Wow. Experience. What a loaded word.
Are we talking about experience points? Game experience? Play experience? Player experience? Or what it means to build experience over time, as a gamer, a DM, a creator?
All of it, really, I guess.
I have been posting my Witches of Appendix N to tap into the experiences of the creators and first players of the D&D game, while also incorporating my own experiences and influences.
But today I want to focus on the experience of exploring different games, and what we carry with us when we return to the familiar.
Recently, D&D influencer Ginny Di did a great video talking about what she loved about Daggerheart, and what she planned to steal for her own games. And while she didn’t name names, we all know she meant D&D. And you know what? She’s absolutely right.
The best games we play change how we think. They expand the toolkit. They remind us there are other ways to do party dynamics, relationships, mechanical choices, and storytelling rhythms. And even if we come back to the same rules we’ve always loved, we bring something new with us.
For me, this has been a theme lately. I’ve spent a lot of time working on my Witches of Appendix N project, not just reading the stories that inspired the first generation of D&D creators, but trying to feel what they felt. What was it like to play this weird little fantasy game in 1974? What shaped it? What inspired it?
But I’m not Gary Gygax. I’m not Dave Arneson. I’m not sitting in a basement in Lake Geneva trying to rework Chainmail into a fantasy skirmish. My Appendix N isn’t just swords and dragons and pulp novels. It’s Dark Shadows reruns on PBS. It’s D-grade horror movies from the ’70s. It’s weird occult books I wasn’t supposed to be reading. It’s Led Zeppelin and Iron Maiden album covers (I am listening to “Number of the Beast” as I write this) and pages from Fangoria, Starlog, and Heavy Metal taped into a spiral notebook.
Those are my experiences. And they show up in every spell I write, every monster I stat out, every setting I dream up. No matter how “old-school” I go, it’s always filtered through who I am, what I’ve seen, and what I love.
And I think that’s true for every one of us.
We all bring our own experience to the table, our own flavor, our own influences, our own emotional palette. That’s what makes the hobby so weird and beautiful and impossible to define.
So yes, learn new systems. Try new styles. Borrow shamelessly. Steal structure from Daggerheart, emotional mechanics from Monsterhearts or Blue Rose, pacing from Call of Cthulhu, drama from Star Wars, or epic deeds from Wasted Lands. Fold it all back into your game.
Because your game, your world, should reflect your experience.
And if you do it right?
It becomes an experience someone else will never forget.
Questions
What. Confident. Lesson. What lesson am I the most confident in? I would ahve to say the math lessons I built in my games with my kids. It was great fun.
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