breaker.

And then there are my Impractical Applications, which are something of an odd case. The idea behind them is that most of my concepts are pretty abstract; while I’ll occasionally slip one-sentence examples into my weekday articles, and occasionally hide game references in my Generic Villain riffs, most of the time I’m talking about general players with general characters or general worlds with general conditions. There’s not much room to see it in action. With the Impracs, I hope to get across how I practice what I preach, particularly when I’ve got a nice applicable series, like summing up several posts on character development through conflict with how I did it using Ruby or ending a long run of intelligent magic item posts by showcasing my dread blade Anathema. It’s rather different from a lot of what’s out there, and I’m never quite sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Do you read campaign journal articles? What kinds work or don’t work for you? What would your ideal be?