Dad sucks at video games

Today marks a slightly new direction for Raging Owlbear. I am adding a Twitch stream to my into my blogging alongside my YouTube videos. Tbis won't change the content of the blog that much. I'm still primarily interested in talking about D&D and other table-top RPGs, but I'm going to add some diversion on the side.

Tonight's steam is "Dad sucks at video games."  A stream for those of us likely to get sniped by a 12 year old just after spawning. 

Don't worry... It's not yet another Fortnight stream. I'm going to be looking at dungeon crawlers, adventure games, and classic CRPGs. It will be on-brand for the blog.

I got this idea after watching my 6 year old son master Zelda: Breath of the Wild. He was doing shield parries and flurry rushes... He was the first in our family to defeat Ganon. He doesn't even read! (I helped him with the quest text).

I'll be starting out with Minecraft Dungeons, which is a Diablo-like dungeon crawler, but with Minecraft aesthetics. I might occasionally just into classics or whatever strikes my fancy. 

But don't worry. Whatever it is, I'll be bad, so it will be good for a laugh or two. Come hang out in chat and we can talk role-playing games, video games, or whatever. Steaming at 10 PM Eastern on Mondays and Wednesdays.

Follow me here: https://twitch.tv/ragingowlbear/

Raging Owlbear tops 1 million views!

Just 6 years ago, I started a little experiment talking about old school gaming and the D&D Next play test that was to become D&D 5th Edition. In that time, my blog has seen some really explosive months where I was getting over 20,000 views on average, and some less than stellar months when I mostly ignored the blog leading to a slump in views from its highs.

However, in over 6 years of content, there are several posts that stand out. I have reviews of which I am proud that have consistently brought in thousands of views year over year. I have posted my share of unpopular opinion pieces for the internet to pillory, doled out sometimes questionable advice... but all in all, it's been a fun experience. 

Sadly, the loss of Google+ and the comments section upon which my blog relied really hurt the interactivity with the audience (all 9 of you)... but somehow I clawed my way up to 1 million page views and the blog stays steady at around 10,000 views a month even when I ignore it.

June was one of those ignoring months... and also the month where I topped the million view mark. 

My goal for the rest of 2020 is to get the juice going again. Perhaps I'll get to 2 million before I retire the blog. The way the world is, who knows what will be in store over the next few years. 

Stay safe and stay sane... and thanks for reading -- all 9 of you. Your fingers must be aching after clicking my posts 100,000 times each. If you're relatively new to the blog, I invite you to peruse some of my favorite articles.

See you again soon!

State of the Owlbear: 45 years of D&D

Happy 45th Birthday!

The state of the blog is strong!

Happy 45th Birthday to Dungeons & Dragons which was released at the end of January in 1974!

There are too many ways to recount how this game has made a direct and lasting impact on my life. I am forever grateful for Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson as well as all the designers who came after to ensure its legacy.

Unfortunately, Raging Owlbear experienced its own shut down in January. Google did not inform Blogger users that comments were being taken off the blogs as of February until just a few days before the take down. Many of us who thought we had until April to migrate Google+ comments were caught out.

I had already started migrating the comments when the threads were expunged, but I hadn't finished... and it's a laborious process to cut/paste 5 years of blogging which I'm still working on... so that happened...

Raging Owlbear - now with 400K resolution!

I am ridiculous... and yet so awesome.

To all 5 of my loyal readers, thanks for getting me to 400,000 views. Your index fingers must be completely swollen from all the clicks.

It took well over a year to get my first 100,000 and now I'm getting 100K in less than 4 months. I must really be pissing people off. ;)

Let's see if we can hit a half million before July.

Serious moment ahead:

There's a lot wrong out there right now. People are suffering. Some humans are treating others like their worth is less because they are from someplace other than "here" (wherever "here" is). Fear and prejudice are outweighing empathy and compassion, and as in countless centuries before this one, the poor and downtrodden are suffering at the hands of the wealthy and powerful.

D&D is our escape from these problems, but it should also serve as our guide.

Be the Lawful Good Paladin you are inside. No matter what your political lean, we can be better than this.  Volunteer in your community -- a church, a food bank, a civic group. Fight for those without political or economic power. Play games with people with whom you might not otherwise socialize. Embrace the other, even if you don't always understand, or see eye to eye. And judge not, lest you be judged.

“There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Thanks for reading!

State of the Owlbear 2016: 300K and counting

It's done -- 2016 is finally behind us and the bes--  well... something is yet to come.

