Ask Me Anything: Legendary_Sidekick

Hello! Its good to meet another ESL teacher! I teach in South Korea. What was the best and worst things about living in Hong Kong? What's your favorite ttrpg? Which one do you want to try but haven't had the opportunity yet?

Oh, oh, I knew what I was going to ask the moment I've seen that you're doing this! :D Do you have a favourite art trick? Something you do for your drawings a lot? Whether it's a brush, or a filter, or a specific hue, or even layer arrangement. Maybe a favourite lighting style? Background texture?

Do you go to arcades nowadays? Any cool machines you like? :D (Oh, do you have pinball ones where you live? I've always been intrigued by them.) What is your favourite arcade machine of all times?

Did your martial arts knowledge and LARPing hobby ever intersect?

Cool! My colleague, who shares a classroom with me, had taught in South Korea for 20 years!

Hong Kong… the best thing is that I could eat some of the best cuisines Southeast Asia has to offer and be thin!—seriously, I made it my goal to gain ten pounds for my wedding. Walking everywhere in extremely hot weather helped, but I also I believe the food/diet there is overall healthier.

The worst, at the time I lived there: cities are crowded and noisy. My wife (who is from HK) and I decided to move to the US after our first daughter was born. We wanted her to have a yard to play in.

My favorite place in HK, Lamma Island, encompasses all of the above. (EDIT- I mean good food, long walk, and you’re away from the noise and the crowds.) You eat seafood caught that morning, then you take an 80-or-so minute walk and have tofu dessert on the beach side.

There are Taoist temples and seafood restaurants off-camera, to the right of the docks for fishing boats. It takes about 40-60 minutes to walk to the pagoda.

Favorite TTRPG? I think Masks is it. It is a heavily-guided rules-lite system (my opinion), but in a good way. I feel like the moves elicit player creativity as opposed to limiting character ability. No character is really limited, since basic moves are the main functions and abilities just add flavor. Who’s better at what is almost a perception vs. reality thing (but of course a +3 label does actually make you the best at moves using that label). Thirsty Sword Lesbians is virtually tied. The nature witch’s magic move is a lot of fun, or at least my interpretation was.

I can’t think of a TTRPG that I *want* to play. Maybe the original Apocalypse World? But the PbtA games I liked all have this premise that you *don’t* kill, which might actually be part of what attracts me to Masks, TSL and even Action Movie World where you do kill, but it’s only a movie and the actors are unharmed.

If you've been teaching for a while, how is it different today than when you started?

Sock, sock, shoe shoe, OR sock, shoe, sock, shoe?

What kind of music do you listen to when you have the time?

Who is your favorite X-Man, and why is it Colossus? :D

I’m gonna get back to you on the drawing question, hopefully with fresh images.

Arcades: last time I was at an arcade, it was January 22, 2005. It was also the first time I called my wife on the phone. So Vanguard was probably the game I enjoyed most that night. The explosions when you shoot spaceship are satisfyingly loud. I beat the game in one life. I played Dragon’s Lair and still sucked at it. Then I said goodbye to my friend and on my hour-long drive home, I heard my wife’s voice for the first time. (We were supposed to meet for lunch while I was on a business trip to Hong Kong.) Not a bad last trip to the arcade.

Arcade machines I’ve played since then:
• Maui, HI, October 21, 2006: Gauntlet Legends at the hotel laundromat. Co-op with my wife.
• New York, NY, Summer of 201X: a Pink Panther game at Chuck E. Cheese. Helped my then-pre-schooler win 100 tickets.
• Concord, MA, early-2024: Rampage at a Mexican restaurant. With my wife. Not technically co-op, but I didn’t eat her when she turned human.

Martial Arts + LARP: I fought light contact, so the concept of "tagging" my opponent without hurting him was normal. Advantage: me… except against casters. I took Iaido and played a samurai master when I NPC’d and someone made me a boffer katana. I had to really work to be a convincing master. I pulled it off, but was always worried I’d get my butt kicked by random monsters since there is no advantage at all to having a short boffer weapon and no shield.

As a player, I did nutty things like jumping into lakes and eating with my bare hands. I played a barbarian, and there was no finesse to that.
Everyone has a Chromebook. Mixed feelings on that, but given all my low-income students, I like supplying them with tech for presentations (which is what they did the past two days for finals). The tech now makes it easy for students to add images from their phone to Google Slides, so instead of an internet photo of Guatemala, it was my student drinking a Coke with a Mayan ruin in the background!

