My hobby, your hobby and gatekeeping...

This post, or variants on it, are really getting old fast. But since the audience for this blog largely isn't intended to be the one for my wargames blog or podcast? here we go again.

The image on the right, and its associated product, seem to have stirred a wide range of reactions among the RPG hobby. If you've been living under a rock for the last while, it's a supplement for the Critical Role world.

I will unashamedly confess, I'm a #critter. Critical Role is largely responsible for reminding me what a fun hobby RPGs are, and in addition, for demonstrating that, for me at least, D&D 5E was well worth checking out. I'm also an old school DM with (until I got rid of it in the early 2000s) about 4 shelf feet of 1st and 2nd Edition books and scenarios, and a sprawling homebrew campaign that ran for a decade or more across four different parties including play by email (before a long break). Heck, in my day you didn't stream your D&D session: you wrote it up for Usenet (thank goodness my writing's improved since!). That makes those of us who posted our session-by-session write-ups to rec.games.frp.archives the Critical Role of the era. (Yes, this is a joke, get over it :D)

Look. Just stop it, ok? No-one's asking you to like it. No-one's making you buy it. It does not diminish the hobby. For goodness' sake, it's the top selling book on Amazon [Other retailers are available. Support your Friendly Local Gaming Store.] It's bringing people into the hobby.

What? It's not your hobby?

OK. Here's the thing. The hobby is bigger than you. And: trust me on this from experience with being chairman of a wargames club, and with some of my current players who started out as Critters... it does not matter in the slightest what brings people in to the hobby, be it CR, some old D&D setting WOTC haven't republished yet, OSR or whatever for RPGs, whether it's Bolt Action, Warhammer 40K or X-Wing for wargames... We have three new members at our club this week, who want to platy Warhammer Fantasy. Personally? It's not my bag. At all. But we're not going to turn them away! Enough people down the club play it they won't lack for opponents, and there's enough other games going on around them to capture their interest in other things. We have people who joined us three years ago to just play Warmachine who've since built English Civil War and WW2 armies...

If you think your bit of the hobby is better than what brought someone else in? Great. Prove it. Show them by your example. Introduce them to your passion.

But don't belittle theirs. Waving a knobbly stick and yelling 'Get off my lawn"? Really not a good look on you.

Review: Feed Me Games

If you've been around Twitter or the right parts of Facebook or other social media, you will have noticed mention of a new gaming site - Feed Me Games.

Essentially, it aims to pull together games of all kinds (roleplayers, wargamers, boardgamers) onto one social media site, free from spam, harassment and general idiocy. Since I fit all three of the first categories (and hopefully none of the second three :D), I signed up - you can find me there, predictably enough, as TroubleAtTheMill.

What do I think?

Mostly, I think it suffers from not having hit critical mass yet - starting this kind of thing is always difficult, as without enough people interacting, it won't take off. Witness Google+, which, with a much less laudable and focussed aim and a much bigger company behind it, never really took off, and ditto Google Wave (which I think was criminally underused and absolutely brilliant, and I wish Google had kept it going, but that's by the by). Traffic is slowly ramping up - my D&D 5E discussion group is acquiring a half dozen or so members a day.

It's kind of a bit of everything - it looks and feels as if it's derived from Facebook, with a front page news feed of all your interesting stuff, plus groups, personal blogs, messages and events - and ads, which might make it the one social media site on which I wouldn't bitch about ads, because they're actually relevant. It's not perfect, and I think jaytee and his partner are well aware of that - there are always going to be teething problems (trust me, I'm a web developer) with a site like this - but what there is for the most part clean, pretty robust, properly secure and usable.

I know there's already plenty of places for us gamers to be social - Twitter, Facebook, Blogger etc. I'm loath to move lock stock and barrel to  FMG (hell, I'm damn proud of my page view count here!), but I do think it has the potential to be a good home for discussions, and for cross-pollination between the various strands of the gaming hobby. I certainly intend to give it my support, and I'd like to encourage folks reading this to do so as well: if enough of us do, it has the potential to be a really good place.

[Note: this is going to be one of the very few posts I cross-post verbatim to Trouble At T'Mill]