A Thesis Statement - How Dragons Shaped my Adulthood

This has been one of those serendipitous weeks as I've encountered numerous references to the playing of Dungeons and Dragons. References to playing D&D were made on Colbert and @ Midnight, and on Steam I contemplated and took advantage of a heavy discount on the software app, RPGMaker VX Ace. Yes, I bought an app which will allow me to build 2D dungeons using a pretty comprehensive set of tools. I know it's a little retro, but when I tried out the demo I was very impressed with the ease of use that's engineered into this system. It reminded me of a couple different programs I've used in my career, Filemaker Pro and Drupal, database systems that are user-friendly on the surface that do not sacrifice the ability to create sophisticated solutions. I've spent countless hours learning each of these systems, mastering the interfaces and digging underneath to gain full mastery and the ability to shape these systems to produce my vision. I've had limited opportunities to do this kind of thing for fun; the last thing that even comes close is the football leagues and stats I tracked years ago when I played Sierra's Front Page Sports Football. Viewing the demo for RPGMaker and seeing the underlying database structure, I recognized that I had been presented a gift, a new quest in which I could learn a new system and create worlds like the ones that I had once drawn on grid paper.

This blog is an attempt to hold me accountable to learning RPGMaker as well as provide an opportunity to reflect on how fighting virtual dragons while sitting at a card table in the basement of my best friend's home helped prepare me for adulthood.

[Note on the photo: I still have my D&D dice, both the original which I purchased from Royal Hobby in Rockford, IL, in April, '79, along with the finer quality dice which I purchased a year later as I found myself immersed in the D&D world. My dice are stored in a unique box donated by one of my fellow D&Ders, Denvis Lasley. There were many tales spun about the Dude, but I think its origins are derived from a tie clasp Denvis had received from one of his relatives. I should note our Dude existed long before Lebowski.]