Hey folks, great to see familiar faces and also some new ones! Looking forward to playing with all of you.
I love RPGs!
I talked a bit about my history with Advanced Fighting Fantasy in
the recruitment post, but I first got interested in RPGs because my friend's older brother had the
TMNT and Other Strangeness RPG. We made so many characters without ever knowing how to use them in a game. Later, his brother picked up
Heroes Unlimited, also by Palladium Books, and we had a blast with that for a while using it to invent our own cool superhero universe. Instead of playing, we'd just imagine the stories they'd go on.
It wasn't until a young English teacher, Mr. Elliot, showed me how to actually play RPGs with
Traveller that I fully grasped the concept. I started running AFF for my friends, and once I got the Traveller books I refereed a long-running game even into University with a little AD&D 2e sprinkled throughout. We did so much gaming with just the core rules and some random tables. So fun!
As my gaming group started going their separate ways, I lost touch with the hobby. It wasn't until the tail end of D&D 4e when I started to get back in. I was running a high school gaming club (trying to pay it forward from Mr. Elliot) but we were mostly focused on Magic: the Gathering. Even though it was a ton of fun, I was uncomfortable with how addicting and commercial that game was/is. So, I started running D&D. I always saw those shiny D&D books in hobby stores, but couldn't afford them as a kid. Now I was an adult with a full time job, so I got to live out that childhood fantasy.
I started running a bit of 4th edition, but I found out about the 5e play test. So, we switched over to that and it was so much fun! My love of RPGs was rekindled! I had recently become a father, so I couldn't spend much time on gaming, but my imagination was SO FIRED UP! So I began playing on Gamers Plane to squeeze in some more gaming time in my otherwise complicated schedule.
I have run a lot of 5e here, but I'm starting to transition into OSR systems. 5e is great, and I've enjoyed some really fun games with that system. But, I am really intrigued by the lighter rules systems that are custom-made for telling particular kinds of stories. I listen to a lot of podcasts and read a lot of blogs on the OSR, and it seems so AWESOME. These remind me a lot of the old systems like Traveller and Advanced Fighting Fantasy that I loved so much. So, I'm really grateful to folks like Harrigan who are promoting it for us new converts.
Oops, I kinda wrote an essay! TL;DR - RPGs explode my brain with creativity, and I'm excited to be gaming with you all :)
Last edited September 20, 2022 8:10 pm