I started a Dungeons & Dragons blog back in 2005 as a replacement for an even older campaign website that I can credit for giving me my start writing for the now-defunct Dragon. D20 Source as it's now known has come pretty far, with almost 250 articles in just over two years. It's also interesting to see how many other D&D blogs have sprung up since then, including several here at Livejournal. I'd like to share a few of those with you.

Most of these names should be familiar to D&D players. Monte Cook (montecook), JD Wiker (jediwiker), Ryan Dancey (rsdancey) and Sean K. Reynolds (seankreynolds) are all here on Livejournal. We have the mad ramblings of Wizards of the Coast's Mike Mearls (mearls) and Ari Marmell mouseferatu), and from Paizo Publishing come Erik Mona (lemuriapress) and Mike McArtor (irishninja). We have Kobold Quarterly's Wolfgang Baur (the_monkey_king, open_design) and EP Healy (ephealy), and Green Ronin's Chris Pramas (freeport_pirate). True RPG afficionados will also be familiar with writer Robin D. Laws (robin_d_laws), Dragon magazine artist Kyle Hunter (kylehunter), and Critical Miss editor Jonny Nexus (jonnynexus).

From the blogosphere, meanwhile, we have sites like Stupid Ranger, Treasure Tables, Dungeon Mastering, Jeff's Gameblog, Hack Slash, Game Designer in the Wilderness and Musings of the Chatty DM, to name a few.

Something you notice with "blogs" (as opposed to simply Livejournals) is that we have a lot fewer big names, but (in general) a great deal more content. There's a reason for this. A successful blog is written to be read, not written for its own sake.. It's not worth anyone's effort to read a blog that doesn't hold their interest, and that puts a lot of pressure on RPG bloggers if they want to attract a readership.

Livejournal is the opposite of this, because you're essentially subscribing to people you know, rather than content you want. "People you know" includes friends, friends of friends, and people you've heard of (including minor celebrities, which the RPG industry has quite a few of). You're not on parade like with a blog, which can be advantageous. I think freeport_pirate's blog sums this up with its amusing subtitle, The Completely Personal and Totally Non-Corporate Blog of Chris Pramas.

tl;dr: If a blog is to get popular, it has to have an agenda of attracting new visitors by publishing content that keeps people interested. Livejournal doesn't have this same upkeep cost, leaving people free to discuss opinions and news more openly, although at the cost of potentially reaching less people.