My instincts are saying “I don’t want to write.” I am pretty beat today.
But I will test the boundaries a little. Let’s see where this goes.
I am usually tired on Saturday morning. This is because Friday night is Nerd Dice night. I have a regular group of friends that I play TTRPGs with. This gaming group has been running in some form not quite continuously for two decades or thereabouts.
You may notice I wrote TTRPGs and not D&D. Gygax’s Legacy actually only pops up occasionally in our activities. We probably fit into the OSR pigeonhole fairly well but also branch out into various other miscellany like WoD and random indie games. However this time we’re aligning with the mainstream a bit more and kicking off a D&D 5th Edition (aka 2014 ruleset) game in the Exandria setting. Yep, one of our number is a huge Critical Role fan and is running the setting and our mantra is “cool is the Rule.”
Should be fun.
But because we are almost all parents, middle aged, and have a tendency to go on tangents, we start quite late and the games tend to run quite late into the night.
So every Saturday morning I’m pretty trashed, and there are animals and children waiting to be fed, and a small boy who needs to be shepherded to taekwondo class, laundry to be done, etc.
I’ve struggled a lot with this tension, and I have had to take breaks. I was very close to going on hiatus from the game last year when work stress was at its peak. But I do try to persist because of the bright spots of creative brilliance that explode every now and again during the game, and I can take a step back and think, “we made that up together! How cool!” Extant examples include:
- The infamous Star Wars game where our party consisted of: one Jawa, one Ewok, one 7 year old human urchin, and a Wookkie who stowed away on a luxury star liner cruise.
- A Kids on Bikes game where I made up my own Tarot deck, we made up a bunch of 80s music playlists, and someone invented an anthropomorphic bear NPC who was a professional wrestler called “Erik the Bearserker”
- A Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign where we encountered The Metal Gods - literal in-game deities that were all modeled off of famous heavy metal musicians
- A later part of the DCC campaign where one of my characters became an elaborate riff on obscure Green Lantern trivia, aka Verena Starheart
- The Legend of Gene, a dwarf who believed that elves hatch out of eggs, and engaged in a large amount of scatalogical behaviour
Maybe no one else would appreciate our particular blend of obscure comic book references, weird internet in-jokes, toilet humour, and other popular culture miscellany, but we enjoy it.
So for now, I’ll write of Saturday mornings and dream of the day when I don’t have to get up early on 6 hours of sleep.