After weeks of planning, the day has arrived.
I played my first Dungeons & Dragons game today. It sounds incredibly weird to say out loud because it absolutely IS weird in the best possible way! With the help of some wonderful friends, including Ash who is also part of the EMC course this year (I will link their website in the future), a ragtag group of explorers set off on their first adventure: accompanying a really sketchy merchant group's caravan to another town for 20 silver total. Really glorious stuff, obviously, but a hero's journey can't always start with fighting the big bad guys. Sometimes you have to hit some angry wolves with sticks to get by until you improve and have less of a chance to die in one hit.
What does this mean for my research? A ton, actually. I've realized that like most things, personal experience adds so much to my initial understandings of RPGs. Seeing my friends transform into characters like I had never seen them before was slightly jarring at first, but it made me realize how important it was to understand that part of how RPGs function (not just the creation but the portrayal as well). I'm hoping to be able to get a lot more experience in the future, honestly! Maybe at some point I'll record a section of a future session and analyze it for an assignment.
I've also decided to set up a schedule for my journal posts from now on. Unless there is something I find incredibly important to update on fast, I will be posting journals every Wednesday like I did last year. It's an easy way for me to stay on schedule and break up the mid-week grind with something much more fun.
Until then!
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