Here are the eleventh through twentieth most popular posts on Grognardia for comparison to the Top 10:
That's quite a different batch of posts and (mostly) a pretty good reflection of what I think of this blog as being about.
- Brandification in Action is a good post and its subject matter is one to which I return again and again. Indeed, it's one I intend to discuss more soon.
- Imagine Magazine: Issue #6 only ranks so high because it was the final post of the first iteration of Grognardia. For nearly eight years, it was the first thing anyone would see upon visiting the blog. Frankly, it's a wonder it didn't rack up more pageviews.
- Programming Help is another post of no consequence whose pageviews are almost certainly are an accident of key words.
- The Articles of Dragon: "Falling Damage" is a genuinely interesting mix of gaming history and theory and is very much the kind of thing that I like.
- The Ages of D&D is a worthy and significant post. I might quibble with some of what I wrote back in 2009, but the general thrust of it still seems sound.
- The Enduring Appeal of Basic D&D raises a very real point on which I think I ought to expand one day. A solid post.
- Silver Age Obsessions is a favorite of mine and, apparently, others as well. I like it because it not only makes good use of the schema of "The Age of D&D," but does a good job of illustrating some of the very real differences between the game's proposed eras.
- Old School Dungeon Design Guidelines is a good and useful post. It's also a relic from the days when there was a lot more interplay between blogs and forums.
- Rebound represents one of the few posts on this blog to talk, even allusively, about 5e, which might explain its popularity. That said, it was written before we knew much about the game, so my points are very abstract. I certainly wouldn't have chosen it as a Top 20 post, but I'm just the writer of this blog. What do I know?
- Quelle Surprise being on this list is probably an artifact of the past anticipation for the 2011 Conan the Barbarian movie rather than a reflection of anything else.
Looking over entries 1 through 20 in terms of pageviews doesn't provide me with much clarity about just which posts will prove popular and which ones will not, since it's an incredibly eclectic mix. However, seeing them all has at least given me a better sense of what I consider my best posts. Perhaps I can use that insight as I continue to contemplate how best to continue writing this blog in the years to come.
Long live the Electrum Age! I just read the Falling Damage post and comments for the first time, and it really shines a light on the cognitive dissonance of "hit points." There's a constant internal battle between them representing physical toughness rather than the abstract combo of luck/heroic experience, etc., they're supposed to represent. Falling damage just brings out the "physicalness" in everyone because ALL of us have experienced it. Somehow, the idea of a high-level hero surviving a fall from a high cliff becomes "unrealistic." The thought of those hit points representing the hero breaking their fall in some way on the way down tends to go by the wayside. That's the silver in the gold.
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