Well hello there, I didn’t see you come in, well, anyway, welcome to my post.

..And a fair warning, there is some incredibly nerdy content ahead.

Hobbies, everyone has them, everyone loves their respective hobby and I think that is a beautiful thing. Me? Well my hobbies vary a bit, including cooking, gaming, and watching movies. A hobby I recently picked up again is possibly one of the most exciting hobbies I have thought about in a while. It is the magical world of… (Insert drum roll here.) Tabletop Roleplaying. Primarily Dungeons and Dragons. If you have no idea what I am talking about,let me explain.

Tabletop roleplaying is a social game wherein players go through a world created by the game master, another person in the group who controls the comings and goings of all the NPC’s (Non player characters) in this world that they have created, Some worlds are pre generated by use of adventure packs and others are created straight out of the Game Masters imagination, drawing from a bevy of influences that they are subject to every day through more traditional media. Depending on the game, but in a more general sense I am going to be using Dungeons and Dragons as my source for all the information I am about to lay down on you.

Everything in the world is decided by way of a dice roll, with some of the weirdest dice around, d20, d12, d8, gone are the days of only a 6 sided dice. Everything from combat to social interactions in the game are decided by these dice rolls, often given a difficulty of let's say a minimum of 12 on a d20 roll, The player has to roll a 12 or higher to get the result they were after. Game sessions can last for upwards of 2 hours and people have had campaigns running for decades already, spanning many characters and stories. A campaign is a collection of adventures all intertwined into an overarching narrative in the world you have created. Now that we have that out of the way, Let me tell you why I enjoy this so much and why this is one of my greatest hobbies at the moment, even though I have yet to play my first session.

The aforementioned dice

I consider myself a storyteller of sorts, I feel like I have the capacity to create something with depth and gravitas, so when I started thinking about roleplay again, I tried to get a group together to play some sessions, but alas… There was nobody willing to be the Game Master. So I thought I would bite the bullet and do what I need to do to play this game with my friends, I became the thing I didn’t think I was able to do until I actually donned my GM pants and started to go to work, and I am loving every second of it! Being able to create a world for my players to explore, writing a story that is enthralling and captivating, I knew from the minute I started, that I loved this.

I remember the first time we played, we tried a Warhammer 40k tabletop rpg by the name of Dark Heresy, where nobody knew what they were doing, only once we started a new game a couple months after that, did I realise how much fun it could be to be a character in this world, I played a veteran assassin from a war planet and I had some sort of PTSD that I had to roleplay, creating some truly memorable scenarios, like completely flipping out on an NPC over a tattoo they had and derailing the entire campaign by pulling my entire team down a shute chasing this basically generic character that got a little bit unlucky because of the roll of the die.

Tabletop RPG's have always been a staple of nerd culture, and over the last few years, It has become more and more acceptable across YouTube and Twitch to broadcast and showcase this wonderful hobby and, let's be honest here, a way of life for some. With more and more new RPG's being released and updated all the time, there is an RPG out there for everybody, Mousegaurd for example, is based off of the comic book of the same name and your character is a mouse, Shadowrun is a near future, fantasy game that has elements of magic, technology and fantasy elements in a cool cyberpunk setting. Any genre, you name it and there might be something for you.

You never know, maybe you will enjoy it and you can add another notch to your nerd belt. What? You don’t have a belt with all your nerdcomplishments? It’s just me? Oh well then. Nevermind.

I guess to end off this blog, I would just like to say that hobbies are great and everyone should really make time in their days to fulfil them, it is highly cathartic and if you love doing what you do, then carry on.

What are your hobbies? What do you do for fun? Please feel free to tell me in the comments, I would love to read about them, and feel free to follow me @thatguyjono for more nerdy escapades. I will be posting more about this amazing passion of mine from now on.

I hope you enjoyed. And as always, stay awesome.

All pictures are from google images.