What this blog is about
There is a lot of great RPG advice out there: blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts. I consume a lot of it - perhaps to an unhealthy degree! But it makes me happy, and I enjoy thinking about all the cool ideas people have come up with When I find something really good I like to save it, sometimes with a summary for myself. I also enjoy sharing these gems with other people when they ask a question (I love to be able to say "you know, there's a great blog post about that..."). When I've made these kinds of posts on the Sly Flourish Discord, I got a lot of "you should make this a blog post." I've resisted for a while (it felt like I was too busy for a blog), but I finally decided to give it a try if I can keep things simple and easy. I am going to try to keep to a mantra of Stick with "Good Enough".
My plan is to just take some of the things I'm already sharing on the Discord, and cross post them here. I want to avoid the trope of a blog that is nothing but posts apologizing for not posting more, and also not take on more than I can really handle. So no promises - you get what you get! I'm going to try to get some momentum with a few posts right away (spinning my legs Wile E Coyote style), and to give people a sense of the kinds of things I'm hoping to share. We'll see what kind of cadence I can manage going forward.
So Who Is This Scipio Guy?
I played D&D as a kid and into college, but then fell away as life got busy. I started dipping back into it listening to actual play podcasts (e.g. Acq Inc and The Adventure Zone), then started watching some YouTube videos (e.g. Matt Colville and Sly Flourish). When COVID started and we all got stuck in our homes, I decided to starting running D&D for my oldest kid and some family friends to try to keep some social connection. I had a blast, and soon reached out to some old college friends to start a game. I also ran a bunch of games for both my kids and their friends; as well as my brother, sister in law and my nieces. I hang out on several RPG Discords - primarily the Sly Flourish, Mastering Dungeons and Tome Show servers. RPG Discords are great - you should join one! It is really valuable to bounce ideas off of other people, share your excitement about your game, and see what cool things other people are up to. Most importantly - with a lot of ups and downs in life I find the community and friendship to be really valuable.
In my day job I am a business professor, so I'm also really interested in the business side of RPGs. You might have come across a few things I do related to that. Whenever the Hasbro quarterly earnings come out, I dig into the financials to try to estimate what D&D's revenue might be. Shawn and Teos often use that as part of their news coverage on Mastering Dungeons. Teos wrote up a description of the approach at the bottom of this post. I've also done some analysis of Kickstarter campaigns, particularly the high end "whale tiers" as two guest posts on my friend Patchwork Paladin's blog: Kickstarter Whales and Kickstarter Whales 2: The Whales' Tail