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Our First Overnight Trip
I wish our first trip away from home was for leisure, but it was not. We had some work on the house that meant we had to stay away for two nights. As such, we booked two nights at the hotel about a mile away and prepared ourselves for traveling with children.
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GMing Without… Anything
Recently, I proudly wrote about trying to run an analog campaign. After years of adding more and more digital tools, I dropped all of that for paper. I thought that restriction was good enough. However, last week, surprise constraints pushed me even further. On the day of my weekly game, I took my car in […]
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The Ever-Changing Parenting Routines
The first few weeks of having a newborn were wild. Previously, I had gradually been moving my life to more routines and habits, and all of those instantly disappeared. My daughter’s schedule became my schedule, and she had no schedule–only needs to be addressed. Fortunately, things settled in surprisingly quickly. I occasionally skim through the […]
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How to Start Without Session Zero
Common advice on the internet about starting a campaign is to hold a Session Zero. Rather than starting with the game itself, GMs instead are told to first gather information and set expectations about what will happen in the rest of the campaign. In principle, it sounds like a good idea. A playgroup can get […]
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Should I “Old Enough!” My Toddler?
I promise I have more thoughts on parenting than just watching TV and movies, but Old Enough! is a big enough that I have to stay topical. Old Enough! has apparently been on Japanese TV for awhile, but it just made a big splash on Netflix a few weeks ago. Children go on errands all […]
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GMing Without Devices
When I was running games for my adult friends, I didn’t worry about phones or laptops at the table. Sure, they checked social media and texts during most sessions, but they were mostly attentive, and I didn’t want to be “that GM” with them. However, when I started this campaign with teens, I wanted to […]
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3 Stages of Watching Family Movies
Like many others, I grew up on Disney movies. My family had an extensive collection of VHS tapes, from Snow White & the Seven Dwarves to The Lion King. And when we weren’t watching the movies themselves, we also had the singalong tapes to annoy my parents. My sisters and I loved those movies as […]
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The Minimum Acceptable Session Length
D&D takes a long time. Movies are around two hours long. MLB has been shortening baseball games because three hours was too long. The average commute (during the before times of 2019) was about a half-hour. And yet, when you ask people about their weekly games, it sounds like sessions commonly go on for around […]