About
(Updated September 3, 2009.)
I'm Carl Cravens, and I'm a lot of things.
I'm a regular guy...
I'm a early-forty-something husband, and father to a nine-year-old boy (who started roleplaying a couple years ago and started playing and DMing D&D 4e this year). I'm a software developer by trade. I'm just like a whole lot of other computer and gaming geeks out there, except that I married a gal I met online in 1986, on a computer bulletin board, which she ran, devoted to play-by-email RPGs... the great-grandfather of the internet-based phoenyx.net. We've been happily married for over fifteen years.
I've been roleplaying since the seventh grade... over two-thirds of my life. My play style is rules-light, character-driven, and story-oriented, but I'm constantly exploring what roleplaying is and means to me. That's a lot of what my blog is about... exploring roleplaying.
I don't like the highly Narrativistic approach that takes the player out of the character's head and makes him more of a storyteller than anything else. I think of roleplaying in terms of creating a story, but the player's part is primarily to experience their character's story, not tell it.
I used to primarily play my own concoction of Fudge, and was a primary player in the Fudge community. I've abandoned that community and Fudge itself more or less, and lately I've been playing D&D 4E, of all things.
...and would-be game writer...
I've only got a couple minor publishing credits with Grey Ghost Games, and a few articles on RPGNet and Fudge Factor magazine. I keep trying to write more... editing Fudge Factor got in the way for quite awhile, and D&D really isn't encouraging me to write a whole lot.
- "The Gramarye," a magic system for the roleplaying game Fudge, published in
A Magical Medley and now available online (link above). - "Just Fudge It", an article about playing with minimal rules,
published in the Fudge RPG, 10th Anniversary Edition. - "Department 13" a mini-setting based loosely on a mash-up of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and SciFi Channel's Invisible Man.
...who runs too many projects...
- I'm the organizer of the Wichita Roleplayers, a face-to-face roleplaying "club". Trying to get the local scene fired up is more of a chore than I expected it to be.
- And another project or two that I'm not quite ready to talk about here. But I've withdrawn from the Fudge community and am focusing my creativity in other directions.
...and still tries to find time to game.
I'm a gamer who hasn't gotten to game much in the past few years because of getting a bachelor's degree, having a kid, getting a second bachelors degree, and having trouble putting together a group of people. I was gaming regularly for awhile, but my gaming group fell apart in December of 2007 and somehow all of 2007 has slipped by with my playing a couple one-shot games. This paragraph used to start with, "I'm a dedicated gamer," but I realized I must not be all that dedicated when there wasn't really anything standing in the way of gaming except petty excuses.
In 2008, D&D 4E came out, and volunteering to run Keep on the Shadowfell turned into a long-term game. I lost players to new babies and job moves, and we didn't play for most of 2009 so far, but I've found new players and we've just (mid-August) started planning a new campaign.