I am big fan of the regular monthly “carnival” of German RPG bloggers, where different blogs coordinate with one another to contribute articles towards a common theme. It’s simply great to be allowed to participate in these events.
This month’s carnival however confronts me with a bit of a paradox. The topic is “sources of enjoyment within RPGs” and writing about that….
…isn’t really that enjoyable to me
One of my own sources of enjoyment – and one that isn’t entirely uncommon, I believe – is in the preparation of the game. More specifically, it is in creating and designing, tinkering and writing house rules, characters, handouts, adventures, setting descriptions, …
This is a source, which I regularly tap also when writing articles. After all, d6ideas is centered on exactly that sort of playable content, even though we usually keep Sundays open for less focused topics.
It is exactly at that point of writing articles that the carnival, too, contributes to my enjoyment. Its topics have always – though sometimes not without some fiddling – provided inspiration and ideas to develop new material that I would probably not have written at all otherwise.
In the end, even such seemingly metagame topics as “the hobby online” or “emotions in roleplaying” could be beaten into shape in that regard.
This time, though, I am sitting here, thinking, without so much as a single clue how to get something resembling playable content out of “sources of enjoyment in RPGs”.
I mean, I could probably write an NPC or two, concentrating on what their sources of enjoyment are… but that does not seem to really mesh with the topic. That would almost be as much of a cop-out as just putting the line “furthermore, I consider that writing such stuff is a source of enjoyment in RPGs” under each of my regular pieces in a bad imitation of Cato.
So, that leaves me with an editorial about enjoying writing as a source of enjoyment in RPGs… …without particularly enjoying writing it, though.