Hello! I’ve decided to start writing about gaming on the internet. By gaming I do not mean gambling (the sport of the asthmatic man) but rather tabletop role-playing games. The most celebrated of this class of games is Dungeons & Dragons, now in its fourth edition; mostly I’ll be talking about that.

If you read the previous paragraph, and have continued on to this, the second paragraph, then I believe I can safely assume that you are to some extent a gamer, and thus I can use phrases like “Dungeon Master” and “roll 2d6+Int” and “lose 1d10/1d100 SAN” and other such phrases without confusing you. Which works out well for me. This gives us a little bit of common ground to build on. I used to write on the internet about gaming (and other things), but I took that blog down when I was unemployed; I thought there was a slim but nonzero chance that I was losing out on job opportunities because googling my name turned up some bizarre gaming-related posts rather than wise discourses on areas of my technical expertise. As part of this blog, I’m going to be reposting some (hardly all) of my old writing, so that it will not be lost forever.

If you try hard enough I’m sure you can find my real name, based on the reposting plus I’m not trying all that hard to hide it… but my main goal here isn’t real anonymity so much as I’d rather anyone googling me find things besides this blog. Therefore for purposes of being on the internet and talking about gaming, call me Drunken Carp, which name I got from Voidstate’s Exalted Name Generator. Email me at drunkencarp@gmail.com.

A very little bit of background: my wife and I met playing D&D back in 2002, and we relocated not too long ago from Boston, MA, to Philadelphia, PA; this process cost us our old gaming groups (who are, basically, the target audience of this blog) and forced us to attempt to assemble new ones. Currently (9/24/2010) our gaming is entirely D&D 4e based, and consists mostly of bimonthly Living Forgotten Realms and a weekly paragon-tier Dark Sun campaign I started recently. On Monday nights we also get together for a little gaming that Bert (see below) runs.

I mostly run nowadays; I run the Dark Sun game and I GM the LFR. Mainly in this space I’m interested in talking about the games I’m running and how things relate to them, so there will be less discussion of Bert’s game.

My wife Vero enjoys psychodrama/role-playing, storytelling, and building (and successfully using the powers of) ineffably powerful characters, in roughly equal measure.

Our friends Bert, Carla, Doug, and Eunice play in the Dark Sun game. Eunice can only attend about half the sessions. Frances plays Living Forgotten Realms with us, but can’t make the weeknight Dark Sun game.

Also, those are not their real names. It’d be silly of me to anonymize myself and not them. Also, part of that fourth paragraph isn’t true, but it’s close enough.

Finally, I intend to keep a nice buffer to entries to the blog, and update twice a week every week, so when I discuss things in game, they will mostly be things that happened some time ago, though they were current when I wrote them down. For the moment, half of what I post will be new content, and the other half will be things I’ve written between 2002 and 2008.

Next up: I talk about Dark Sun characters!