DB

When it comes to games and other types of things, there are tiny lies that I tell that make me seem better or more prepared than I really am. I sometimes do this by saying things like, “let me find my notes”, and “let me look this up”. I believe it may be a remnant of a habit that I picked up from another DM, who I will not name because I do not support them for personal reasons, but who relied on “looking up their notes” for lore, items, or other sorts of things.

This ties in a bit to the idea that making things up on the spot is lowly in comparison to making things up before the session. Sometimes, I really am looking up notes because I know that I wrote something, and I want to honor that creation. Sometimes, it is because I want the world to feel real, even though I am still the person making up those facets of the world that the characters and players learn about. I think specifically, when it comes to names, I word it like that a lot. “Let me find their name”, is literally that. I don’t have a name for them, but I think that in world, they would have a name. An NPC may follow certain types of naming conventions, of which I want to be able to follow–whether the names are based around a certain real-world culture, or if they’re generated from some of the useful name generators found on fantasynamegenerators.com, which include naming conventions for fictional cultures and heritages, like goblins, orcs, or elves.

I think that the language that I choose when I am finding something via generator is similar to the language that I use when I am looking something up from my notes. I think that’s because when I use a generator, it is not that I am making something new in the spot. It is because in my head, this person does have a name, but I as the GM and very human person do not know it. That being said, the character would know their name, their friends and family would know their name, and their name would follow a certain set of rules. It is similar to the idea of…”I don’t know, but I can find out”, sort of thing. For certain things in my world and in my games, I understand the logic of how things should work and how they should be named and whatnot. It’s just that it may take me a while to find out for my players. These are the things that require looking at notes and looking at generators–I already have the framework in place, and I just have to confirm my suspicions and generate something in that area, whatever it may be.

It’s sort of like procedural generation. While I don’t have the consistency and logic of written down rules, I do have some rules in my head about how the world should work. And when I run into something that falls into the “hey, you have rules about this” sort of thing, that is when I refer to lookups, generation, and notes. They are the things that are softly planned, but not explicitly planned.

So yeah, I maintain an illusion of competency in that way.

This was originally supposed to talk about how I schedule my writing, because I enjoy talking about how things occur behind the scenes, but here we are. I talked about another thing. I will still talk about my writing and how I maintain a consistent schedule, but honestly it didn’t feel long enough for a post.

I write a bunch of articles ahead of time (in June 2023, I wrote about 4 articles back to back!), and I schedule them for a weekly release. A weekly release feels like something that I can feasibly do. If I am actually writing week to week, it is sustainable. And when it comes to feeling…motivated about something and feeling a burst of creative energy, being able to write in advance for a few articles is nice.

Speaking of creative bursts and energy, I will get into that in next week with a little book review! I have been reading quite a bit of non-fiction this year, including a bunch of self-help books whose advice I will have to figure out how to integrate in my life. But, Effortless is one of those books that is so distilled of ideas that I think it is truly great! I’ll talk about a few of the concepts that I like in another post.

Anyway, that’s me. Making things up in a way that sounds like I had them prepared, and my writing schedule. Bye bye for now!