Hi!
My name is Adam Seats, but if you're here you probably already knew that! And no, I haven't learned a way to make a better opening post on a blog since the days of Xanga and Myspace, thanks for asking.
I am a firm believer in the One True Path of "Shut The Fuck Up Unless What You Have To Say Is Important Or Interesting." For quite some time, what I've had to say has been neither! Recently, however, starting just about the time we all got locked in our homes to defend against the plague, I began doing D&D adventure writing for more than just hobby reasons, and in 2022 the project I worked on with my friend Jake won an ENnie. I went out to GenCon, fumbled through an acceptance speech, lost my shit from Matthew Lillard giving me a high-five, and most importantly, had my eyes opened to the wide world of TTRPGs beyond the confines of Dungeons and/or Dragons, which had made up my life almost exclusively to that point. In fact I would say aside from a very brief stint with Rolemaster 1e with the local grognards at my FLGS, D&D 3.5 and 5e were probably the only TTRPGs I played for the better part of a decade. That was my life - reading the Order of the Stick webcomic, chatting on the forums on that site, doing CharOp, and then...then it was GenCon 2022, and I suddenly had my eyes opened to what things could be.
Writing One Night Strahd with Jake was probably one of the most important things I've done in my life, and I say that even knowing that truly One Night Strahd was Jake's baby - I just gave the baby some clothes and made sure it didn't walk into traffic. I learned so much about the art of CREATING a game through that project, and when I saw what the world could be beyond the confines of D&D, I set out to learn what I could. I have not stopped learning. Sometimes I return to the old wisdoms, to see what yet remains to be mined from the depths of old D&D modules. More often lately I have turned my eyes to the OSR/NSR crowd, and most recently (at time of writing this) to the wretched and (a)lonely lands of solo RPGs. Every time I discover a new community of players and how they approach gaming I am fascinated to see how these little ecosystems grow and how new thoughts form - and I'm just as interested in the internet archaeology of discovering old communities that I missed by being locked to the Giant in the Playground forums and seeing how they've influenced gaming in the modern day.
And so that brings us back to my One True Path: I don't want to talk about things unless they are important or interesting because a LOT has been said about games by people who are much smarter and more talented than myself - and that's not negative self-talk, I mean that seriously: there are some brilliant game designers out there right now that I truly admire. But a thing that I think is both important AND interesting that I don't see explored is how you get people like I used to be - people who just get stuck playing one game system for their whole life unless something shocks them out of it. People who decide that the one system they learn is their silver bullet, the one they'll use to tell every kind of story, people with no curiosity or drive to explore beyond what they know.
Personally, I find that kind of approach to games boring now - I feel that there is something to be learned from every game, even if it's just the ability to do critical analysis about why you do or don't like something. But more than that, I am fascinated by the interconnections between games - why one person thought one mechanic might be better than another, or how two people use the same set of design principles in vastly different ways. I don't think there is one system that can do everything. And so, for want of a silver bullet, I continue to learn - and I hope you'll come on this journey with me.
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