Twenty Sixteen was a bit of a weird year for Raging Owlbear. Because life doesn't often let me do things I don't get paid for, I did not have as many posts to offer up this year as the year prior. I averaged less than 1 per week... and when I did post, it was sporadic, such as nothing for 2 to 3 weeks and then 3 articles in a row over a week and a half.

Despite the cave of neglect in which I left the owlbear, it kept raging on due to a few really popular posts that drove oddly high numbers.

Raging Owlbear - 2016 Ennie Nominee

This was a nice feather in my beak to hear about last week...

Raging Owlbear was nominated for an "Ennie" (vote for me) in the Best Blog category by the eminently gracious and delightfully charismatic (I must say) EnWorld judges. This would be all true, I'm certain, if I had ever met them.

This would be even more impressive if there were more than 5 submissions to the category, but alas, they do not report on those submissions (or rather, they do list submissions, but it's hard to easily tell the category from the list)... There appears to be at least 5 blogs, so I beat at least 1 person out... So suck it!  (just kidding).

Vote for me here -- select "1".

I have to say the submission list is quite a treat to browse. I mean, check out AdventureScents.com.

Wow. Talk about a niche product. But, holy f@#%... They have SIXTY different little potpourri packs to simulate your adventure locations. The are the freakin' Glade Plug-Ins of table top gaming.

I honestly don't what to think about that. Is there really a market for sixty different RPG-based scented packets? Your guess is as good as mine, but best of luck to them! I might just have to buy one now out of sheer curiosity.

Anyway, if you've ever read and enjoyed my blog, please vote for me. Even if you didn't enjoy it, vote anyway. It don't cost nuthin'.

State of the Blog 2016: 200K and counting

Beaky -- the new official unofficial mascot of Raging Owlbear

So 2016 has been a bit of a hard year for the blog. It'll be June tomorrow and I will have only posted 16 articles for the entire year so far... Life can sometimes be demanding in ways that kill my ability (or sometimes desire) to post frequently...

And yet, my page views are as high as ever.

I can't entirely explain this phenomena, except to say that, of the articles I have posted this year, a couple have been very well received and reshared (a good page view driver over the long term), a couple have been controversial (a good page view driver, but only over the short term) and a couple have spiked for reasons that just can't be explained other than "the interwebs are weird". I also have been lucky in that there are a few older articles that consistently drive decent numbers every day due to D&D related web searches, and I think that may be the one key thing that keeps my blog relevant.

Owlbear Days of Summer

The Owlbear posting frequency has been extremely slow of late, which somehow turned August into my best month ever.

The Raging Owlbear broke 10,500 views for the month of August. I had been flirting for months with 10K views per month, but had not officially topped it according to my blogger stats. That trend broke in August which is odd since that has been one of the worst months in my posting history.

It seems some of my more evergreen content is helping keep the readership high, so thanks for those of you visiting from time to time.

Hopefully, the dry spell of posts should end soon. I have moved into a new home in Maryland, so I should be getting back some of the occasional free time to comment on RPG-related news of the day.

Until then, thanks for reading.

Marty -- The Raging Owlbear

Owlbear Milestones and Project X

Owlbear Hits 100K

A classic AD&D illustration by Jeff Dee

Last week, sometime early in the July 4th morning, Raging Owlbear passed 100,000 page views. This was a very nice milestone for a rising sophomore blog. I had hoped to cross that point in the first year, but did not due to my own lackadaisical publishing schedule. August/September of 2014 and January/February of this year brought in poor numbers due to my lack of consistent posting.

This fall I'm hoping to better at that. July and August of this year may not fare much better as I am in the middle of a move back to my native Maryland. Fondness for southern Virginia (and the beaches) grew steadily over the years, but I sometimes felt like it wasn't quite home. It will be delightful to be near family again among the rolling hills of Maryland.

In other news...

Why We Love RPGs

+Charles Akins of Dyvers started a blog roll project (dubbed Project X) to get a bunch of bloggers to describe what we love about our favorite RPGs. Many of these have now hit blogs around the interwebs. I hope I'm not stepping on any "official" announcement by Charles, but others in the group are already linking to each other so... here are some links!

