Kick A Buck: Saving Throw Over At Kickstarter!

There’s less than twenty four hours left on this project over at Kickstarter.

I only just became aware of it, but it sounds like a pretty cool project -a TableTop/Mythbusters style webseries for familiarizing people with tabletop roleplaying games.

I played RPG’s for about five or six years and it gave me a solid foundation in storytelling that I really believe helped me out as a professional writer. Elements from my gaming days have wended their way into my stories and novels. The seeds of a few of the stories in my Merkabah Rider series were planted in a weird western PBEM I ran using the HERO system (in which a friend, now a World Fantasy Award nominated novelist, was a player), and  most recently, a lightsaber gimmick I came up with in a session of West End Games’ Star Wars Roleplaying game when I was about eighteen or nineteen made it into the pages of Star Wars Insider via my story Hammer.  Roleplaying foments creativity.

I hear a lot of my friends talk about how D&D was looked down upon where they came from and so they never experienced it (but they wish they had), and a good many of them say they’re too old to learn it now, or still don’t know where to start.

Additionally, there is something of a leaning in worldwide geekdom toward non or mildly interactive gaming, something I kinda find troubling when it comes to my own children and the children they interact with. I love my Xbox, but the anonymity of online gaming can be isolating and a bit troubling sometimes. I really think that nothing compares to the thrill of face to face RPG’ing. It’s a healthy, fun way to pass the time, and if you’ll pardon while I wax lyrical a bit, I believe it links us directly to the far flung past of our furthest ancestors, who probably crouched around a fire as the light danced on their painted cave walls, and they entertained each other with dynamic, evolutionary make-believe.

So unplug a bit, and help take some of the ‘video’ out of gaming, and kick these guys a buck. They’re already making it happen. Help make it even better.

-Hasta pronto!