Wooo.

Never experienced this myself, however -- I like the parody :)

Half Author/ Half DM - All Nerd

As an Author - you are in full command and control. You decide what each character is doing and what he or she think and feel. You dictate how they respond to situations and can use your amazing powers to make storylines meet and arcs come together. The characters can be clueless and miss things that your audience catches, or they can be intelligent and make the wise move in a sea of bad ones. 

As a Gamemaster (also known as Dungeon Master or DM) you are in ... some command and control. You are the storyteller, responsible for the plot and keeping things moving. Responsible for giving players a reason and incentive to keep playing and providing them with stories, characters, and antagonists to interact with and react to, so that they continue to develop and grow and play the game. You lose control of a set number of characters that are played by the others in the game, those feelings and emotions and actions are controlled by the players and you just have to go with it and have the world react and bend to them. Being a GM (gamemaster for those who got lost) that tries to make the players bend to the world generally just leads to frustration for both sides and a very short game. It is much tougher to be a DM, but in some ways it is easier because some of the content is generated by others and you don't have to decide every single decision and dictate every single action.

I am trying to do both, at the very same time -- in the very same world.

While I enjoy the aspect of creating a world for Novels at the same time as being the storyteller or gamemaster for a RPG in that game… it does lead to a lot of headache and effort that I just can’t seem to summon lately.

The weekly arguments with players who want to rule the world without effort and to endlessly defeat any bad guy they run across is a constant drain. It is absolutely insane how I can go from thinking that I am best gamemaster on the planet for my slick storytelling and way that I got the entire party involved to the next week wanting to be done with it all and never have to try to please these stinking selfish players every again.

It doesn’t matter how many times you tell a player that the world is harsh and mean that most people die at a young age and that they are already overpowered and have the best armor and weapons and skills and stats compared to anyone in the world --- they still want more! At heart, every gamer plays just to win. That is the driving force behind why we play in the first place, so we always try to find the cleverest best way to defeat a situation and we must always win and come out on top.

It is funny how playing a console game never brings the level of frustration that a tabletop RPG elicits, in the latter it always seems like it is our own ideas that are being shot down- not just a command we chose out of a generated list of possibilities.

To my current players - bear with me. I have to change the world often as you veer off in unknown directions and disrupt my carefully placed applecart. And please understand that the world sometimes won't just stop and let you have what you want when you want - I haven't experienced that in life and our current game is based on reality and not strictly fantasy (like Dungeons and Dragons or some other games that come to mind).

To my readers - join in and encourage me. It helps so much to hear ideas from my friends and those who read what I write. I may tease and joke when you do mention something, but inside it helps so much. 

To the future!

Doomed

I have become daunted by my own story.

The stakes have risen so much, battlegrounds extended, the plot skyrocketed. And now to be able to fully grasp and pull everything together in the correct sequence and keep things enjoyable for all… I have to spend entirely too much of my time documenting and translating some of my previous notes into something useful and easy to combine into an actual situation and metric.

While I may be able to remember in my head that I had this character betray his faction and run this direction, when it comes time to actually interweave the faction story arc, will I remember who he spoke to and who was in town at that time?

I dislike having to retroactively go back into my story and generate the names of the nobles and etc who would have witnessed events and thus reacted to them but I forgot that originally. So I am trying to plan out each Noble House and all of the people who serve it and where they are and keep up with those people as each week advances plotlines and the RPG game that we are playing in this world also advances things.

However, the task of keeping all of that noted, generated, reasoned, logicked, backgrounded and the like is so daunting. My mind actually shuts down and runs away and then I am left feeling very upset with myself because I know that I should be working on this and keeping things in easy progress or I will lose my place and my head. Knowing that doesn’t seem to be adding to my willingness to sit down and put everything together and push it over to the computer instead of being in 2040592 hand written notes (a possible exaggeration there).

Oh, what to do? What have I done to myself?

Not only do I need to get approximately 357 characters, backgrounds and plotlines together but I also have another 17 organizations within the Kingdom that I have to develop their plots and reasoning and desires and activity. The world can’t just stand still since the protagonists are in a little town instead of interacting with the world.

Star Wars 7!!!

Ever since meeting the beautiful lady that has become my wife, my life has taken a very sudden and drastic Star Wars nerd turn.

She enjoys Star Wars so much, that I happily stowed my classy geek and went full out to learn and experience more Star Wars in my life.

Since that time, we have watched every Star Wars movie, played every Star Wars game, played various Star Wars roleplaying games - SAGA is still the best!, journeyed forth into the expanded universe and created a Star Wars Library of our own...

And now comes the exciting news of the Star Wars movie finally coming to fruition!

We are both disappointed at the direction that Disney decided to go in distancing itself from the Expanded Universe (now labeled the Legends), however ... Its Star Wars!!! Who can't be happy to see anything related to Star Wars? (Erh.. besides the Ewok movie that is).

And so I forward you to this wonderful post by IGN which breaks down the announcement of the Cast of the next movie, which is a tremendous step in actually getting this movie made so I can spend all of my time and money on it. Woohoo

Star Wars 7 Cast