• Why Arcana Evolved Is Awesome
• Why I love Apocalypse World
• Blueholme
• Why I Love RPGS: C. J. Carella's WitchCraft RPG
• For the love of the D&D Rules Cyclopedia
• Why I Love Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons
• Why I Love Ethos RPG
• In Loving Memory: Everway
• Why I Love HeroQuest 2
• Remembered with Honour: Lace and Steel
• Why I Love RPGS: Moldvay Basic
• Not Loving Friend Computer is Treason - A PARANOIA Love Story
• Why I Love RuneQuest/D100/Basic Roleplaying

My Last GenCon

This will be the last Gen Con I will attend.

Earlier this year, I was ecstatic when my wife gifted me a trip to Gen Con 2015 (a pretty big deal since it will mean she's home alone with 2 toddlers and a 4 y.o.). I anxiously awaited badge registration, arranged flights well in advance and bought my badge on day 1 of registration.

But then, there was the housing fiasco. People were randomly assigned to a wait time in the queue between 0 to roughly 3 hours before they could register for housing, That's understandable. You can't process thousands upon thousands of room requests at once, so the only fair way is to let a limited number of people in at a time,

But that's not exactly what happened. Anyone who registered for their Gen Con badge the day the housing portal opened were immediately let into the housing portal regardless of the thousands of other attendees waiting in the queue who had already registered for their badges.

So that's a major foul up, but there are thousands of rooms in Downtown Indy so almost everyone should be able to get a good room, right?

Year of the Owlbear

Source: http://hicksvillecomics.com/1752

One year ago tomorrow, I published my first real article for Raging Owlbear which began my journey into the blogosphere in earnest.  Over the past year, I gained about 88 thousand page views from 75 posts, just shy of what I hoped would be a 100K freshman year, but still respectable in my mind. I have a few hundred Google+ followers and I've made a name (albeit a small one) for myself in the RPG blogging community. Not too bad for year one.

Blogging over the last 12 months has also improved my creativity. I'm thinking a lot more about game design, DMing, world building, and my writing has improved overall.

On the other hand, I've also had challenges. I've started several creative projects that are sitting at anywhere from 10% to 25% completed and obligated myself to others despite my already limited time to work on my own blog. It seems I want to do a lot more than what I realistically have time for.

For my one year resolution, I plan to get back to several of my half-started endeavors and complete at least half of them (trying to be realistic here).

I stumbled in my development of 1st Adventures when I discovered that many of my ideas had already been done, and done very well, by others. While I knew many of my ideas were probably not revolutionary, the more I dug into other OSR systems, the more I realized I didn't have as much new or different to offer as I initially thought. This was a bit of a blow to my creative juice. I've been thinking of new ways to approach this project to get it off the ground again.

Second, I want to get back to the D&D Primer. I still have some compelling ideas for a "newbie packet" that includes more than just my introductory example and character sheet.

Third, I want to keep the ball rolling on creating 5th Edition conversions of existing modules and I'm hoping to rope in some other popular bloggers to the table, so this becomes more of a community affair.

In addition, I'd like to keep writing about Dangerous Journeys to see what else I can discover about Gygax and his... uhmm... "creative" game design.

Lastly, there are at least 3 or 4 other half-baked ideas that I haven't mentioned on the blog. It'd be a personal feather in my cap if I could get at least one of them launched.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you stick around for another year. I think you'll see some more entertaining, compelling and useful articles coming out of the Owlbear for your gaming edification.

Marty -- The Raging Owlbear

State of the Owlbear Blog 2014

Source: http://hicksvillecomics.com/1752

It's been a good year. I started blogging back in May and my readership has really taken off thanks largely to a fantastic Google+ RPG community and a few key mentions by sites like ENworld (thanks +Russ Morrissey).

To take a page from +Charles Akins (http://dyverscampaign.blogspot.com/), I'm going to post my stats from Raging Owlbear and relate some things I appear to have done right and wrong.

Sometime during December 30th, I crossed 50,000 pageviews for the 8 months the blog was active. I'm not a huge fish in the rpg blog pond, but I think I've done pretty well for my freshman year.

Some general trends I observed:

1) Articles on industry news tended to do well. My opinion pieces about about D&D Basic and Codename: Morningstar announcements did fairly well even in the early days before I had many followers. I don't intend to be a rpg "news" blog, but it helps to keep on top of what was going on to stay relevant to the audience, given the high interest in D&D 5th Edition.

Month	Pageviews
May	1020
June	8729
July	6105
August	5393
September	3378
October	9814
November	8545
December	7306

2) Critique articles did well. I was fortunate that there was plenty of new product coming from Wizards to review and discuss.

