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Introductions

plus1jeremy

Member
Wizard of Story
Jeremy Henson in the New Orleans metro area. I own and operate +1 Gaming, a tabletop and video game store in Metairie.

I've been a GM since about 1994. I've run D&D (AD&D through 5e), Pathfinder, Star Wars since the West End days, Rifts, 7th Sea (both editions), L5R 1st edition, Mutants & Masterminds (all three editions), and a smattering of other things. I've written two unpublished RPGs to a playable beta version - a pro wrestling RPG, and a Star Wars RPG built on d20 Modern/Future.

I'm running a Pathfinder 2E campaign right now about resettling the Sarkoris Scar, with custom brewed town and exploration rules. Custom brewing systems is my jam.

I'm hoping to hone the process of planning and running games to deliver a top-tier consistent experience to customers at my game store.

My favorite die is the d7 from Game Science.
 

Wolf

Member
Wizard of Story
Not really new but I'm back "from the dead".

Me signing up for the new Adventure Building Workshop (which I'm super stoked for btw) made me come back to this place. I'm already a lifetime Campaign Logger subscriber - although my usage went down to 0 (as did my gaming) with the beginning of COVID19 - which is why I had an account.

I'm from (near) Cologne, Germany and have been a GM for ... multiple years now. I used to run two campaigns, one Eclipse Phase and another Blade in the Dark campaign. The Eclipse Phase campaign died (which was completely my fault), I'm just no longer into crunch-heavy games, especially after Blades showed me the light. The Blades campaign is still alive but on ice with the pandemic happening, and I'm really hoping to spice up things with the workshop. Especially because I'm kinda burned out on prep. 😕

My favorite die is the d20. It's just iconic of the hobby as a whole. 🙂
 

Wanderer

Member
Wizard of Story
Hi everyone, I'm Peter from near Vancouver, BC, Canada. I'm originally from the UK but have been living here for seven years now.

I've been playing an GMing RPGs since the mid-80s and have played maybe 20 or 30 systems in my time but have only GM'd D&D, Savage Worlds and GURPS. I hate reading rules and so I don't know many games well enough to run them confidently.

I guess my favourite die is the d20, but I have a lingering affection for the under-appreciated d12 and a large d100 I was given by a friend who gave up RPGs - it's not very practical but it is fun.
 

aahz

New member
Platinum WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Hi
I'm Malcolm from Pullman Washington. I started RPGing in 1978 and really last GM'd seriously around 1995 (Champions).

Now I'm old, with a wife and 2 daughters (15 and "almost 11"), working full time, and working on my 4 year degree in computer science, so great time to add something else to my study list right?

Anyway, I'm excited to revisit a hobby that I have loved for more than 4 decades but not been able to partake in for the last 2 and a half.

I'll answer to Malcolm or Aahz (Couldn't believe that my old OryCon name was still available)

If I have to pick a favorite die, because of all the Champions, it would be the humble 6 sided.
 

Gambrius

Member
Wizard of Story
Hello everyone!

My name is Gregor and with 41 years it seems to me, that I'm the youngest one here on the forum =) I'm from Austria, Vienna and I*ve been GMing since about 30 years. I started to play D&D 2e in 1991 as a young teenager, followed by Midgard, GURPS, MERS, Shadowrun, D&D 3e & 3.5e, Runequest 2e, Cthulhu...
In 2006, on a trip through eastern Canada, I bought my first Ars Magica 5e book in Ottawa (visiting my auntie there) and got totally enthralled by the setting and design. After experimenting a few years with the system I started a long-term campaign (all home-brew), which now is in it's 8th year of playing, while I'm currently preparing for our 90th !! Session (60 of them with the same three players) We focus storytelling, in character personification & emotional/dramatic play.

Since I`m so used to them I love the D10s - they don't roll too far and can be used either as percentage dice or .. whatever =) I just like them.
 

ejnotts

Member
Wizard of Story
I've had an idea for a horror adventure that I've been toying with for years now and I find that I'm paralysed by not knowing how much detail to include in the building. And also by not understanding how open or controlled the final scenes should - or even whether I should plan for the final scenes. Overthinking has really held me back.
Not sure this will help with the overthinking, but what's helped me with horror settings in the past has been The Trajectory of Fear. It really allowed me to plan encounters and ratchet up the emotion in the right way.

