Spent all of yesterday doing my taxes, so I'm taking a bit of a day for myself. Apologies. Hope to post something later this week.
For the curious: our volleyball season is over. We lost in the semi-final to a very good team that received some very questionable line-judging calls from the parent/volunteer. By my count we won the first set 25-21 (rather than lost 21-25), and if that's judged differently, we go to a third set with our strongest players and a good chance to win. Maybe. They were still a very good team.
And you can call it sour grapes, but we did go to the championship on Sunday (by "we" I mean myself and half the team), and watched a game with neutral (i.e. official league ref) line judges and watched them play extremely mediocre and get beat in straight sets. To a team that (I think) we also could have handled.
Ah, well...it is what it is. We had a very good, very successful season with a group of kids (most of whom were new to the sport) who had a great time. Losing is a part of sport...a valuable part, as it helps build resilience. You don't die from a loss: you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and move on to the next challenge, hopefully taking a moment to glance over your shoulder at the road you just navigated for the length of the season (12 weeks for us, and a lot of victories under the belt). There's even some discussion about a couple/few of our players moving into club volleyball. Diego's one of them...though he intends to see how his soccer try-outs go first.
Volleyball. Such fun.
And good for the boys. Been listening to Steven Bartlett's Diary of a CEO podcast lately and I found this one with Logan Ury and Scott Galloway was really thought provoking. While it doesn't address Dungeons & Dragons or the place of fantasy RPGs in the scheme of the declining demographic of young males, it made me consider what could be the benefit of such groups (something that has been broached before by others in our community). Noisms definitely had a point with the importance of male role-models to young men...and yet, I'm NOT a humongous fan of "all dude gaming groups," finding it pretty neat/useful to have people of different genders playing/operating together in a cooperative fashion that lets all sides see others' strength and value to the collective. For me, growing up playing D&D with young women was immensely helpful...and yet, I also had the benefit of many male role models in my life (my father was around till I was seventeen, and I had male teachers, male coaches, male Scout masters, etc.). There are plenty of boys...including those I grew up with...who didn't have the same luxury. And that sad state of affairs is, it seems, becoming more common not less.
Mm. Just something I'm thinking about this week, as my own "young man" (who is now taller than his mother) is gearing up for high school. Probably I should just keep coaching.
Funny observation from coaching both boys and girls sports teams: with regard to boys, the main issue is keeping them disciplined and focused; for girls, the main issue is stoking their "competitive fire." Doesn't mean there aren't boys who are disciplined (like Diego) or girls who are fiery competitors (like Sofia), I'm just talking about "general trends." But you know what? I think one of the things that has helped BOTH my kids in this regard is the game of Dungeons & Dragons: playing D&D has forced Diego to reign back his more reckless impulses and had forced Sofia to step up and be more assertive. Yet another great reason to encourage your kids to play D&D from an early age!
*ahem*
The last thing I'll mention is that I am, indeed, working on some D&Dish stuff; ending vball, getting the taxes filed, and getting through all D's high school enrollment stuff means I suddenly have some extra "free" time. Today, I've been going through a LOT of old stuff that's been lingering in open windows on Ye Old laptop...adventures I'm writing and whatnot...and I came across this old (I mean old) post that any fan of T1 or The Temple of Elemental Evil might enjoy perusing. It's not the blog post itself, but the discussion in the comments (spearheaded by the once prolific scottsz) that is worth the read. This kind of discussion...minus all the Greyhawk-ian "lore"...is the kind of thought process I go through these days when I'm rewriting/repurposing a Hickman adventure module. Not that they don't "function" (well...) adequately for an evening's D&D entertainment. But it's possible to do a deeper dive and dig into the "why" of a thing such that it translates into stronger world building in your campaign.
Which is a VERY GOOD thing. For me, anyway. Because I'm not into superficial ("cheap") thrills when it comes to my game. Oh, it doesn't matter to me that such information will probably NEVER matter to anyone besides myself (certainly not the players!)...it helps me understand and grasp how the adventure works and how it fits with everything else going on in my game world. Which gives a comprehension of my campaign world such that I can answer any insipid questions the players come up with in a reasoned and meaningful way. Which makes me a better Dungeon Master. Hard to be a Dungeon Master if you can't even 'master' your own world.
ANYway...good post, good discussion. I'm not a Greyhawk dude, but between that, Joe Bloch, and Trent (whose new book you should take a look at if you're interested in 1E adventure material) I feel like I might want to do something with ToEE. And I have a pretty good idea what (although let me get through these other three projects first!).
Also, it may be time to revisit cosmology in my AD&D game. That should be the subject of my next blog post. When I have the time.
; )
From reading your news it seems like you made a good call to do your taxes before the free service was chopped. Do all citizens have to do their own taxes? In the UK most of us do it directly through our employers (PAYE) though because I run my own company I have to do mine myself - actually through my company accountant who chips in the service as part of their wider fee.
ReplyDeleteThe male role model one is pertinent for me too. Netflix drama "Adolescence" has been a big thing in the UK, verging on a bit of a moral panic. The high school has been strong on promoting anti-misogynisitc attitudes. I'm definitely more participatory and openly emotional with my son than my dad was with me but I'm still worrying more about my masculinity than I ever think he did. My boy's just turned 14yo and he's 5'7", plooky, and gangly, but has a very strong group of friends who are all in the firm needs camp. Despite that nerdiness they all get on well with girls in a way that I never managed until my 20s, in that they can relate to them as other people rather than something to shag/marry/avoid. I tend to think that most of this boils down to treating others as you would like to be treated - "do unto others..." and "that what you do to the least of my brothers..." and that masculinity and femininity misses out our common humanity.
Gaming-wise I'm at a place where I'm wanting to play rather than DM. My ambitions are a bit of Bushido and Pendragon, both games founded on very specific chivalrous, masculine notions!
I do love the Pendragon game as a concept...but I, too, would want to play it, rather than run it. And with smaller, more obscure RPGs, finding a GM (let alone a "good" GM) is always the tricky bit.
DeleteIt's definitely possible to have a "healthy masculinity" without being misogynistic. People of our (yours and my) generation have our own hang-ups based on the time in which we were raised (as did our fathers before us), but we can teach our own sons differently...more than just "doing unto others" but treating each other as fellow human beings (and accepting our own limitations as such).
In the U.S. we all file our own federal returns (unless we pay accountant to do it for us), but it's generally pretty easy. Mine's a little more complex due to my "side hustle" (selling D&D books), but it takes a chunk of time.
[ha! I say it's "pretty easy," but I also think AD&D is pretty easy...others may beg to differ]