A to Z Challenge Postmortem

The Blogging from A to Z Challenge was a lot more fun than I expected it to be. Going over all of my campaigns to pull out characters was a neat historical exercise, and figuring out which ones were interesting enough to warrant five hundred words got me thinking about how my gaming style and the styles of my players have evolved. I may go back and do some retrospectives for other characters, too. About fifty characters didn’t make the cut, and several of them really deserved an article but didn’t get one because their letter was taken by someone else. If nothing else, writing about them will give me something to link to whenever I say things like “half-ton ladies’ man” or “kobold werepanther ranger/sorcerer raised by goliaths”.

I will admit to failing one portion of the challenge, though I also admit no wrongdoing in that failure. See, one of the points of the challenge is to visit other blogs. The managing blog put it pretty well on day G:

One of the best things about the Challenge is meeting new people and finding cool blogs that are super-interesting. However, the only way people will know you’ve visited is if you leave comments on their blogs. That not only says that we’ve dropped in, but that we were engaged enough to introduce ourselves.

I tried to do this, I promise, but every time I tried to leave a comment something technical got in the way. One blog banned all comments from anybody who wasn’t signed into a Google account. Another pretended to let me comment, but when I tried to submit my comment it took me to a separate login page and erased what I had written. I’m not sure a technology designed to foster communication is doing its job if it limits that communication only to a subset of the audience. I ended up following a few blogs for the entire challenge, but I specifically want to give a shoutout to Fuzzy’s Dicecapades; it has a lot of interesting things to say that merit discussion, but its commenting system means I am in no danger of saying so on each post.

I also didn’t want to get into the habit of commenting along the lines of “yep, this post sure was a post”. I feel like if I’m not contributing to the discussion I don’t need to assert my presence in it. It’s why this blog doesn’t have many posts about updates on my campaigns or their settings unless they pertain to some greater conversation about gaming (or I just want to show off my swank Zelda maps), and why every post in April had to involve something about how the character made me an angrier a better DM. If there’s no advice in my comments I’m doing a pretty poor job of representing an advice blog, and if there’s no actual commentary then what’s the point?

Accordingly, if you made a comment here this month (or ever, really) just to say “my keyboard works, here is a link to my blog” and you’re wondering why it didn’t get approved, there you go.

I’m already trying to figure out whether I’m going to do this next year and, if so, what I’ll talk about. I thought about covering the most fun NPCs and villains I’ve run, but that feels like a month of patting myself on the back for being amazing. Another option is to spend each day telling a story about some monster in my campaigns. I know I have stories about a xorn, a zombie, a qlippoth, an umber hulk, and a jyoti, so that’s half the battle right there. Apparently the other half will be wrestling my auto-spellcheck into submission.

What I definitely won’t do is another month of characters in my campaigns. Even though I enjoyed it, I only had one options for F, H, N, O, Q, U, X, Y, and I’m not planning on asking my players to run characters only in the disused section of the alphabet. Since my next two campaigns are going to use mostly characters from earlier campaigns, I just won’t be able to get the volume I need.