For what it's worth, I'd suggest not planning final scenes until you're close to the adventure finale - trying to plan too far in advance risks players doing something unexpected, resulting in a lot of excellent, well-planned, but irrelevant material, which can get seriously demotivating for a GM. @JohnnFour 's Loopy Session Planning might help with this - and I imagine it will be covered as part of the masterclass :)
 

saps

Member
Wizard of Story
Not sure this will help with the overthinking, but what's helped me with horror settings in the past has been The Trajectory of Fear. It really allowed me to plan encounters and ratchet up the emotion in the right way.

For what it's worth, I'd suggest not planning final scenes until you're close to the adventure finale - trying to plan too far in advance risks players doing something unexpected, resulting in a lot of excellent, well-planned, but irrelevant material, which can get seriously demotivating for a GM. @JohnnFour 's Loopy Session Planning might help with this - and I imagine it will be covered as part of the masterclass :)

I hadn't seen The Trajectory of fear, Ed. Thank you, that's a really interesting article. I think it will be very useful.

And I think you're right about not planning final scenes. I think my problem is that (having experienced the brain freezing horror of seeing what happened when I didn't plan anything like enough before a couple of games) I now have a totally unrealistic and impractical sense of the detail and structure I need to have in place. It's this kind of hurdle that I'm hoping to be able to knock over in future rather than trying to jump over it.
 

Brian P

Member
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
This is exciting!

As most it seems, I played D&D and all the other TSR rpg's back in the day with a good helping of the original Battle Tech. I GM'd mostly. Then after college, life got busy and I forgot RPG's existed, I didn't know game stores existed. I was out of gaming. Fast forward a decade-plus and I remembered how much I enjoyed playing D&D so I threw up a few fliers and started a local game. Luckily a few experienced GM's jumped on board and I was introduced to the 3.5 system. What happened to THAC0 ?!

I loved it. 3.5 was great. But situations changed and fast forward another decade or so and I go looking for another d&d game. Only now nobody is playing D&D anymore. Its a game called Pathfinder. I started playing that, moved again, only now I know about game stores. The game store had these regular games called 'Pathfinder Society'.

I loved it. I played with an amazing group of players who had been playing RPG's for decades. A couple of them were writers for RPG's. Venture captains, just a great group of experienced players who really showed me a high level of play.
I started GMing a home game again. I've only run published adventures but am committed to building my own adventures. I'm a veteran and it is weird, but my experiences have caused me to not have an imagination. As if my brain is not capable of playing 'imagination'. As the years tick by its been getting better and my creativity is growing.

As for published adventures I've run the entire megadungeon DCC Castle Whiterock (that took a year), Lost Mines of Barakus, and a lot of one-shots - I've enjoyed AAW Mini Dungeons as a goto. Currently, I am GMing a 5e game for the same gaming group from high school. Most of them haven't played since so this has been a great blast. The very first day they split the party. N00bs.

I'm very interested in adventure writing of my own. I've attended quite a few seminar panels on the subject and have bookmarked all of the youtube videos out there, but keep getting stuck with the creativity. It's there. It's just pretty blocked up. BTW - there is rather new set of lectures out by Jason Bulmahn on youtube on the subject of adventure writing and GMing that are the best I have seen on the subject. Until this course, of course. :)

I live in MD. I'm originally from Alaska but I'm ex-military and my wife is active duty so the longest I've lived anywhere is 5.5 years at the same location.

I have a massive pdf library of RPG systems, adventures, supplements that I want to try but lack the regular gaming group to play. So much material - so little playing. Fantasy Grounds/Roll20 anyone? I have started playing online this year mainly out of necessity.

Looking forward to this class and the interaction with everyone and their experience.

- Brian
 
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JochenL

CL Byte Sprite
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Borderland Explorer
Fantasy Grounds/Roll20 anyone?
Hey, we might get a group running among us?! What timezone is MD? (And for what is MD standing)? I am at UTC+1 (in the summer UTC+2).

EDIT: and you would have to cope with a heavy German accent :)
 
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ahvdesign

New member
Wizard of Story
Hello!

My name is Alex. I'm in New York, USA. I'm currently a GM for a couple of Dungeons & Dragons 5e campaigns. I'm actually an aspiring game designer and have been studying game design almost daily for roughly 8 years. Can't believe I slept on tabletop games for so long! I've been GMing for about a year now, but not steadily. We skip weeks and I also play in a friend's campaign once in a while instead of running mine. Favorite dice is the 12 sided. It's just powerful!
 

