Introductions
Hey folks, great to see familiar faces and also some new ones! Looking forward to playing with all of you.
As DMJ mentioned, I've played with him and Jabes in a few games. All great experiences, whether he was running the game or playing beside me. Good times!
My RPG history goes back to my friend's older brother's copy of 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 Advaced Fighting Fantasy for my friends (they had copies of all the books at the public library), 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'm now a moderator on these forums and the GP discord, and I hit the 10,000 posts milestone earlier this year.
I have run and played a lot of 5e here, but I've been transitioning into OSR systems for a while. 5e is great, and I've enjoyed some really fun games with that system. But, I am really interested in 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.
Thanks for reading!