A Whole Lot of Silence and Trousers: Intro

46 hours into Dragon Age Inquisition, I ran into a bug, which blocked me off from something that I very much wanted, though something whose lack would not prevent me from finishing the game.  I thought about whether I should delete or just finish the game with the hand I was dealt, and after much consideration, chose to delete.  Then I tried starting a new character and realized the depth of my folly.  Did I want to reroll the same character and try again to do what I'd done before to the point I had reached, in hopes that the content I wanted would not be glitched away from me?  Did I want to start a new character and try something new and different, and leave the old one to its fate?

I still have no idea.  So what I have decided to do instead is kick the can on it, and start over from the very beginning.

Short version for those who savvy not the video game - DAI is the third in a series of fantasy RPGs set in a place called Thedas (The Dragon Age Setting - see what they did there), where in the first one, you get to save the unfashionable southeast corner from destruction, in the first-and-a-half one, you get to faff about in the countryside and fail to make friends, in the actual second one you get to faff about marking time in a city designed by head cases, and in the third, you get to branch out to more fashionable parts of the setting and probably save the world.

There's more to it than that.  Hours more.  And I am going to blog it, through three (maybe 4) characters, and who the hell knows how many hours.  Because winter, and because I need to make myself write somehow, and this the kind of thing all the cool kids do these days.

Now folks have been here before me. Mark Oshiro blogged his playthrough of Dragon Age Origins, hour by hour, for one example I can find really easily on the internets.  What will I do that's different from all those who came before?  Hell if I know, but I have a couple of ideas.

First thing, I'm going to be looking at this through the eyes of a tabletop game designer, looking to make a tabletop version of the setting that I would want to run and darkpaisley would want to play (I'm aware that Green Ronin made [2/3 of] one for me, and we'll talk about that in greater detail sometime, why I don't want to use it or anything else I have seen commercially available).

Second thing, I'm going to be looking at this through storytelling eyes.  I'll be looking at the tropes and tricks and things that go in my run.

Third, I will liberal all over the games, at times, but not all the time.  I will also apprentice-ally and nerd-culture on it as those things pop up.  I'll try to be up-front about my biases and put up content guides at the top.

In the interest of being up-front about my biases, I have played Dragon Age Origins to completion once, with its expansion pack Dragon Age Awakening.  I've played Dragon Age 2 to completion once with Legacy and Mark of the Assassin in there somewhere.  I've watched Darkpaisley play a lot.

Well, we shall see.