Yeah, about that …
So I’ve been gaming a lot more of late, but not as one might expect from how this blog has been / used to be.
I have left the City of Heroes
Don’t cry for me, Paragon City …
The Homecoming revival of CoH is a marvel. It scratched an itch I’d been suffering from since the original game shut down.
And then, one day, the itch had been scratched.
A couple of things happened:
First, the dev team made a bunch of “improvements” to the transport system. In particular, they dropped the ability to teleport directly to bases from anywhere, which put a serious crimp in getting about Paragon. True, they added some extra bits, and that base teleport was always flagged as an “oops, we didn’t mean this to be publicly available,” and they added in some other ways to get around as well as improvements in travel powers …
But I decided I really didn’t want to re-memorize how to get from Point A to Point B.
Again, that’s all on me; the devs are doing what they think is best for the game. Just not my cuppa.
Second, I realized that I was spending a lot of time playing CoH. More than I wanted to be, and at the sacrifice of other things I wanted to be doing. (We’re not talking “City of Heroes almost ruined my marriage” stuff here. I’m talking about other hobbies and pastimes.)
So, I quit. Cold turkey. That was back last fall (I think the Halloween event was going on), and I really haven’t looked back since, except to worry about when my account will be archived and my hero names all backup for sale. And feeling like I should go in and take a final inventory of my created heroes for future storytelling.
We’ll see. Some day.
I’ve been doing a lot more TTRPG
The Tabletop RPG world has conceded that “RPG” points now to a lot more online games than tabletop ones, so “TTRPG” has become the New Label.
Anyway, I’d been doing a certain amount of that before for a while — and when COVID-19 hit, my main gaming group was already on Roll20 and able to continue on without a hiccup.
Since then, not only has that continued, but I’ve spun into an additional group that, after some earlier play, I’ve started GMing, playing honest-to-God D&D 5e. So there’s that, too. Lots of material to share.
So what’s up with this blog?
I’ve been a utter and total slug on this blog. But, then, my “normal” blog has been far more quiet than I’d like, too. I’ve been doing most of my social media on Twitter, and been pretty negligent in getting that content into a form I have ownership of.
I think I’d like to change that, at least with the Blog of Heroes (baby steps). So I’m going to try and make this blog a bit more about all my gaming. I’ve already changed the subtag from “Dave Does the MMORPG” to “Dave Does the Game”. I want to do more talking about all the games I play — mostly on the RPG side of things, but also reports from our weekend Game Days and the tabletop games going on there, and talk about D&D 5e and other systems I’ve been playing.
That’s my intent, anyway.
The other thing I’m doing is shuttering the @BlogOfHeroes Twitter account. I don’t expect I’ll have so much traffic out of here that I need to maintain a separate Twitter account for it. It does mean people following my gaming stuff will perforce read my various ravings over politics, society, and geek culture, but I Contain Multitudes, and keeping them separate is kind of a PitA.