Fiction Life: Introduction
I was going to just post on the topic I recently chose, but I felt silly doing it so out-of-the-blue and decided to write an introductory post on what readers can expect from this blog in the future.
One of my interests other than chess is tabletop roleplaying games. I've been playing them for about eight or nine years; the story of how I got into it warrants a separate post altogether, most likely. I've had a lot of great experiences with roleplaying, and a lot of bad experiences, too. I love being around the table with friends, indulging in snacks, laughing together, creating together, loving our favourite genres together, being unabashedly nerdy together, and the feeling of always having to cut it too short which keeps my mind cycling through idea after idea and draws me forward to next week. But I've also experienced a fair bit of poor sports, roleplaying personalities that rub me the wrong way, and which are also considered to be generally inappropriate, like hogging the spotlight, stealing someone else's schtick, awful metagaming, power trips, and generally getting railroaded and led by the nose a little too strongly.
So being the idealist that I am, I strove for better, consistently better, roleplaying game experiences and developed an... ethos, I guess you could call it. A set of beliefs that I feel inform good quality gaming. It's these ideas that I'd like to share in this blog, (along with updates on my campaigns, etc.) without the pretense that I'm the first to have established them or the first to coin this or that term. After all, the ethos was informed by the writers of some of my favourite roleplaying games and other gamers who were good role models, not just good role players. And no, it won't just be me complaining about so-and-so, but rather a well-thought out consideration, burning questions and queries about how to deal with this or that paradox, and stories from my fiction life.
Ah, the fiction life! And, oh, how roleplaying games make it come alive. The unique medium is what draws me to roleplaying games. It's the only one that, as a folk art, combines creative writing, storytelling, acting, and improv, sometimes with a hint of drawing and music thrown in, as well. It's the only medium that offers to participants the equal opportunity to be a creator and a viewer, for all of the fine arts listed above, simultaneously. It's truly amazing, to say nothing of the immersion and the emotion. I can't say enough about it, really, and I want more of it.
Why write this blog on chess.com? Well, the aforementioned campaign updates I must include as a way of maintaining consistency and keeping up with projects that I start, which is often problematic. And, as I've been on chess.com since 2013 (different account), joining with the intent to improve my chess, and as I've kept up with that goal and my chess has improved, I felt like this would be a good place to start. Not to mention, chess.com boasts a large community, with many participants in the forums coming only for that community and not necessarily for the chess, it doesn't seem too out of place for something like this to exist. I'm sure there are other chess fans that also happen to be roleplaying game fans, no? And to a certain extent, aren't we all roleplayers when we're at the board? Who doesn't think to themselves "What would Carlsen do? What would Danny Rensch say?" and like we haven't all, at some point, decided to make a move that we thought might have been uncharacteristic of our typical play but was inspired by a recent Grand Master game you saw? Are not all of us beginner, amateur chess players roleplaying as the chess greats?
That's the fiction life.
