Dear Twitter, I love D&DNext

Dear Twitter,

Hello, my name is Jerry and I like to talk about things, mostly games. I’m often very hyperbolic when speaking about D&D and other topics that I’m passionate about, especially when using Twitter. It’s just the way I am and I don’t really have a good explanation for it. So this is an open letter to anyone who might actually take me seriously when reading my twitter feed.

You see, during Gencon this year I believe I was actually mistaken by a few people for hating D&DNext, or to be more specific – its keynote. I’d like to address a few things:

• If I wasn’t already a huge fan of D&D, I wouldn’t have taken an impromptu walk through the pouring rain to go to a D&D related function. Especially not to just hate on it and score a free poster.
• I’m somewhat of an aversion for the Forgotten Realms, it’s just not really my cup of tea. I don’t think it’s a bad setting, in fact I think Ed Greenwood is a mad genius and I’ve read at least a few good FR novels. Most of my friends are FR fans and we don’t have any shouting matches about it either. Anyway, it’s just not my thing. And yes, it’s okay to not like things. The FR content in the keynote was just so elongated. I understand with something as delicate as the golden setting of D&D you need to treat it with care or you’ll upset the fans especially if you leave them with too many questions. It just felt very vague in a lot of places, and I know that myself (and others) wanted to hear more news actually about D&DNext, and not about the next cataclysmic event in a campaign world a lot of us don’t actually run our games in – at least not verbatim.
• I love to hear about the artwork of D&D, despite what you might have thought when I wrote about it a week or so ago. and I liked seeing samples of it up on those big screens on grand display. I also love smoke machines and heavy metal. It was a pretty cool event, a lot more fanfare than most of us nerds ever get. If I didn’t make this clear before, consider me doing that right now.
• I made a remark about the little upcoming FR novel video montage being a sausage fest because I thought that Erin M. Evans was left out for no good reason. Turns out she was kind enough to shoot me a twitter reply the next day and explain that she was there via telephone because she’d just had a baby. Foot, meet mouth. Oh I see you two have met before.
• Ed Greenwood was reading from a teleprompter and having an absolute blast with it, I can’t blame the guy. He should do voice overs for movie trailers.

Anyway, I’m not sure what to do here. After much debate I’ve decided to attempt to take a more serious approach to tweeting about these things. I’ve been accused of attempting to “silence” people who “oppose” D&DNext, and conversely accused of secretly despising the game (which I eagerly play on a weekly basis) that I love. It’s obvious that personality doesn’t come out well in tweets, nor does sarcasm or elation, so I’ll be doing my best to keep it all reigned in. I’d like to be taken seriously in this “industry” we have here and I’m never going to pull that off by actually being myself in a limited character, text-based medium like Twitter.

Speaking of which, if you tweeted me during the con and we didn’t get a chance to meet up please, please don’t take it personally. I was running on about 8 hours of sleep for the first 2, almost 3 days. If you waved at me and I seemed oblivious, it’s because I am pretty oblivious at times so please next time grab me and say hey. I know “I know you from twitter” is an awkward intro, but hey, almost every intro at gencon is awkward, we’re nerds! Sometimes I don’t have the best thing to say after an introduction, I need some warm up time or preparation which isn’t always a thing that happens. So yeah, I promise I’m not nearly as big of a dickhead as you might think I am so just come say hey or shoot me an email and we can exchange phone #’s before the con. I’m rambling now so let’s wrap this up.

For what it’s worth, my blog has always been 95% hyperbole free, so I hope you can at least rely on these pages here to get a good gauge of how I feel about these topics. Anyway, thanks for reading, and thanks for putting up with my shit. I’ve got an actual blog post lined up for tomorrow, so I’ll see you then!