Brent Romans

Member
Platinum WoA
Wizard of Story
Wow, so cool to see a community like this! I've been GMing for about five years. I've mostly run Pathfinder games with my friends in that time but have recently tried 5E and found its greater simplicity (through the advantage/disadvantage and bounded accuracy mechanics) to be pretty appealing.

I've generally been content to use published adventures and tinker/adapt them to what I want. But it's been harder trying to adapt my vast library of PF/3.5 adventures for 5E. Johnn's pitch for his new Adventure Building course seemed right up my alley -- Is it a pain when your players go off-script? Yes! Is it exhausting trying to go full improv? Definitely! -- Being able to come up with cool custom adventures -- while still being able to cherry pick the best stuff from published adventures -- is something I'd like to be able to do.

I live in California. I don't have a favorite die. But my least favorite is definitely the d4. It's unpleasant to hold and unpleasant to roll. And the best you can get is a 4!
 

knoppi

Well-known member
Platinum WoA
Gold WoA
Wizard of Story
Borderland Explorer
Ahoi, I'm Jan, currently living in Munich, Germany. Kind of curious to scan through the forums.

I've been doing roleplaying games since ~1995 with more and less intense periods. Right now, I'm going through some kind of renaissance, trying out a lot of new systems (Modern AGE, Fantasy Age, Fate). Before that we had a very long running game of Fading Suns.
Since I grew up with the most popular german system Das Schwarze Auge, the d20 for me represents role-playing, so that's my favourite dice.
 

JochenL

CL Byte Sprite
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Borderland Explorer
I'm on East Coast time USA (Maryland). -4 UTC

This will be a great group of players.
A difference of 5 to 6 hours should work on Fridays & Saturdays. (y)
 

Dan Wholeridge

New member
Platinum WoA
Hi, my name is Dan and I am in Northern Virginia. I started GMing D&D in 1978 and found that I loved FRP but I felt that the rules could use some improvement. Today I use a home-brew system without classes or levels and with a die-roll mechanic loosely based on Sorcerer. My favorite die is the 10-sider, which is the only die I use in my system. (Attacker and Defender each roll a handful of d10s and compare the resulting die pools.)
 
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tkingwv

New member
Wizard of Story
Good evening everyone,

I'm Tom, and I'm a game addict. I've been one since the early 80s with the Red Box and Basic D&D. My addiction has now grown to include Fate, Dresden, D&D (5th Ed), Pathfinder (1st Ed), and a couple more shelves of materials and game systems. Not to mention my ever growing board game collection.

I've been a GM for most of my experience as a gamer, and though I have that experience I always feel it's good to learn new techniques and sharpen the saw. Lately I have been inspired to run games, but weak on the adventure parts. My stories end up short and rambling at the same time.

I'm hoping this new adventure design course will help me broaden my strokes, help with interlocked campaigns, and get my adventure design mojo back.

My favorite die is the D20, followed closely by the D10. Can't forget the Fudge/Fate dice either. Okay apparently I'm addicted to dice too.

Looking forward to working with all of you.

Tom
 

El Condoro

Member
Wizard of Story
Hi, my name is Duane and I live in Melbourne, Australia.

I've been playing D&D since 1980. My introduction to the game was rolling a character for Keep on the Borderlands and falling down a pit to my death in the first 5 minutes of play. Ignominious beginning but my continued adherence to the game through 5e is testament to its appeal and longevity.

I'm really looking forward to the Your Adventure Building Master Game Plan (can we get an acronym for that?) and rekindling some of the spark of those heady early days of D&D.

Cheers
 

lehrman

New member
Gold WoA
Wizard of Story
Hi all, my name is Michael. I‘ve been GMing since March of this year, and playing since March of last year. Super new. Having a blast. Currently I’m running a game that was supposed to transition to Hoard of the Dragon Queen, but has morphed into its own home brew mess.

My favorite die is the d12 because it’s like a tiny d20 that usually rolls way better for me. I’m here to learn and one day, hopefully, I’ll have some wisdom and stories to pass on.

Thanks for having me!
 
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manu

Member
Wizard of Story
Hi,

My name is manu, currently in Geneva switzerland :)
I've been playing since 94 and GMing since 95, started with warhammer then some ins/mv and settled on GURPS.

I'm just out of a ten years hiatus (between college years and last year when the neighbor student rekindled my passion)

my favorite dice is D6 because you always find some, anywhere (and if you don't you can use the sides of a pencil)

Looking forward to that master plan.
 
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