I started this blog on Monday, got busy, went to dinner and passed out on my couch so I never finished it. It's Tuesday now, but pretend that this was all written yesterday mmk?
Had my first taste of Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition last night as I watched a campaign run by Mesk. It was drastically different than the other experiences with Dungeons and Dragons I've had in the past. I was introduced to the game on version 3.5 and I've played with two groups of people on 4th edition. In both cases, I've played with/know the people in person (in addition to playing with one group occasionally online when we can't get together). This was an incredible learning experience for me because I had a chance to really pay attention to text-based interaction and roleplay. I've seen some of Mesk's videos, but I must admit I wasn't so concerned with the mechanics until this.
I notice that the players have a lot more time to think about their actions, roleplaying and conversation vs when it's voiced, which is a lot more awkward when you have long pauses to figure out whether a) it's really what you want to say/do and b) whether it's actually in character. Writing it lets a person say exactly what they want in a relatively orderly sequence and have time to think through it. This is a level of interaction and roleplaying I was not prepared to experience because I REALLY suck at roleplaying at the best of times (that said I've never really done...text based roleplay before so...). Seeing these players do it with such ease was a little intimidating, but impressive. I can tell there's a lot of anime influences in these people's lives though with how many references were made. I got like...1/3 of them (and the only reason I got the DBZ ones is cause Shauna introduced me to DBZ Abridged).
I recorded the game and ended up voice acting a lot of the spoken lines (very poorly). Was more for practice and fun than anything else since I haven't been doing much LP work lately. I made it through about three of the eight hours before my voice completely gave out and I had to resort to just commenting occasionally, or when I was really tired late-game, simply giggling. Some of the rolls were really hilarious. One of the things the players tried I'm like, there is no way this isn't going to end in tears. It actually didn't, but man that whole end boss sequence escalated quickly.
One thing I didn't expect was the length of the one-shot. I expected it to be 3-4 hours tops. It went for 8 hours and I ended up delivering a 10GB recording to Mesk. I actually didn't know how it fully ended (there was a lot of character building stuff going down) so I peaced out at 3:30am to be unconscious for three hours (work in the morning).
Personally I think the campaign went really well. There's a lot of weird things in 5e I'm not used to, but Nick made the comment that it was really plug-and-play vs 4e, so I can see why that edition appeals to custom campaigns. I saw a couple players min/maxing their characters, though when two of them were actually hit, they were almost one-shotted, so I can see that a lot of it went into maximizing damage. The test seemed to give Mesk a lot of experience and information, so that was good to see. I'd definitely watch again or even join in the future, but I don't know how my experience would play into the group dynamic. My campaigns have made me very cynical in terms of events and characters - see Boats of Doom and Undead Campaigns when I finally get the videos done for them. Basically the former had us enslaved at the beginning and we got all our items constantly stolen and the latter has been never-ending harassment from the undead and assassin HANDS.
So after my nap I attempted to vote in the morning. I packed up a puppy and drove over to a church nearby to vote (by-elections cause Harper took his ball and went home). I walked in and made it pretty far before I realized that it was the advanced polling station and actually had to go to a school to vote. A school that's like...a block away from where I live. I debated going back and realized that it was the start of school (was about 745 and the school starts at 759), so I decided it wasn't worth dealing with the kids and the buses and cars and parents and general chaos that I typically avoid the area for. The people I knew would win, won anyway so meh (my area is full of of new families and old white conservative people...the latter being the majority that votes). Then I facerolled a few spreadsheets at work, ate a lot of Brazilian food (BUT NO BBQ PINEAPPLE!!1!!!1!) and made it through watching two cat videos before I was suddenly unconscious on the couch.
I think the short-term solution to needing to supervise a puppy a lot on the main level would be to set up a remote desktop on the laptop for my main computer and just work on things downstairs. I would get so much more done for RPG making, sprite creation, video editing and going through some old files/videos. This will likely be implemented Thursday or Friday though as tonight I work and will definitely be passing out immediately when I get home and Wednesday I'm TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS. Don't know why I capitalized that to be honest, but now I have BTO stuck in my head.
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