My TTRPG Credentials

If I'm gonna talk about tabletop games on this blog (mostly suggestions born of dissatisfaction with the usual approach and most popular homebrew advice), I may as well talk about my history with them. Hopefully this'll help readers get where I'm coming from, even if they disagree with the conclusions I draw from my observations. I'm a voice at an online table of discussion, suggesting how others dissatisfied with their own table experiences might work towards improving them. If my solutions don't work for your table experience, I understand; every group's specific circumstances are different. Thank you for stopping by, and I hope you find the right tools to sort your situation out with.

At time of writing, I'm 26 years old, going on 27. I know I'm young in the grand scheme of things, and as a result of that and other factors, most of my game table experience (past and present) is via online virtual tabletops (VTTs) like Owlbear Rodeo and Foundry. My very first game, in DnD 3.5e, was in my early teens and on a physical table. I was at a summer camp, and some of my older peers had invited me in to play. I rolled up a simple monk concept that they helped me pen the sheet for, and we messed around for a single session of play fighting some monsters. I don't remember other specific details, but I do remember having a good time.

Only when COVID hit in 2020 did I return to the hobby. I was a 21 year old then, neither able to responsibly drink and mingle at bars, nor continue my in-person college education. A lot of people in my age range, to include younger high school students at the time, retreated online with similar frustrations in their heads. I got frustrated easily, and expressed it in ways I wasn't proud of. It got difficult to avoid the temptation to "feed the troll", especially when going outside for fresh air and in-person socialization wasn't really possible as it was before the pandemic. A consistent play group of mutually familiar people was hard to come by, and most of my gaming experience was from LFG forum posts and westmarches/living world giga-groups in Discord servers.

A positive side-effect of this frustration: it encouraged me to shop around to different systems. Like most Dungeons and Dragons players, I shifted my play from 3.5e to 5e when I returned to the hobby after the latter's release. But 5e's many issues drove many (myself included) to leave, as did certain aspects of the online community. Next stop was Pathfinder 2nd edition (PF2e), which surged in popularity after the OGL crisis Wizards of the Coast fumbled. I found a living world server in PF2e that let me play around with the system at large, experimenting with character builds galore and experiencing a lot of types of GM and fellow players. I even became a GM there, and refined multiple aspects of my GMing approach.

I learned a lot there, before the server unfortunately collapsed into an inactive husk. So it goes.

A small splinter group of players introduced me to Pathfinder's 1st edition, as well as the latest edition of a game system called GURPS - Generic Universal Roleplaying System, 4th edition. Both were far more complex than anything else I had played, and while said group helped me learn the ropes, I found both too complex to call them my system of choice. GURPS 4e at least had an inbuilt modular feel to it, full of first-party optional rules to both increase and reduce complexity on several fronts. There's even the (free!) GURPS 4e Lite available to give it a shot, and the built-for-DnD-feel Dungeon Fantasy RPG that ran on GURPS's game engine. I would recommend starting with GURPS Lite to feel it out, then Dungeon Fantasy RPG, then GURPS proper for anyone curious.

Honorable mention to Kids on Bikes, the parent system for Kids on Brooms - I played a brief campaign in that second system. Fun rules-lite system that's very story focused, and has a neat, communal worldbuilding approach at the start of play.

At the moment, I'm in a lot better place in my personal and work life, and can engage in the hobby in a manner more healthy than I did a few years ago. Pathfinder 2e is still my system of choice, but I'm curiously poking DnD5e again after all this time.

My goal with this blog is to propose tools that'd help a table in a tough spot - from system-neutral advice on roleplay pillars and setting construction, to trying my hand at tackling large issues with specific systems. At the end of the day, people want to have fun with the whole thing. A game system should enable fun with its ruleset, to include balancing balance tension and risk-reward in subsystems.

To quote former Nintendo president Reginald "Reggie" Fils-Aimé: "If it's not fun, why bother?"