You may have gathered from the last few months entries or lack there of that somethings been going on with The Dice Bag.

Without boring you guys with to many personal details between health issues and finishing up work after Christmas I’ve had absolutely no time or opportunity to write. I’ve got so many posts half written or or game content part designed and no chance to finish them. In the new year I have a couple of businesses to set up and hopefully I’ll be going back to university later in the year so something has to give. That basically means in the short term my time is going to be spent on getting money in my pocket and giving these businesses the best start I can give them.

Hopefully once they are up and running I’ll have the time to get this place back on track and maybe even improve it a little. If your that desperate I’ll still be around on twitter on either the @thedicebag account or @bobzilla and I’ll occasionally be updating my personal blog with well..personal things like how I’m doing or how well the businesses are going. Until that day however this is Bob at The Dice Bag signing out.

Wish me luck!

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It’s been a while but this months blogging carnival which is being hosted by The Bone Scroll hit me like a carrot on a stick. After Viri Cordova had to pull out of hosting it at the last minute The Bonemaster stepped in to keep it going.

This month we’re looking back at a previous carnival hosted by unclebear where we commented on our resolutions for the year. This isn’t something I normally do so I took a different slant on things and talked about how I thought the year would go both for myself and for everyone else in the RPG Bloggers network.

ChrisL AK @ Flickr

So to cut to the quick I have to say that I failed but you guys took the ball and ran with it. From a personal view point almost everything I touched and took part in has remained unfinished and in some case have been forgotten about. I signed up for the RPGBN collaborative campaign setting which seems to have died a death. I had to pull out of helping start up Nevermet Press and my contributions to Geek Dad have dried up as well.

I could lay blame on a lot of things but it comes down to two very significant events in my year. In April I was diagnosed as dyslexic and despite feeling good about finally understanding my failings and realising I wasn’t as stupid as I usually felt I was at the back of my mind it’s became the new excuse. It’s my go to answer for not being able to do anything. It really isn’t an excuse but I’m only just beginning to come to terms with what it means and after fighting with my work for the last 8 months to get help has mostly fallen on deaf ears I’m now taking voluntary redundancy in order to start a business up and look into returning to university later in 2010. I’ve lived for 33 years without knowing I was dyslexic and managed to get by so why should that knowledge change matters now.

The second event was the birth of my daughter. I just didn’t have the time for writing and gaming in 2009. She’s great but only now am I able to do anything other than look after her and her brothers and sisters. We had so many worries with her sister that even the slightest cough or illness gave us sleepless nights.

So why, I hear you ask, does this have anything to do with gaming and blogging? Well my involvement with the groups I pulled out of and my Geek Dad articles were aimed at pushing people towards others great work. I managed to help out a little bit but nowhere near as much as I’d liked to have.

Nevermet Press has had a hugely successful year and with the upcoming work they are about to release I can only wish them even more success especially as I can’t be as involved as I’d like to be.

The RPG Bloggers Network has grown that huge in such a short period of time that they now have the writers of the games we play joining us in our blogging ways.

The RPG Circus podcast has taken off and has found many followers as well and wouldn’t have worked without collaboration between the bloggers involved.

There were many more collaborations this year that ended well and it didn’t just have an impact in our blogging field. The building of grassroots following of games helped launch new systems and places like GenCon managed to see just what can be done when gamers and writers from across the world can do when they get together.

I may not have been involved directly with most of these success stories but I like to think that indirectly I helped out in any way I could.

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Very recently I found that a group of folk from my office take time out once a week to run a game in our canteen over lunch. They don’t run in my social circles so I’ve never really talked to them or managed to work out what system they actually use. Apart from dice they only other things they have on the table are their lunch and their character sheets. The DM must run a system simple enough to play from memory.

ANYWAY… Today I overheard possibly the funniest encounter I’ve overheard in a long while. They are playing what appear to be vampires in a modern day setting that sounds more like True Blood than WOD Vampire.

One of the players was following someone into a kwikimart style shop but didn’t want anyone to know he was there so turned into a shadow and followed the next customer in through the sliding doors. I missed what actually happened as the canteen queue had moved by this point but on the way back I could see the player was getting very frustrated.

by akuban @ Flickr

Whilst the player was in the shop the lights went out and everyone ran out the front door leaving the vampire standing in the middle of the shop. With his target gone he went to leave as well only to find the automatic sliding doors wouldn’t open. At first he thought it was a powercut until he noticed the register was still working as were the overhead fans and air con. This was where his problems started.

He followed a belief system not far from The Masquerade and so he couldn’t use his powers in case someone noticed. He was quite happy that he wouldn’t show up on the CCTV cameras but he couldn’t force the door open. He jumped up and down on the door mat hoping to flick the switch to operate the door. He pushed over stacks of beer cans onto the mat hoping to trigger the same switch. It wasn’t until he lit his lighter to double check the lock on the door that it opened. He was going completely mental by this point.

I wonder just how many people that play vampires in roleplay games remember that in most systems they very rarely give off body heat and so infrared sensors will not work for them?

It made me laugh on a day that really needed it so I thought I’d share.

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