Why Eggdip?

This website is a theory and game advice blog for tabletop role-playing games, commonly abbreviated throughout this site and the world as TTRPGs. A TTRPG is a game where players assume the roles of various heroes, misfits, or villains, progressing through a shared story where their actions and choices affect the development of the plot. They roll dice to determine the outcomes of their actions, typically under the guidance of a Game Master (GM). The whole time, they generally make fools of themselves by accidentally toppling governments, destroying economies, or literally always doing the one thing for which the GM has not prepared any material.

The most famous TTRPG is Dungeons and Dragons, the game that popularized the genre and acquired an infamous reputation back in the 1990’s thanks to the Satanic Panic. The game has recently regained fame through serials such as Stranger Things and Critical Role. D&D also has copyrighted the much more famous term “Dungeon Master” or “DM”, so no other TTRPGs can use it. 

That’s fine. It sounded too kinky for our tastes anyway.

If you’ve never heard of TTRPGs before and you’re curious, welcome in! We will try not to scare you away. These games are fantastic for building community, expressing creativity, and making memories with your fellow players. If you don’t jive with our specific style of writing or humor, please try to play a game anyways or find some other resources regardless. We promise you that it’ll change your life for the better.

If you’ve been living, breathing, and dying (with all the shuffling of a new character sheet that it requires) in TTRPGs for a while, then have a seat by the proverbial hearth, friend. This blog is for you. You are our target audience, our closest friends we haven’t met yet; the people we most want to hear from.

We want to write about the stuff that makes us (and hopefully, you) excited. We plan to argue about game theory, game design, GM-ing tips, and the eccentricities of games and TTRPGs.  Hopefully, you’ll come along for the ride.

Now that we’ve explained the basic idea, let us explain a more complicated one.

Why the hell is our site called EGGDIP? 

In our case, over eight years of play, it did not matter where we started. It did not matter what noble intentions we began with, what backstories we had painstakingly pieced together, or what grand campaign our Game Master had set before us. 

Invariably, by some point, our party would turn into pirates.

We could be noble swashbucklers or chaotic reavers, renegades rebelling against a totalitarian regime or power-hungry warlords, sailing on the sea and space alike, but it always ended with pirates, all the same, every time.

You see, most TTRPG games exist in the world of D&D. D&D has a lot of prebuilt lore that many players choose to follow, and this lore pushes you to play as epic heroes. The realm is in trouble, and you are the mythic protagonists who are going to save the day. 

Our GM didn’t like D&D very much, so instead, we played many indie TTRPGs. These systems (and the style of our GM) lent themselves to sandbox play. Given no real mission to solve, no world to save, we typically ended up trying to amass power as a way to challenge ourselves. Somewhere along the way, we’d run afoul of the laws of our fictional world, and we’d be on the run. Tired of fleeing, we’d fight back. Suddenly, our names were plastered around everywhere, and we were true criminals. Add a boat or a space boat (which all of these universes seemed to have), and boom, pirates.

This trend kept on repeating itself in almost every campaign we ran. Sure, we had a few that didn’t end in pirates. But the good campaigns? The ones that made us laugh and cry and play until six in the morning? The ones that left us with memories of escapades we still laugh about, that caused certain names of player characters long dead to launch shivers down our spine? 

Those campaigns, they all ended in pirates.

Since, you know, every good game devolves into pirates.