"Half a Year, Half a Year, Half a Year Onward..."

Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash

Apologies to Alfred, Lord Tennyson for butchering his iconic opening to The Charge of The Light Brigade for the sake of a cheeky headline.

This blog has now been on "active duty" for six months now... and seems to be ticking over nicely.

To be honest, it actually feels much longer, like the gravitational pull of a black hole warping my perception of time. On one hand life is racing by at an accelerated rate, while on the other the blog wades slowly through treacle.

I realise this iteration of my blogging 'career' has grown out of the detritus and chaos left by my previous near twenty years of blogging, but I somehow fooled myself into thinking that that would make it easier to stay focussed on what I wanted this new edition to be.

This has not been the case.

Of course, I wish there was more tabletop roleplaying gaming material on it, as that was one of the main reasons for returning to the bloggosphere and it's always been where, I felt, I was the most creative.

Previous blogs have boasted gameable material, monsters, magic, and houserules as and when such tickled my fancy or I was suitably inspired. But so far - for the reasons I mentioned the other day - there's been bupkis.

I also wish my health - both physical and mental - was in a better place, but ultimately that's all down to me ensuring I pull my finger out and take positive steps to alleviate those issues.

The erratic heartbeat of the blog's views/hit count over six months

Behind-the-scenes, a conversation the other month with Tim Brannan (of The Other Side) finally managed to rid myself of my obsession with "hits" and where they were coming from.

Looking at the views individual posts are getting also paints a very different picture to the occasional tidal wave of bots scraping the blog as a whole for whatever it is they think they might find here.

Each article gets a pretty consistent amount of visitors that I'm very happy with. When you look at the blog's widgets charting "popular posts" for the week, the "scores" that separate each are usually only one or two hits apart.

These days I'm much more focussed on getting comments - either directly on the blog or on Facebook (where I promote all my posts). Comments, for me, are the lifeblood of blogging and the best, most genuine, reflection of a true connection with your readership.

Obviously, I'd prefer more people left messages on the actual blog, but Facebook has the bonus that readers can simply react to a post without the necessity of sharing their more detailed thoughts on my nonsense. 

Maybe, eventually, I'll write something revolutionary and suddenly my site will blow up with large-scale, genuine engagement, but in the real world I'm more than content to just keep posting my posts for my circle of friends and acquaintances. 

As this new blog continues to grow, I would like to develop that hardcore band of followers - my posse, if you will.

My goal is for "quality" over "quantity". As I've just said, I'm not striving for hits and clicks. Just a coterie of readers willing to interact with my babble, offer constructive criticism, and engage in conversations.

Look to the right and you will see in the side column (below the current 'featured article') a widget entitled Join The Posse. Under avatars for my current Followers is a button marked Follow.

Simply press that and - all being well - your avatar will join the ranks of this group of brave heroes.

I do think you'll need a Google account for this to work (Blogger, after all, is a Google thing).

Not only does this mean that my expertly crafted prose will appear in your Google "Reading List" but it demonstrates to me that you're interested in my waffle and support what I'm doing (without having to part with a single red cent, sign up to Patreon, or back my Kickstarter).

Since I last brought this subject up, I've had two new recruits join our happy little party: my best mate, Paul, and my old online pal Ivy aka The Happy Whisk.

Maths Explains Why It's So Hard to Organise An RPG Session

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

Let's Talk About Stats, Baby, Let's Talk About You and Me

I love stats.

It all dates back to my school days and it's all because of Dungeons & Dragons and the other RPGs I was being introduced to in my formative years.

Those early roleplaying games were a gateway drug to broadening my vocabulary and learning the importance of numbers, percentages, chances etc
 
I may not have been the greatest pupil to ever walk the hallowed halls of my prep school or grammar school, but - on top of my creative writing I was developing at the time - I maintained my obsession with the magic of numbers.

Throw comic books into the mix and suddenly the revelation of Official Handbooks and Who's Whos from Marvel and DC were like catnip to me.

I'm pretty sure I picked up all the original run of DC Comic's A to Z Who's Who of their deep character roster at the time, but it was Marvel's Official Handbooks to The Marvel Universe that really blew my tiny socks off.

Entry from The Official Handbook of The Marvel Universe: Spider-Man 2005

These actually went into technical minutiae and even rated characters on strength, durability, fighting skills, energy projection, intelligence, strength etc

This was gold dust for an info-hungry gamer like me. Even if I wasn't looking to adapt a Marvel character directly into an RPG setting (almost certainly 2nd Edition Villains & Vigilantes), there was enough detail (even height and weight!) here to create a character based off of a Marvel character!

Sure, there were official Marvel roleplaying games, but these Handbooks felt like I was getting the details direct from the source.

To this day, I have an eBay alert set-up for Marvel Handbooks, as I've developed a special interest in the later "themed releases", comic book-sized updates featuring current characters from a particular storyline (e.g. the comparatively recent Empyre) or genre (such as 'horror' or Conan The Barbarian) .

People have devoted whole podcasts to these kinds of books (and it's easy to see why, there's just so much to talk about) and smaller companies have also dipped their toe into the "handbook" field (I try and grab them when I see them).

I primarily love comic books for the wild, superheroic, storylines and incredible art, but having these encyclopaedic volumes of facts and figures makes it all the more real for me, building a degree of verisimilitude that I can then port over into my gaming.

Well, that's the idea anyway...  

My treasured collection of The Official Handbook of The Marvel Universe A - Z