I still do a lot on paper though. And when we read Of Mice and Men, Joy Luck Club, etc., it’s a paperback. There’s something magical about a book in your hand to me.

Sock, sock, get interrupted, shoe shoe OR sock, get interrupted, swear under my breath and ask the walls "where’s my other sock?", sock, shoe, shoe OR give up the search for the missing sock, flip flop, flip flop.
I try to find out what’s new. Some bands I like and didn’t know existed until the past year or two include Dry Cleaning, The Orielles, La Luz, Bodega, and my latest discovery is Sweeping Promises. They’re a Boston-based couple. I think they went to Harvard.

I also enjoy video game music, so if I don’t want ads (because I’m too cheap to pay Spotify), I listen to a live stream called Radio Cutman.
In the X-Men 6-player arcade machine, it is Colossus. I don’t honestly have a reason. He dies just as quickly as everyone else, despite his armored body. But that special move just hits everyone nearby, so I do like that.

Oh… @FlyingSucculent, my favorite machine is Gauntlet. The game is dated (so is X-Men), but just seeing a huge machine built for 4 was cool in 1985. The artwork on the side was cool. They really had generic names. Questor?! Really?! But at the time, OOOH I WANNA BE MERLIN! I WANNA BE THOR! OR THYRA, THE GIRL THOR!

(Honestly it was just Thor or Thyra for me. I didn’t wanna be a bearded old guy or an elf with a dorky name.)

If a Genie appeared in front of you what would your three wishes be? (Normal Wishes that are not allowed rules stand.)

1. - become a character of my own creation, complete with all of the chosen character’s features and abilities.

2. - grant this power to my wife, but a character of her design with features and abilities of her choice.

3. - whatever features and/or abilities my wife and I have from our altered selves are retroactively hereditary to our daughters, if they choose to accept them.

Was Hong Kong your first choice of location to be an ESL teacher?

If you could sing a karaoke duet with anyone, living or passed, who would it be and what would you sing together?

What other play by post mediums have you tried and what prompted you to try us?

Sort of. I was unemployed when I moved there, and while looking for work I volunteered at my wife’s friend’s school for the autistic. I liked it, and ended up working for a learning center.

It’s hard to explain how things work there. I worked at three kindergartens and also got a lot of gigs, like after school programs, reading to kids at bookstores and the Central Library—audiences of like 200+ people, but just reading stories and making puppets talk and learning the hard way that sometimes kids cry onstage and parents complain when that happens.

And I was actually hired for birthday parties. "Should we get a clown?" "Nah, let’s get an English teacher. That’ll liven up the party." I also landed an all-expense-paid gig in Kunming, China. I think the center paid more for the trip than they paid me.

But anyway, teachers at the kindergarten suggested I take a post-grad course at the University of Hong Kong. So I did that, got my educator license and worked at a secondary school for a year.

…

Short answer: I just fell into the teaching career.

(Maybe I shoulda led with that.)
The song would be Spoiler Alert by They Might Be Giants.


Who would I sing it with? Anybody willing and able to do Flansburgh’s part! (The red-background-hand.)

Oh… and he needs to be alive. I ain’t karaokeing with no zombie.

Your top three oriental street food delicacies?

(so we can try them, if available locally!
We have a lot of choice in London, but I never know what to try - recommendations welcome! )

The site where I got into PbP was a site for fantasy writers, or people who wanted to be. So most of the PbPs didn’t use a system.

I played on a GM’s own site. After his games ended, he joined one of my summer one-shots on Discord.

I also still have an active game (4.5 years now) on the forum of a TTRPG publisher. I won’t join new games on that site though. I prefer the set-up here, and since GP isn’t the site of a particular system, I find there’s more variety. I love the abundance of Rules-Lite: Tiny D6, Lasers and Feelings, Kids on Bikes..!

I ALSO LOVE THE FONT CHOICES, the ability to embed video, and I just learned how to code die rolls. That is a very nice feature. A player (FlyingSucculent) also showed me how roll tables work!

More importantly, in one of the first games I joined, the GM mentioned safety in our Session Zero. Even before I joined, I saw a lot of GMs took the PbtA note to the MC, "be a fan of the players’ characters," and extended that to players: "be a fan of each other’s characters." It was this line that attracted me the most.

What prompted me? I won’t tell the story, but let’s just say I wanted a safer place to game and leave it at that.
Okay… gonna limit my suggestions to Hong Kong cuisine.

1. BBQ Pork Rice (cha siu fahn) - this was the first dish I learned to order in Cantonese (after I caused a teenage waitress to visibly panic when I ordered in English). My wife made it earlier this week, and last night, we had BBQ pork fried rice from the leftovers!


