Obsessions, Old and New
I am officially addicted to a thread on the Wizards of the Coast message board.
The thread in question is in the "Mature Topics" section of their D&D boards and it called Pippa's Slavemarket. It's not as bad as it sounds, although I suppose it depends on your viewpoint. It's a role-play thread where people bring in their D&D characters to talk and interact with other characters. Explaining it like that it sounds dull, but I have a blast. I've cheated a little and brought in a "D&D-ized" version of my original RP character, Tal'ya. For the purposes of the board she is a young adult gold dragon with a few levels in monk. Tal'ya is about 90% my personality. She hates conflict and never fights unless directly attacked. She is a complete bleeding heart and hates to see people suffer. She is refined yet still playful. She pretty much loves everybody. She is great to have there to balance out the general chaos created by other characters. Tal'ya has also fallen in love with another character, a mage by the name of Zousha. It's all very romantic and a lot of fun and it's not the only long-running storyline in the thread. We have a recurring villain in the form of a fallen paladin of Bahamut (who doesn't like me too much, as you can imagine. Bahamut is the god of good-aligned dragons.). I post late into the night on this board, having loads of fun writing interesting dialogue and describing character action. I generally don't do much other than hit the refresh button every couple minutes hoping for more. I stumble out of bed in morning (ok, usually afternoon -.-) and go right to the thread to see what has happened.
I do read other threads on the board though, and run into Zousha lot. It's amazing the volume of his posts, and most are detailed and well-thought out. I think I may have fallen in love with him a little in real life. What can I say? Proper English turns me on a little. He's also nice and highly intelligent. Major points for those too. I also found out he has Asperger's on a thread discussing the symptoms of autism (of which Asperger's is a mild form). One of the hallmarks, apparently, is the difficulty to understand other people's emotions, or empathy.
I thought about this a little and realized how I, in stark contrast, am HIGHLY empathic. I often truly feel like I am experience others' emotions. I tried to find out more info about psychic empathy to find out whether I could find out if I am what people would call an empath, but there wasn't much solid info. However, while searching, and thinking about disorders like autism, I remembered something else...
I think I have discalculia, which is basically the numerical form of dyslexia. I've suspected this since high school when I ran into an article that mentioned it in my CosmoGirl magazine. So I did some quick searching around tonight and found a forum for people with the disorder. It was eerie and astounding to read some of the posts there, because I kept thinking, "Yes!" and "I do that too!" and "OMG Yes!" and "HOLY ****!" as I read. It's almost vindicating. I'm now more sure of it than I was in high school. Not that it changes much. Apparently testing is expensive and since the disorder isn't officially recognized as a disability, it won't help me one iota to gain employment. It would be nice to know for sure, though.
Back on the subject of D&D, though, I have officially volunteered to run the game on Fridays. Mitch (the OTHER Mitch, not my Mitch) told us last week he was moving to Oregon. So, I'm going to run an episodic campaign based on the manga Descendants of Darkness. Why? Because I've been dying to stat out Muraki and use him to taunt the party members. There will be more to the campaign than that, of course. Muraki is just a fun device. I'm going to try to more or less copy each storyline and turn it into an adventure. I do have to tweak some things, obviously, to suit a fantasy campaign, but it helps a lot to have so many plot hook ideas right in front of me. Also, it will be a true test of my DMing skills as I will finally be running a game for several experienced players. My Saturday game, however, is a wash. I am going to attempt to end it in about two or three sessions. It's just hard to keep it up when my players are so unreliable (sorry Pam). I do want to see it through to completion though. It's been a fun campaign.
The thread in question is in the "Mature Topics" section of their D&D boards and it called Pippa's Slavemarket. It's not as bad as it sounds, although I suppose it depends on your viewpoint. It's a role-play thread where people bring in their D&D characters to talk and interact with other characters. Explaining it like that it sounds dull, but I have a blast. I've cheated a little and brought in a "D&D-ized" version of my original RP character, Tal'ya. For the purposes of the board she is a young adult gold dragon with a few levels in monk. Tal'ya is about 90% my personality. She hates conflict and never fights unless directly attacked. She is a complete bleeding heart and hates to see people suffer. She is refined yet still playful. She pretty much loves everybody. She is great to have there to balance out the general chaos created by other characters. Tal'ya has also fallen in love with another character, a mage by the name of Zousha. It's all very romantic and a lot of fun and it's not the only long-running storyline in the thread. We have a recurring villain in the form of a fallen paladin of Bahamut (who doesn't like me too much, as you can imagine. Bahamut is the god of good-aligned dragons.). I post late into the night on this board, having loads of fun writing interesting dialogue and describing character action. I generally don't do much other than hit the refresh button every couple minutes hoping for more. I stumble out of bed in morning (ok, usually afternoon -.-) and go right to the thread to see what has happened.
I do read other threads on the board though, and run into Zousha lot. It's amazing the volume of his posts, and most are detailed and well-thought out. I think I may have fallen in love with him a little in real life. What can I say? Proper English turns me on a little. He's also nice and highly intelligent. Major points for those too. I also found out he has Asperger's on a thread discussing the symptoms of autism (of which Asperger's is a mild form). One of the hallmarks, apparently, is the difficulty to understand other people's emotions, or empathy.
I thought about this a little and realized how I, in stark contrast, am HIGHLY empathic. I often truly feel like I am experience others' emotions. I tried to find out more info about psychic empathy to find out whether I could find out if I am what people would call an empath, but there wasn't much solid info. However, while searching, and thinking about disorders like autism, I remembered something else...
I think I have discalculia, which is basically the numerical form of dyslexia. I've suspected this since high school when I ran into an article that mentioned it in my CosmoGirl magazine. So I did some quick searching around tonight and found a forum for people with the disorder. It was eerie and astounding to read some of the posts there, because I kept thinking, "Yes!" and "I do that too!" and "OMG Yes!" and "HOLY ****!" as I read. It's almost vindicating. I'm now more sure of it than I was in high school. Not that it changes much. Apparently testing is expensive and since the disorder isn't officially recognized as a disability, it won't help me one iota to gain employment. It would be nice to know for sure, though.
Back on the subject of D&D, though, I have officially volunteered to run the game on Fridays. Mitch (the OTHER Mitch, not my Mitch) told us last week he was moving to Oregon. So, I'm going to run an episodic campaign based on the manga Descendants of Darkness. Why? Because I've been dying to stat out Muraki and use him to taunt the party members. There will be more to the campaign than that, of course. Muraki is just a fun device. I'm going to try to more or less copy each storyline and turn it into an adventure. I do have to tweak some things, obviously, to suit a fantasy campaign, but it helps a lot to have so many plot hook ideas right in front of me. Also, it will be a true test of my DMing skills as I will finally be running a game for several experienced players. My Saturday game, however, is a wash. I am going to attempt to end it in about two or three sessions. It's just hard to keep it up when my players are so unreliable (sorry Pam). I do want to see it through to completion though. It's been a fun campaign.