You are going to be receiving some postcards over the next couple of months and I wanted to explain why!
In 1999 I started a D&D website which I ran for two years. In that time I established an Internet message board where thousands of people post messages about D&D. While I no longer run the website, it still exists and is run by my friend Russ, who lives in England. The website is now called EN World (EN, of course, being my initials -- the site was re-named by Russ in my honor after I "retired") and even though I'm not in charge any more I still post messages there a lot and am sort of treated like a "retired celebrity" or something.
There are over 24,000 members of this community, participating in in almost 100,000 conversations with well over 1.5 million messages. As you can imagine, it would be hard to make this many people behave! On the internet there's a tendency for some people to be rude, obnoxious, crude, etc. And D&D players can get into fights over pretty dumb things.
I found, however, that it was not very hard to keep these thousands of strangers in line while still allowing them to have fun. I established two main rules: "Keep it civil, and keep it clean." And to make it clear exactly what I meant, I explained that I wanted them to pretend that my grandmother was reading their messages. People instantly understood -- they understood that they couldn't use profanity, they couldn't have mean nasty knock-down fights with each other. They had to keep things to a certain level of civility and pleasantness. It worked! Over the years I have been complimented dozens of times that EN World is the "nicest" D&D message board on the internet.
Grandma, I was thinking of you when I established these rules! I was thinking of the many, many mornings at your house before school, and the hours we spent at your house at other times. We kids always had fun, but we were also expected to behave and treat you, as our host, right.
The tone I tried to set at my website was one that said, "Yes, have your fun, but don't be mean to others." That's a value I learned from you, and I passed it along to my 24,000 friends and they all appreciate it because it means there's at least one place on the internet where "Eric's Grandma" expects you to behave while you have your fun. In fact, hardly a week goes by without someone mentioning "Eric's Grandma" -- whether it is to gently warn another person that they might be going over the line or just to say how much they appreciate the atmosphere at EN World.
So, over the next few weeks you will be getting some post cards from people across the country and around the world who just want to say "Thank you" for making a difference in my life, so that I could make a difference in theirs. I hope you find it entertaining!
Love,
Eric
It was joke!