2. Dim Sum - I actually had Dim Sum at 11:00 this morning! It’s like a brunch—there are carts full of rice rolls, steamed buns, dumplings, etc.


3. Sweet Soups - I had a tofu dessert (dau fu fa; lit.trans.: "tofu flower") at the dim sum place. We do red bean soup at home occasionally. At a restaurant, if we can find it: snow fungus with pear. My wife is gathering ingredients now to make sweet potato soup with rice dumplings!

Oh… street food!!! I’ll get back to you later. I somehow missed the word street until just now.

Well, these are great tips too, thanks!

No problem!

Here is HK street food.

Last time we were there (2019), we had my wife’s favorite: bubble waffles.


I used to get egg tarts as the Tseun Wan station in the way to work when I taught kindergarten.


And the tofu dessert "dau fu fa" I had today is a street food, though the best was sold on the beach of Lamma Island.

Yum!

What's the inspiration behind your username, is there an interesting story or was it an on the spot deal?

No story, really. I like co-op games, so my goal is to excel at being a teammate.

Do you teach ESL online or in person?
And if online, do you operate privately or through a school or marketplace?

In-person, at the local high school. My students are from Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Uruguay, Honduras, Brazil, Venezuela, Portugal, Ghana, Pakistan, Vietnam and Korea.

EDIT: and Columbia.

I’m kicking myself for not including Columbia because the student who’s from there gave an awesome presentation for his final.

Have you asked any of your students about role playing games available in their home countries?

Your evolution into tabletop gaming is interesting. What about table RPGs keeps you coming back for more? Was there any game that you played that you really enjoyed? What kind of story would you like most to try and play?

Secret of Mana is a fantastic game. I've played it from start to finish many times. I was even listening to some songs from the soundtrack just the other day. Gauntlet is great fun as well. What a black hole for quarters that thing was. "Insert .25 for extra health..."

I have not.

Probably the closest I’ve come to showing this side of myself is using an online die roller (with polyhedral dice) to randomly choose the next student to give their presentation. They get a kick out of that—though they all volunteered during finals last Thursday.
An RPG is an unpredictable story, and I’m in it. Not me exactly, but my mind viewing the world through my character’s eyes.

In my first Pathfinder game (a homebrew, not an AP), my Druid was in Neverland. She befriended a fairy and used Wish magic to become one. The GM weaved descriptions so well, I visualized everything vividly, like dreaming while wide awake. So in the fairy form, the world had suddenly become enormous! It could be horrifying at times—like seeing the decapitated head of a villager I failed to save. But it was fun while the campaign lasted (which was about 5 years).

A campy Charlie’s Angels type superheroine game that takes place before my time, before cell phones, with a bit of a Get Smart flavor and something like those flashback scenes in Watchmen—the glory days of the past superheroes before the morbid reveals. Colorful like Adam West Batman, corny, nonviolent-ish (non-lethal).

Oh—and question for you, @Phil_Ozzy_Fer, have you played Trials of Mana? Not the remake. The 1995 game translated to English. My brother got it on Switch (2020, I think, or 2021), and we played it whenever he was over. It took us a year or two to finish!

@FlyingSucculent

A trick I read in a Modern Cartooning book ten years ago: 3 sections for a woman’s torso, a bowl for the hips.


That said, if I think a pose is boring, I dress it up anyway, then try new poses before I commit.


Third time was a charm! (Second pose not shown. Trust me. It sucked.)


I try to organize layers. I find stupid mistakes as I color.


I have a separate layer for skin and clothing. I will shade each on a different layer, and I’m probably going to use Flat Brush, Jagged Brush and Oriental Brush for shading. These are Procreate defaults.


I’ll post more later, but I gotta pick up my daughters and be the lifeguard at their last-day-of-school pool party.

Hopefully I’ll finish soon. This is Grace, my Fabula Ultima bard who actually hits people with an oversized lute called a Baroque Theorbo. I used a reference to draw it kinda right.

@FlyingSucculent, not sure if I adequately answered your question, but here’s what I came up with in the parking lot just before my girls got out of school.

I think the game you're looking to play sounds fun. Maybe with something like Savage Worlds? There are other people on this site that will be able to help you, I believe.

I have not played Trials of Mana, however(!), I did recently purchase Collection of Mana for the Switch which contains the 16-bit version of Trials.... Depending on my adult schedule, I will get to it! Hopefully it won't take me two years, but at least if it does then I'll know I got good value in quality gaming.