It’s the fourth week of Amtgard online and I think I’m finally getting my drive to create back. It has taken some time to adjust to the current situation and I’m still not happy about it, but at least I’m feeling somewhat productive again. I even managed to write an article. World Building: Quest Basics, and post it on the same day. I had some serious drive.
Not only did I write the article this Monday, last Thursday I did my own stream, a Twitch stream I’m calling Beers with Baelnorn. You can follow the channel HERE if you like, it’s my old Gamer Blog and Streaming account.
I’ve been talking about doing an Ask Me Anything stream on twitch now for several months, but I kept pushing it off. I’m not too big to admit that I suffer from anxiety and thinking about the stream was anxiety inducing. I’m generally pretty open about my mental health, although I don’t often bring it up myself.
Seeing everyone else doing streams really pushed me to finally do an AMA. I still had to find a way to fight my anxiety. My biggest fear was finding a way to fill up the time, especially if few, or no one, actually talked in the chat. It’s hard to do an AMA if no one asks any questions. I decided to try and find a topic people would be interested in. I asked on my blog, no one responded, so I reached out to people. Eventually Guin came up with an idea, event running. It didn’t take me long to realize that was the idea I would settle with.
I’ve been thinking about doing an event running article for a while now, but it’s a large topic with lots of parts. The furthest I’d gotten was a basic, unfinished, outline. My creative juices started flowing and I set to work on fleshing out the outline and turning it into a lesson plan. It only took me a few days to complete the class outline. One day to write, a few days to let it sit and then another day to revise it.
I had what I needed, content for my stream, it was my big weapon against my anxiety riddled brain. It worked! I managed to have enough event content to cover my first 45-50 minutes. I had two active people chatting, Gustav and Dee Metria. I was very grateful for their participation. Dee Metria was much more active during the lesson plan. She mad several worthwhile comments and even asked one or two questions I got to answer! I know two is a small number but it was exciting.
After the lesson plan had been executed I proceeded to talk to them for 15-20 minutes longer. Being able to generate conversation after the learning content was over was icing on the cake. It proved to me that I could do it. I think I found my perfect mix, a lesson plan first and an AMA after. It helps combat my anxiety and still gives the possibility for lively, open, conversation. You can view it on my YouTube Channel, HERE
Needless to say, I am making this a monthly activity. I’m so looking forward to it that I don’t want to wait a month. I already know what I’m going to talk about and I’ve created the basic outline. I’ll be talking about my article series World Building. So far I have two articles in the series, one, mentioned early is the Quest Basics article. The second is the first one I wrote which talked about two basic approaches to world building, World Building: Initial Approach.
I got the idea for this next topic by combining a few suggestions from Gustav and Guin. If not for them I may not have written the second article, Quest Basics. By writing the article before doing the stream, I will give people a chance to become familiar with the topic, allowing them to more easily come up with questions. And more questions means more conversation and more engagement overall.
I might not have to wait another three more before getting behind the camera. I might have the chance to teach a basic short sword class this Sunday for DH on their Facebook Group Page. We are still working out the details. This is something else I have been wanting to do for a while.
Earlier in the week I working on an outline for the class however I was having a hard time trying to decide what to teach and in what order. Thanks to Gustav I don’t have to do think to hard. He has outlines for 7 different classes that he’s ran or worked on and one of them was the basics. He’s a very organized person and the outline was a perfect starting place for me.
I’ve talked about it a little before, but Gustav and I were friends before we started playing Amtgard and which lead to us starting Amtgard at the same time. We spent a lot of time fighting in Gustav’s backyard in additional to the normal practices. A lot of how we learned back then was through those fights. This was the time before YouTube mind you; we learned some from traveling but a lot of learning early on was us figuring stuff out ourselves. I would teach him something and he’d teach me something.
That lead us to having a lot of the same philosophy on the basics and in fighting in general. There are of course differences in our fighting, but the core is very much similar. That lead me to having to make very few changes to his outline. It will be interesting to have Gustav watch the stream and tell me how he views things. Some of our style differences might show up during teaching and I’d like to hear about them.
Streams
This week it seems that people have gotten a little exhausted putting out content, at least at Dusk Hollow (Dallas, OR). They only put out two short videos and they were just court. On the other hand Inland Ocean (Redmand, WA) had two classes. One Grind Nation also got into the mix with two of their own videos.
Dusk Hollow
I watched the court videos from DH. It was nice to see that awards are still going out. They even gave awards for things done after the quarantine went into effect. That probably means the park’s monarchy is still keeping in touch with each other and making a point to watch what people are doing.
It might also be easier for them to find reasons to get out awards. They have had a lot of people doing work on streams in comparison to many other parks in the Pacific Northwest. They have also used Discord to talk about each other have been up to and share projects they are working on.
DH also was running a talent competition, which is what they planned to take up their usual 3 hour block. Sadly it didn’t go as planned. Only one person, Farlanok, entered the contest. He sang a song on Facebook Live, which you can watch HERE. He was, by default, the winner. He won a park level item that lets him cast Lycanthropy once per game.
I think the concept of an online talent contest was a good one, I was disappointed that only one person entered. If I had thought about it soon enough, I could have wrote a short story or monologue and read it aloud. Sadly I didn’t think of it till right now, as I am writing this blog.
Inland Ocean
The two Streams that Inland Ocean did were about Amtgard classes. Heron did a class about the Warrior class, which you can watch HERE. Drusk did a class about the Scout class which you can view HERE. I was able to watch Heron’s class but not Drusk’s.
Heron is a Paragon Warrior and her knowledge of the class shows it. She went over the class abilities, talked about their strengths and weakness and some strategies concerning how to use them. It was very informative, I’d recommend it if you are interested in the Warrior class, both how to over come it and play it.
On Tuesday Oromis organized a Google Hangouts session to replace their in person fighter practice. I was only able to join for the last half hour or so, but it was fun. We talked about fighting. I mostly listened but I added a few things, especially when it came to footwork exercises you can do anywhere. You can view the last half of the conversation HERE. If you want to hear the conversation about footwork it starts around 14:20.
The whole experience kept up my level of drive for fighting. I need to keep that for when people are able to meet up and fight again. I’d hate to waste this energy.
One Grind Nation
Dalos did two combination interview and AMA streams. The first one was with Peter the Quick which you can view HERE. The second was with Xion which you can view HERE. The only one I managed to watch live was the Xion one, which I liked but I’m sure both are worth your time.
The Xion interview got me thinking about my basics, like a lot of things have been lately. This time it was mainly foot work and shots. That wasn’t what they talked about most but it was certainly covered. It even helped me to decide I would actually take some time to work on muscle memory where I can despite my little apartment.
Next Week
Over the next week as much is planned. It sounds like people are a little burned out making and organizing content. So far it’s been mostly the same people doing all the work so it’s understandable. In most cases it’s one or two people in the monarchy doing all the organizing and they are getting burned out.
If anyone who is reading this is incharge of finding and organizing content, please make sure you find someone you can offload some of the work to. Maybe you could take turns organizing streams for the week, giving you effectively two weeks to plan out your streams.
So far OGN said they would do another stream but they didn’t give a date or time. I imagine they will probably do two. To keep updated like there Facebook Page HERE.
Sadly DH hasn’t released a schedule, nor could I find one released for IO. I know that I want to do my short sword basics class this Sunday for DH. I don’t really feel like I should unless I’m put on their schedule. So we’ll see if I’ll be streaming this Sunday or not.
Sadly that doesn’t bode well for content this week but I’m sure it will bounce back soon. In any event I’m excited for the streaming I’m going to be doing going forward. I hope you are too.
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