EDIT: new post

content/posts/Agency, Ego, and Enjoyment Rethinking My Role in RPGs/index.md

@@ -20,19 +20,19 @@ You might think that this experience with roleplaying games is what started my l
 
 Before I started becoming a DM and playing the game for real, I also took part in play-by-post game on Discord around 2015-2016. This is, what I feel, my first actual experience with the hobby. We played 5e, but very much in the background. We were basically roleplaying in a text chat, while the DM would roll things in private for when we made attacks or attempts for various things. We never saw any rolls, we just roleplayed. Whether this is really 5e or not, who is to say. There were two parts to this online game, one was where I played a goblin that joined in mid-campaign, and the other was where I played a sorcerer (I think?) that kind of went out of hand.
 
-The goblin part of that game was fun, I vividly remember killing a giant spider and taking a tooth to use as a new knife, but other than that I cannot really remember that much about that mini campaign either. The other part of that game was less so, early on I once again was forced to become the face of the party, and I was presented with the illusion of a choice. I say ‘illusion’ because the DM was expecting me to take the *obvious* choice (to them). This did not sit well with me and the DM and the rest of the group, since I chose the more interesting choice for me. Eventually this group also fell apart after some arguments, and I did not play for a while after that.
+The goblin part of that game was fun, I vividly remember killing a giant spider and taking a tooth to use as a new knife, but other than that I cannot really remember that much about that mini campaign either. The other part of that game was less so, early on I once again was forced to become the face of the party, and I was presented with the illusion of a choice. I say 'illusion' because the DM was expecting me to take the *obvious* choice (to them). This did not sit well with me and the DM and the rest of the group, since I chose the more interesting choice for me. Eventually this group also fell apart after some arguments, and I did not play for a while after that.
 
 *Thinking back, those first few sessions have not affected me in the present time as much, even if it is my first few experiences with the hobby. As a nod to this small part of my experience, I made my first character in Baldur’s Gate 3 a cleric to Selûne as well. The other two games are interesting to me, since it is actually the first time I had a negative experience with this hobby that stemmed from not setting expectations from the start. Something that will come up later in life as well.*
 
 ![Zephyr, my first BG3 character](img/zephyrbg3.jpg "Zephyr, my first BG3 character, it was a ton of fun playing this game with you three. It might not be a tabletop roleplaying game but it is still a game dear to my heart.")
 
 ## Session 1: Inspiration
 
-We arrive in December 2018, when I started my own campaign. I had been watching Critical Role for a little while and thought to myself: “Why not play this game with my high school friends?” What followed was a yearlong campaign which I will remember fondly as one of the most fun experiences I have ever had with friends. We called our group ‘Dungeons and Lads,’ and I tried to tell what I thought was an interesting fantasy story taking place in my first homebrew world.
+We arrive in December 2018, when I started my own campaign. I had been watching Critical Role for a little while and thought to myself: “Why not play this game with my high school friends?” What followed was a yearlong campaign which I will remember fondly as one of the most fun experiences I have ever had with friends. We called our group 'Dungeons and Lads,' and I tried to tell what I thought was an interesting fantasy story taking place in my first homebrew world.
 
 ![My first ever world map](img/first%20map.jpg "My first ever world map, made in Wonderdraft. While this definitely is not my best work, it is fun in its own right.")
 
-Was the game I ran good? **Hell no.** I just started being a DM playing with 7+ players, the story was kind of dumb and overambitious, and our combats were extremely unbalanced at times. I also kept adding more homebrew features because they sounded cool. This just went on and on for months until they got TPK’ed, and that campaign ended after we all decided that would be best for us all. The most important part of this though?
+Was the game I ran good? **Hell no.** I just started being a DM playing with 7+ players, the story was kind of dumb and overambitious, and our combats were extremely unbalanced at times. I also kept adding more homebrew features because they sounded cool. This just went on and on for months until they got TPK'ed, and that campaign ended after we all decided that would be best for us all. The most important part of this though?
 
 ***I had fun with my friends.***
 
@@ -66,7 +66,7 @@ I had run a short campaign with another group of online friends that sort of fel
 
 ![Lyridia & Orpheios](img/lyridia&orpheios.png "Lyridia & Orpheios, one of a set of maps I made for my currently worked on world. For the record, these are floating continents in the sky, if that was not obvious. It is probably my best map out of all the ones I have made. I made this one back in 2022 and I still want to change some things about it. But I just love how this looks; it really evokes the fantasy world feeling that I want to emulate.")
 
-Being frustrated with a lot of extra work me and my DM friends had to put in to make 5e work the way we wanted it to; we tried out Pathfinder 2nd Edition. A quite different take on the tabletop roleplaying game, a take I am still not entirely sure I find myself agreeing with. Its focus on combat and tactical gameplay in my experience seems to slightly take away from other aspects of the roleplaying game. This might just be an isolated incident but it is something I have personally noticed outside of this game as well. We played the short introductory adventure to get an idea of how the system worked and then jumped into a yearlong campaign for Abomination Vaults, which was a bunch of fun most of the time. I started off playing an elf swashbuckler, who died, and then played a half-orc barbarian. Sidenote: Barbarians in Pathfinder 2nd edition are extremely fun. It feels good when your normal hits do as much damage as someone else’s' critical hit. Of course there is some friction with the structure of adventure, plus a relatively new DM, plus a new system, a lot of stuff that went *sort of* well, which lead to the overall experience maybe not being as we all expected and wanted. However, our DM did an excellent job running the adventure, it was a fun experience. Only thing I personally missed was a bit of roleplay inside of the game. Around halfway through there was a general shift in play dynamic where we were more focused on beating the adventure and maximizing our combat potential, and not telling a story together. This is partially a product of the structure of the adventure, since it is a megadungeon combatfest 99% of the time. Still fun, just in a different way.
+Being frustrated with a lot of extra work me and my DM friends had to put in to make 5e work the way we wanted it to; we tried out Pathfinder 2nd Edition. A quite different take on the tabletop roleplaying game, a take I am still not entirely sure I find myself agreeing with. Its focus on combat and tactical gameplay in my experience seems to slightly take away from other aspects of the roleplaying game. This might just be an isolated incident but it is something I have personally noticed outside of this game as well. We played the short introductory adventure to get an idea of how the system worked and then jumped into a yearlong campaign for Abomination Vaults, which was a bunch of fun most of the time. I started off playing an elf swashbuckler, who died, and then played a half-orc barbarian. Sidenote: Barbarians in Pathfinder 2nd edition are extremely fun. It feels good when your normal hits do as much damage as someone else's critical hit. Of course there is some friction with the structure of adventure, plus a relatively new DM, plus a new system, a lot of stuff that went *sort of* well, which lead to the overall experience maybe not being as we all expected and wanted. However, our DM did an excellent job running the adventure, it was a fun experience. Only thing I personally missed was a bit of roleplay inside of the game. Around halfway through there was a general shift in play dynamic where we were more focused on beating the adventure and maximizing our combat potential, and not telling a story together. This is partially a product of the structure of the adventure and the way it was interpreted, megadungeon that heavily focuses on combat. Still fun, just in a different way.
 
 ![Arcraig styling on a devil](img/arcraig.png "Arcraig, played by a friend of mine, shield styling on a devil inside the Abomination Vaults, my character Drogath, the half-orc barbarian, burning in the background after killing a big bone devil. This is the most beautiful piece of art that came out of this Pathfinder campaign.")