Barbaric Psychedelic one-year union

One of my first major video play projects for this site was an extravagant foray into Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition, using a focused playset I’d built in face-to-face play a couple of years before that. I called it “Barbaric Psychedelic Cosmic Cataclysmic Fore Ee,” and you can see the sheet I made for it attached below.

In time, I developed some specific scenario and vortex (dungeon) building techniques for it, and if I were inclined, the whole thing is now a pretty good start at publishable work.

The players were Gordon, James, and Ross, and recently, James contacted the rest of us to say hello. From there, we scheduled a get-together to look back and think a bit about what we’d done and how it went. That’s what I’m presenting here.

Some of the questions we addressed were pretty focused rules thoughts, such as the hybrid class mechanics which I’d required or whether the items rules had missed an opportunity. Others were more general like whether we were “playing D&D” at all, and whether either a “yes” or a “no” to that question was a feature or a bug.

I think a discussion like this is a good thing, perhaps even something I’ll seek as an ongoing personal policy. Teaching at the university level for 25 years showed me indisputably that one-time evaluations or assessments of an experience held at or near the end of it are not sufficient for their purpose, and arguably harmful to it if treated as a final word. A later assessment, well after separation from the experience and subject now to however it relates to life since then, is absolutely required to understand what the experience was and what one makes of it.

Part 1 of last week’s reunion discussion is embedded below, and at long last, I have discovered how to make a playlist flow through via viewing! So all five parts continue from there.

The original play posts are found, in order, at Barbaric Psychedelic Cosmic Cataclysmic Fore Ee,ย  BPCC 4E continues!, Crystal psychic revelation + slimy explosive mayhem, Dungeon is as dungeon does, The door, Say “syzygy” three times fast, Kumbayah oh no, and Hop skip jump scribbles. The videos aren’t too badly edited, and I worked hard on the titling and accompanying images, but I did not yet have the video chops to make them into shorter segments, so each is a whomping too-much block of viewing time. The material is good enough, I think, to be re-edited into a new presentation some day.

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