A neighbor was showing my wife photos on her phone. Somewhere in the scroll, she swiped past a picture of their husband hunched over a D&D sourcebook. The neighbor didn’t slow down. Just waved her hand and said, sorry, that’s just him doing his nerd stuff.
My wife said: oh, Sean loves that nerd stuff.
That conversation — is how I ended up playing Curse of Strahd for three years.
The hobby I didn’t have
For a long time, when someone asked me what my hobbies were, I felt a little embarrassed. I didn’t have a real answer. I had things I did, but nothing I’d call a thing.
Then I fell into Critical Role.
Campaign 2, specifically. Which is the best campaign, and I will not be taking questions. I came in knowing nothing about D&D — I didn’t even know the dice had that many sides — and got hooked watching a group of friends craft a story together. Hooked bad.
I’m not embarrassed to say I cried during episode 22 (those who know, know).
Here’s something I say as a joke but is genuinely true: the average Critical Role episode runs about four hours. The average campaign is around 130 episodes. I’ve watched all of them… Imagine all the things I could have done with that time.
Let’s choose not to think about it.
But watching a thing is not the same as doing a thing. And, I might have stayed a watcher forever if it hadn’t been for a photo on the phone; a casual dismissal became an accidental referral. Within a few weeks there was a group of neighborhood dads sitting around a table, telling a story with their dice. A DM among us willing to run it. Strahd waiting in his castle.
We played that campaign for three years.
What this blog is for
I want to say something about this blog, because I think I owe it some honesty.
I started it for the wrong reasons. Some version of: this will make me more employable, this will attract attention, this is the thing that finds me the next thing. That’s why it never got off the ground.
I know what this is now.
It’s a recount of time at the table. The stories we’re telling — the characters we’re playing, the worlds we’re walked through.
There’ll be other stuff here too — I’m a dad, I think about that a lot, I can’t help it. But, at least for the time being, D&D is the spine of this. The reason it exists.
Cheers to the Nerd Stuff!