Ask Me Anything: bowlofspinach

What is your favorite German musician and why?

Also, best German movie of the last decade - go!

Also, pineapple on pizza?

What's the one RPG you most want to try but haven't found the right people or the right time to get into?

If I may be so bold, what are you studying with regard to philosophy?

Let's talk Star Trek!

Favorite series? Favorite movie? Favorite character? Best Captain? Favorite ship design?

• Do you still play TTRPGs in person, or virtually on Discord, Zoom, Roll20, Role, Foundry or the like?

• Do your professors know about your pun-powered English-language transgressions?

• Do you pun as much in German as you do in English?

• Why is it you don't play D&D and D&D-like games on GP? Is it the system, implied setting, the way those games tend to be run and played by the GM and players, or something else entirely?

• How many new-to-GP players have you run through your Tales from the Loop starter game now?

• What do you love about Germany? What do you wish you could change?

Do boardgames count as meaningfully different from RPGs for this question?
I love fiction writing and I've been doing more of it recently.
For music, I listen to a whole lot of different stuff but mostly just in the background. I'm not a music connoisseur.
I'd love to learn an instrument but I have absolutely no sense of rhythm so I'm bad at it. I also think learning languages is really fascinating. I was learning Polish for a while but have been neglecting it recently. I'd also like to learn Swedish but it's hard to come up with the motivation sometimes.
Good question. I love all kinds of food. My favorite food would have to be pasta with a creamy salmon sauce. For drink, I would recommend pairing it with a nice glass of diet cola. Because I drink way too much of that stuff.
That is a tough question. I haven't been watching much TV recently at all, more just youtube or movies. Can't come up with an answer to this right now, sorry.
Hm, hard to narrow it down to one. Thomas D is one German musician I really like. He's part of this famous German hip hop band that got very famous for Die Da but he has also made some really great solo stuff.
Not German but German language, at least: Falco is really great, obviously.
I'll also mention ASP, who made two amazing concept albums telling a really fascinating horror story about a man who falls in love with the ghost living in a hotel.
Have I even watched a German movie in the last decade? I don't remember a single one right now
Is something from 2008 okay? Because I really liked Die Welle
Yes
Masks and Monsterhearts
I really liked my philosophy classes in school, ethics primarily, so I decided to study that and English to become a teacher. So just an all-round general thing.
I wrote my Bachelor's thesis on ethics in Watchmen.
Favorite series: Voyager, closely followed by DS9
Favorite movie: Nemesis No, but that's a tough question. I find the shows generally better than the movies. I liked First Contact, just because I like the Borg. I also used to really like Undiscovered Country but I haven't watched it in years and with how little I enjoyed TOS when I tried to watch it again recently, I don't know if I would still enjoy Undiscovered Country much these days. I should give it another shot
Best Captain: Probably Janeway, maybe Sisko
Favorite ship design: A Borg Cube
I haven't in a while. I formed a board game group in my home city recently and we are planning on it but haven't yet.
No, I save up all my puns for you
I find D&D combat to be pretty boring. It takes a long time and doesn't achieve anything narratively that couldn't be achieved much faster in a different system.
Sixteen, unless I miscounted just now. Oh wait, you only asked for new players. Then thirteen. Three of those were people who were just testing the tutorial to see if it's suitable as an introduction and to help me smooth out some edges
I love German sushi. I don't like beer.

Traitor!!!

What YouTube channels have you been into lately?

There's this really great channel that's actually about Tabletop RPGs and PBP in particular that I would recommend to anyone. It's called Gamers Explane.
Beyond that, two fun channels that come to my mind that I could recommend are Big Joel and Jenny Nicholson.
I generally tend to look for longer videos, 20 minutes to an hour or more of people just talking to the camera. Stuff I can have run in the background while doing things or playing videogames.

Not exactly an 'ask', but I will work a question into it. :)
When I saw Liminal was on bundleofholding I thought about you. Thought you might like it.

So, my question: Have you looked at Liminal?

What are your favorite kinds of characters to play? And which character has been your favorite to play?

I hadn't before but looked into it now. It looks interesting and has some pretty positive reviews but doesn't grab me enough that I'm planning to buy it. But thanks for pointing it out!
I'm always interested in new games and this one is definitely the right direction.
That's a good question. I like to play a variety of different characters, which is why I enjoy games where I get to play a number of characters (as GM for example).
I don't think I have a specific type of character I tend to go for as I try to mix it up a bit.

One character I really loved to play was a half-orc in a homebrew fantasy game who grew up into childhood among orcs before beign adopted by a human nobleman wizard. That complicated cultural background was really fun to play. Plus, magic-enhanced punches and rage.
My current avatar is a free artwork I got for a Delta Green character that I played for a bit. She was pretty fun as well. Too bad that game didn't last very long.
A long time ago, in my first game of Tales from the Loop, I played one half of a pair of twins with a crush on the boy who had a crush on my sister. That was really fun as well.
I could probably list at least half a dozen more characters easily but I'll stop myself here 😄

I rarely see you offer your games in The Tavern, yet you have so many. How do you usually recruit for your games?

Looking at my list of currently running games that I'm GM for:

1 on 1 Gaming
- I joined a duet game and after that was finished, the GM and I decided to keep going together with other games and started up this

[Smallville RPG] Shattered Crossroads
- the original GM left and I took over

Cyberpunk in Space
- advertised in the tavern

Death of the Old World
- advertised in the tavern

Notes and GM Screen
- not an actual game

Sidestory
- we just needed a place to play out some scenes for a different game

🖥️ The Council of Elrond
- not an actual game

The Stolen Village
- advertised in the tavern

Cold New World
- I was playing some other games with this player that died and decided to start a duet with them

GP Tutorial - Tales from the Loop
- my tutorial game

Nevermind, "Things from the Flood"
- the original GM left and we kept going GMless

The Ugliness
- continuation of a game advertised in the tavern

Avid collector of physical books, or PDFs work just as well?

How many dice do you own?

Do you ever go with the deluxe editions with props and variant covers?

I love physical books and try to get them if I'm really interested in a game. I prefer physical books for initially reading a system but for referencing rules, I prefer PDFs.
A lot. I used to buy myself dice sets all the time until one time I bought a bundle with like ten full dice sets at once and that kind of ended my dice-buying obsession for the most part.
I did just recently buy myself a D30, just because. And I bought the official TftL and TftF dice sets.
I backed Wildsea at a tier that gets me a deluxe edition but usually, standard editions are fine for me. Unless it's a game I'm really super excited about.

Did we just loose all our Italian players?

I have a hard time getting into Falco, though Rock Me Amadeus is classic.

I happened to live in Germany in 2008 when Die Welle came out and I got to see it in the theatre. It's such a good movie, and honestly one that I wish American audiences could have had wider exposure to. Now I need to go back and watch it again haha

Haven't seen it, but it is adapted from a TV special from the early 80s which itself is based on actual events. I saw it in high school and I still remember it to this day. I should check out this version though.

Well, it's based on a 1981 book, which I assume that TV special is also based on. Though with a lot of changes (for the better, in my opinion). Also it's set in Germany, which is extra fitting for the story.