13 October 2006

Worldwide D&D Gaming Day 2006

The Worldwide D&D Gaming Day will be held on the 4th of November 2006. Sadly i missed it last year, but not this year, this year i'll even be a hosting DM.
First you may wonder what's a D&D?
It's a fantasy tabletop Role-Playing Game (RPG for it's friends), if you don't know what that is, check the link, but let me tell you this, it's not a kinky sex game and it does not involve computers.
Dungeons & Dragons (aka D&D) was actually the first of it's kind, it created an entire format, there was no such thing as an RPG before D&D.
Before you start to get all "oh these geeks!" attitude, consider what an RPG actually is for a moment, it's a game where you play a role, not any pre-ordained role but YOUR role, YOUR choice, YOUR imagination, and you do this with a group of people. I would say that that is the most important thing about any RPG, it's social-creativity unleashed and brought to another level. You don't have to like dragons or faeries, there is an enormous host of genres to choose from, heck you can even make your own, the possibilities are endless, you just need a bunch of folks and rules (it is a game and as such it should have rules, if you don't want even that then you can LARP).
The Worldwide D&D Gaming Day will be a celebration of this specific game, whether you like or not D&D is the daddy of the entire format, and it's been played for 32 years, the only goal in the celebration is to actually get people to play the game in that day.
Remember this is an RPG and as such creativity is encouraged, in case you don't want to do it your way there will be venues which will host the event with all the materials required to play the game, whether you play every week, never played it before, or only played it like 10 years ago. Everyone is welcome!
You can check out a list of the hosting venues here, Portugal has 5 venues this year.
I mentioned above that i would be DMing a table. Let me explain this, most RPGs have 2 types of participants in the game, the players and the Game Masters or GMs. They are the ones who "organize" and "arbitrate" the game. In D&D a GM is called a Dungeon Master (DM for short). We call the act of being a DM or GM, DMing or GMing (yes we're lazy so we reduce everything to letters).
Now i haven't DMed in a long time...
I have this notion i was not bad, although i actually traumatized a guy (sorry T.) and kept killing everybody off (Not my fault, it has been proven!). So for the safety of future parties (a party is a group of players) and the sake of not traumatizing any more players i've stayed off the ropes (this is a lie, DMing is hard work and requires a lot of reading and preparing, and i'm already piling up my TBR as it is).
Now with all of these terms and confusions you think this is a very confusing sport, not really, anyone can play D&D with bare knowledge, the party and the DM will help you, remember social game! The main goal is to have fun, to create a new world, to have adventures (this is what those folks who did the movie forgot).
Anyway, on the 4th of November 2006 i will be playing D&D!
Where will you be?

No comments:

Post a Comment