According to WordPress, this is my 100th post on Being an Online Dungeon Master. My first post was in late April 2010, and here I am in November 2010 putting up post number 100.
I thought I would use this momentous occasion (tongue firmly in cheek here) to chronicle my own personal top 5 posts of the first 100.
#5: MapTool programming. I’ve picked this post to be emblematic of my many posts that talk about writing macros in MapTool (these are collected on my MapTool Education Central page). I list this mainly because a lot of the traffic my blog gets is from people who are searching for tutorials on writing MapTool macros, and I’m proud of my learning process and the way I’ve documented it on my blog. If you just want a finished product to play D&D4e in MapTool, you should definitely check out the various frameworks that are out there. But if you enjoy writing your own macros, as I do, I hope that my blog can help you with the learning process.
#4: Are you in the RPG closet? I like this post because of the discussion it engendered. Lots of gamers hide their hobby from certain people in their lives (often co-workers), and I’ve been guilty of this myself. Is it a bad thing? Well, after this discussion I decided that I wanted to be more open about my hobby and specifically mentioned it to a few people at work. Nothing horrible has ensued. I feel better about myself now.
#3: Eat what you kill. I love this story. In this post I tell the tale of the first game of Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition that I ever ran as a DM. It was totally improvised and run at a friend’s wedding all the way across the country with no gaming supplies – and we still had a blast. That story is what led to the creation of this blog.
#2: Building a better portable projector rig: This is one of my personal favorites, because I’m proud of what it documents. In this post, I describe how I built the final version of the rig that holds my projector above the game table so that I can run in-person games using MapTool. I was inspired by a post from Sean Pecor in which he details the construction of his portable projector setup, but after some trial and error and some investigating online, I went in a different direction. I would love it if other people followed my lead and built a rig like mine and used it to play RPGs with their friends – that would be quite cool, in my opinion.
#1: My online campaign begins. This one isn’t so much about the post itself as the game behind it. I knew when I started this blog that it was entirely possible that I would someday run a game completely online – finding strangers online to play with, running the game, keeping a campaign going. Amazingly enough, I’ve succeeded on my first try. The group that gathered online for that first session in July is still playing together in November. I had to cut the size from eight players down to five, but those five are still playing with me in the same campaign that we started four months and 12 sessions ago. They’re great people, too – even though we’ve never met in person, I legitimately consider them friends. And it’s all thanks to playing D&D on the internet!
To those of you who regularly read my blog, I thank you. I appreciate those rare occasions when you leave comments, and I appreciate those of you with whom I’ve communicated regularly. I enjoy blogging about this hobby whether anyone reads what I write or not, but it’s always nice to hear that someone is out there. Thank you!