I have just been watching
The Big Bang Theory, a ''new'' episode, I mean a new episode here in the UK, set during Christmastime, titled
The Santa Simulation.The gang played
Dungeons & Dragons, which is of course my favourite game, but also a game my brothers and I now
play during the Christmas season, because it is the only time in the year when we can play now. Because of this, and
for other reasons too, I associate D&Dr with winter. That said, we used to play all year round. We started our current campaign in August 1992. For a while, we played nearly every weekend. There were of course pauses, sometimes we stopped for weeks and even a few months, but we overall we played regularly.
Which brings me to playing the game in springtime. It was generally a quieter period than autumn and winter, the big playing time periods. It was also in a way quieter than summer, which yes was holiday time and with people away, but we had the few rainy days (sometimes not so few) and plenty of evenings. And in August, when people were back from holidays, everybody wanted to play to forget about the upcoming school year. But spring was different, we had ran a few adventures and
PJ, who was and is still our Dungeon Master, needed time to prepare new ones. We were all running out of steam and imagination. I used to call this the ''between adventures times''. It was a time when our characters were mainly going from point A to B (in my case, as I was a ranger, from the city dwelling when often adventures ended to the nearest forest), buying new equipment and gems to light ourselves of the money we had, overall being fairly inactive. Sure, there were a few combats here and there: some players were impatient to get XP and more treasures, and the road from A to B was often a dangerous one. There were even a time when two characters cleared a whole dungeon from its monsters to turn it into their hideout. PJ used this time to flesh out the world and introduce elements of its history that would be the roots of future campaigns. So it was not a waste of time.
One word about the picture I uploaded to accompany this post. it is again from
Larry Elmore. It does not look much like springtime on it, but I could not find anything really seasonal that both fitted and that I loved. There are plenty of pictures that are autumnal and wintery though. I like this one and it could fit for nearly every season. You see two adventurers being lured in a trap by a thief, while a werewolf is waiting for them. It appears to be a werewolf anyway, I have seen in a D&Dr card that it was a
werebear, but it does not look like a bear, and besides werebears are good and certainly not treacherous like this lycanthrope. So yes, I thought this picture could illustrate my experience of playing
Dungeons & Dragons in springtime.
