Restart: #RPGaDAY2020 1 - Beginning

Another year, another #RPGaDAY!

This year the daily blogging prompts take the form of words on a map:

Today's prompt is:

BEGINNING

There are more beginnings than ends.

Part of this is because I start a lot of projects and then never finish them (because other things capture my interest, or I run out of time, or I just don't want to do it anymore), but also I think in general the space of potential is much larger than the space of actual outcomes.

In this hobby, we think about how things start a lot. You all meet in a tavern. Setting expectations and rolling characters in session zero. Coming up with good adventure hooks. Looking into the shadowy dungeon entrance, lantern held high.

I wanted to get a sense of how I've been thinking about beginnings. Luckily I had the good sense to make "beginnings" a tag on this blog, so I'll review some of the things that come up on in posts I've tagged "beginnings".

The first post on this blog, obviously. Interestingly while I've mostly kept to intentions a b and d, I'd forgotten about c: "comment on and synthesize the work of other roleplaying bloggers". I have a bunch of text documents in my "Gaming" folder where I put summaries of stuff I find on blogs that all seems to fit together; for example a whole bunch of different guides on creating adventures. I think I convinced myself that nobody wanted to see stuff that was already elsewhere, but maybe that's not true? Especially if I grind it up into a paste and spread the result out.

There are a bunch of #RPGaDAY2016 posts that are tagged too. Things about getting the first session started off right, first experiences roleplaying, etc. I still love the story of how I just walked in and sat down to watch some people playing in the university dorm common room like some kind of creep and now they're awesome friends and I still play with them every week 12 years later.

There are posts about starting off game design projects, like the weird graveyard text adventure thing I started making for nagademon, and more recently my attempts to make a thiefy duet game in Crook and the Gygax 75 challenge I'm doing at this very moment.

The most-viewed post on this blog is tagged "beginnings": it's the list of Reasons to Do Gamethings which provides an occasionally-updated calendar of game jams, blogging prompts, design competitions and challenges. A whole bunch of potential beginnings!

There's also a post about the *DREAM Principles, which I think I saw as a new beginning for the OSR scene (LOLSOB especially now as I write this with loads of people leaving the OSR discord over TERF shit and opaque moderation). I actually have a draft post where I was going to look at another list of principles (the Dungeonpunk Manifesto from Sword and Backpack), and I think it would be interesting to do a series of posts about these lists of principles cause there's loads of them out there (like the Possum Laws of Gaming and the Principia Apocrypha and even the Dungeonpunk Counter-Manifesto which responded to Sword and Backpack's manifesto cause it wasn't punk enough!)

That's it for this review of previous beginnings. And whaddya know, it generated a few more beginnings. Let's see if they lead to any ends.