Remembering all the campaigns I ran that went unfinished ......

     Wow, I think I could be a real short story novelist if I could run down this whole list of general.  I took a break from writing my story for a few months since I have been working out some personal issues that I would rather not discuss on a public blog about roleplaying; let's just agree that life sucks and all of us have our own problems.  I haven't been actively writing out a general plot for a campaign idea for when I become a regular DM again, but I have hosted a few improv sessions as a DM recently.  So where does that leave me at the moment for roleplaying?  I am just experiencing life and I am sucking up experience, inspiration, and trying to be as original as possible, acting as a player while someone else is taking on the role of DM. 
     However, I think that originality is dead.  After reviewing several forms of campaign settings from several editions over the years, all of the broad ideas are covered for tabletop roleplaying settings whether you want the setting to take place in the past, present, future, on space ships of realistic or magical based, varying planes of existance based on various ancient religions written in old literature, et cetera.  I really could go on but then the sentence would become a lengthy run-on sentence filled with at least fifeteen more commas filled with other cited examples.  "Originality" seems to be not in the campaign setting that the DM runs the roleplaying game session but how the DM/GM (whatever term you prefer) steers the direction of the plot.
     When I was growing up, my brother and I used to buy madlib books where there was a general short story written on the notepad but there were blanks lines in the story where you would fill in some random word or phrase that would fit on each line.  After filling in all the blanks with random suggestions, someone would read the whole story and we would laugh at the final result of the story since the suggestions were ridiculous.  So why did I bring up that strange little factoid about my childhood?  The answer is the last sentence of the previous paragraph.  The general suggestions of campaign settings are in place, the types of characters are already established, and the suggested rules of how to run the game already exist.  The only real control DMs have is the madlib plot, unless you are reading out of an adventure module.  For the record, I have never ran a campaign using an adventure module as a DM, but I have enjoyed adventure modules as a player.  I have read through a few of them and I seem to get lost reading them for some reason.  I do not have dyslexia but I seem to get lost in what is written in the passage.  I prefer my madlib method of inserting stat blocks, and having a general plot idea established from plot hook to climax to conclusion.  Even though players can at times throw DMs for a loop with strange incentives, interests, or strange actions ( I have heard of all sorts of strange stuff, like the almost naked dwarf that would turn their thong into an improvised sling for example, yeah, ....... you know who you are .......... ), I find that having several madlib plots strung together in the same setting creates an ADVENTURE WEB.  I capitalized the last two words since that is an important concept.  Set up several adventure modules / adventure ideas for long term campaigns that way players can advance their characters several levels.
     In a future post though, I will discuss leveling pace when I get the article finished from the point of view of the player and the DM, but I will just move on for now and check my facebook page.  Feel free to contribute any comments or questions that you may have ........ :-)

So .................. You went crazy and decided to design your own form.

      Redesigning your own player character sheet for a tabletop roleplaying game is frustrating to say the least about the endeavor.  Depending on your knowledge of how to use the office program, this can be a frustrating side project to engage in since unexpected problems can arise.  Yeah, I designed a character sheet as well as other forms for other purposes such as the stronghold sheet, the custom monster sheet, et cetera.  Currently, I am designing an animal companion sheet and a spellbook sheet.  I hit a writer's block sort of a wall regarding my spellbook sheet since I wanted to number every line of the spellbook's contents by inserting a field but I keep running into problems.  I will figure something out but I hate the alternative of typing stuff up manually over 100 lines.  UGH!  
      So why did I write up all of these forms?  Well, back in 2006 approximately, I was really frustrated with the design of the character sheet in the back of the book for some reason.  I think the issue I had was how they tried to cram everything onto two pages of paper.  Then they did the same thing in the expanded psionics book in the back, and then in the Incarnum book as well.  I wanted to combine all of these rules, but create separate sheets for each type of character. 
     I ended up creating a 10 page file.  WOW right?  A general character sheet for pages 1 & 2, a Basic Magic sheet for 3 & 4, an incarnum sheet for 5 & 6, a psionics sheet for 7 & 8, and then a cleric/paladin sheet for 9 & 10.  It works very well generally, but I keep reviewing the file to find ways to tweak the form to design it to trim down certain sections or clean up the look of the sheet.  Microsoft Word can be a little unforgiving at times so I try to save often.
     Then I discovered the printer margin problem, so I had the help of the officemax people to resave the file in a PDF format.  I was proud of my work but at the same time I felt a little bit of embarrassed.  I think about 95 % proud of my work for hearing the praise from the officemax worker but 5% embarrassed for how crazy and geeky I sounded describing my work.  I wasn't sure but the guy sounded like he was pretending to be fan of tabletop roleplaying.
     So now I am tweaking the character sheet file as well as designing a spellbook statistics sheet and an animal companion sheet.  Yeah, a little bit of a headache but in the end I think the efforts are rewarding.  The game is about adding unique presentations and roleplaying afterall, so adding flair in description and design can be fun afterall.  Even if printing the pages out at the Officemax makes you feel proud to be a geek.  YAY!

PS: My document files are a trade secret so I won't share my files with just anyone.