3) When I post, it's better to promote the articles in phases to different G+ communities over the course of several days as opposed to spamming all the role-playing groups at once. People who may have missed the posts on one day might spot them on a different day. This also makes the blog turn views consistently rather than in spikes.

4) Regular posting is critical. Even if I can't post more than once a week, I need to post at least once each week, if not twice, to help keep readership growing.

September got very busy for me and the blog numbers took a dive. Though I posted 4 articles, one of them wasn't until the last day of the month, so did not contribute much to the totals. October went really well as I posted some very well received articles and had 2 things to promote each week on social media. I wasn't able to keep up the posting schedule in November, but the quality of the primer articles really helped keep the readership high.

5) I prefer long-form articles. Many bloggers will post very short 2 to 3 paragraph posts in order to post more often. My articles are a bit more magazine-like in scope. This often takes more effort on my part, and there is a danger that the "wall of text" effect may lose some readers. I may need to adjust my style to better fit my free time.

6) I don't make much in the way of advertising, but I did make about $25 this year in Amazon referrals (mostly from friends and family), which was enough to buy me a gaming accessory. This is not something that you do to make money.  ;)

Top 10 Owlbear Articles

D&D 5e: Backward Compatibility and Combat Math	4575
D&D Encounters: Bored of the Dragon Queen	2073
D&D 5e: The Bard is Back!	2038
D&D Digital: It's time for a simple license.	1733
D&D 5e: Monster Manual Quick Critiques	1300
WIP: D&D Primer Annotated Character Sheet	1289
D&D 5e: Minions Rise Again!	1254
D&D 5e Digital - Codename: Morningstar	1038
WIP: A D&D Primer for new players and DMs	981
D&D / OSR: Djara's Artifacts	914

Nothing too surprising about the above, except for the #1 entry. It was a post that was a quick observation on the numbers, not an in-depth analysis, but it set off a bit of a tiff in the ENworld forums... mostly because I used the word "efficacy" instead of "progression" in an off-the-cuff sentence (I thought the context was more than obvious). I don't even consider that post one of my best (quite the contrary), but I guess I'm glad it gave a good amount of attention to my blog. I rather do like #2 article, but I am disappointed that it's follow up post didn't make this list (it was close, but not quite). I guess a lot of people like Bards, too.

Thanks to all of my readers for an excellent freshman year. I hope I will continue to find the time to keep the articles informative and entertaining, and perhaps I will make enough from Amazon in 2015 to buy an entire board game!   ;)

D&D 5e: DM Basic Rules Quick Critiques

Wizards of the Coast updated D&D Basic yesterday.

In a word: Awesome!

I'm extraordinarily happy that Wizards of the Coast has decided to walk this path. I'm almost certainly going to buy the Player's Handbook [done], Monster Manual and Dungeon Master's Guide [because that's just what I do…], but it is fantastic that the option exists to hook new players in.

Now for the quick critiques. I haven't digested all of the new DM Basic document (essentially the Mini Monster Manual) but I have noticed a few oddities that I thought I'd mention.

Raging Owlbear Turns 10,000

Source: http://hicksvillecomics.com/1752

Just a quick note of thanks to all my readers and for the support I've gotten from the fantastic RPG blogging community on Google+.

Raging Owlbear passed 10,000 page views on July 1st -- about 6 weeks since I started really actively blogging. I'm very gratified that my feeble ramblings have attracted such positive attention from the RPG community, and I hope to keep it going for some time to come.

 Thanks for reading and keep checking back!

Marty -- the Raging Owlbear

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Owlbear

When I first started playing AD&D, I hated most of the iconic monsters, especially the Owlbear... and I largely blame David Sutherland.

A face only a mother Owlbear could love

Some of you may know that David "DCS" Sutherland (along with David Trampier) had his hands deep in the AD&D artwork within the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide and especially the Monster Manual.

It's not the Sutherland was a bad artist -- he had some awesome work on those books. But, there were also illustrations that were decidedly... not awesome.  Next to the Beholder*, the artwork for the Owlbear was one of the worst.

* The Beholder illustration was actually not a "DCS" piece... but it was still awful.

Welcome to Raging Owlbear

Welcome to Raging Owlbear, my new blog about D&D and other general RPG topics. Hoping to find time to start publishing on a regular basis soon...

...which won't be easy because I have two newborn twins and a 3 year old toddler. Wish me luck!

Bath time in the Walser household