Sorry for being late to thisāmuch to do! But Iām really glad youāre here, @Ouroboros-Binary02. Your history sounds really interesting and I hope you find it easy to share your experiences.
Hi, My game alias is DeReel. I enjoy games like ForTheQueen, Svart av kvalā¦ and Venture and I write one page storygames that I publish on itch, where you can find my storygamer life story and artgames where I express my relationship to writing games.
I also spend too much time skimming new games to find new ideas, and talking RPGs on discord 
Iām glad to see a community with people with the same specific interests as me 
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Hi, gang! Iām Canyon, aka PigDog. They/them pronouns. Just last week I moved to Columbus, Ohio, in the US, so if you know anyone who games in the area, please tell me!
I started playing rpgs when I was 12, just in time for the release of d&d 4e. I started by running it for my father, who couldnāt be bothered to learn most of the rules and always tried to ābreakā encounters. He had no experience playing rpgs but he was fascinated by their limitless potential. When I first played in a ārealā session, run by somebody else, I was pretty disappointed at the rigid structure and lack of creativity I saw. After that I ran games for my friends, sort of following the rules but mostly doing our own thing. This lead me to game design, and by the time I was in my mid-late teens I was writing my own games, only ever having played one āproperā session of d&d. (Thatās how I saw it at the time, anyway.)
I found out about the community called the OSR sometime around 2015; somehow the first I heard about it was when I had Fire on the Velvet Horizon recommended to me. Iāve mostly played challenge-focused d&d knock-offs since then. Just finished running (and still a player in) a Wolves Upon the Coast campaign. Currently also running a very low-key campaign for close friends and family which has morphed from OD&D to AD&D 1e over the course of about a year. In the near future I hope to run a very loose campaign with āoral tradition onlyā rules: just the procedures āwe all knowā, no specific edition, any character from any system welcome.
I have had a great time playing Monsterhearts, though itās been a while since Iāve played it and Iām not sure how Iād feel about pretending to be a horny teen nowadays. My best session of all time was a horror one-shot in Donāt Walk in Winter Wood. And Iāve enjoyed the few sessions of Mothership Iāve played as well.
As far as current projects: Iād really like to get into a phd program in philosophy this year. Iām writing a zine about wolves upon the coast with my co-gm. And Iām workshopping a two-player game about a vampire and their prey.
Finally, I help run Old School Table-Time, a discord server dedicated to open-table play.
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Oh, and Iād also like to get some more experience playing ānarrativeā games, preferably with someone more experienced than me who can offer live, constructive feedback.
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Welcome, @pigdog! I was really impressed by your ability to handle hard personal topics on Discord, so Iām really glad to see you here.
Regarding ānarrativeā games, Iāll fish an answer @Hans gave you on your Adept Play post where you said the same thing:
The more I play across a variety of games the more I think received categories that get used on the internet as if everyone knows what they meanālike ānarrative gameāāare worse than meaningless. They actively obscure and damage meaningful discourse.
I say that not to chide or correct you but just to say that I think we need to be on better footing regarding what weāre actually talking about. Rather, we can safely dump discussion of ānarrativeā play and mechanisms and just talk about the actual things and how they operate.
Generally Iām in agreement and I donāt see any point in taxonomising roleplaying like that.
However, all of that aside, I think what you mean is that youāre looking to find people to play games outside of your comfort zone, and youāll likely find them here. I myself am available to play anything youād like, time allowing.
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Yo! @Froggy, this place is great. I suppose nowās a good time to introduce myself.
Iām Hans. Had my first roleplaying experience in 2007, GMing a published Eberron adventure in 3.5 D&D for some high-schoolers I was working with at the time. Very shortly after this I discovered Dogs in the Vineyard and a range of other games, self-published and not. The fact that there were non-genre games really piqued my interest, as I read a ton growing up, but not much in āgenre fictionā. I dove in and had a ton of middling experiences with a few mountaintop highs, thinking that maybe thereās something to this roleplaying thing, I want there to be something to it, but Iām not sureā¦that was sort of the vibe. All mixed up with anxiety as I was just coming out of fairly hardline religion and was taught growing up that D&D was satanic.
I continued diving in pretty hard. I played a ton of games, helped host and run weekly one-shots at local gamestores, helped organize tracks at conventions, spent a lot of time on Story Games, a little time on the Forge near its end, and then some time on the short-lived Adept Press forums post-Forge. Favorites around this time were: Freemarket, 3:16, Silver & White, Polaris, InSpectres, Burning Wheel. The auteur model of the game designer was attractive to me, and me and my friends were always working on games. The social status of being a good designer was pretty high in these circles. I published a game about Eminemāstill proud of it, actually. I thought design was the real art.
I mostly took a break from play or even paying attention to what was āgoing onā in roleplaying (if we can say keeping tabs on Kickstarters and new games is what is āgoing onā, which it definitely isnāt) from about 2014 to 2017. The last few years Iāve been getting back into it in a big way, and Adept Play has been a huge part of that. Along the lines of what @sam_1234 said, I find it contains the only consistently cogent orientation toward and discussion of roleplaying on the internet. Ronās course āPeople & Playā is highly recommended to anyone who is engaged in this activity we call roleplaying.
Game design as a discrete activity no longer really interests me; I want to play, play a lot, and get better at play. Like Claudio I view design as artisanship. It is wonderful to create tools but the point is their use and their use should be centered. Play is the activity; design is auxiliary.
Iām 100% allergic to knowledge-destroying nonsense labels like traditional and indie and story game and narrative game &etc&etc&etc&etc. Same goes for taking seriously the notion that a group of consumers or fans is a ācommunityā. Iām not saying this place canāt be a community, to be clear.
Iām from the U.S. and have lived my adult life on the west coast. In late 2022 I escaped to Germany and am currently in intensive language courses. I really look forward to seeing what the English- and German-speaking roleplaying scenes are like here. I suppose at some point I will have to play Das Schwarze Auge. 
Most recent things Iāve been playing (tried to use pics but it didnāt work):
- Sorcerer
- Burning Wheel
- The Pool
- A Viricorne Guide
- Worlds Without Number
On my mind:
- The Pool: Generation Ship/Retrofuturism
- Gamma World 7e
- Beast Hunters & BH: Bloodcarved Edition. I have both of these and plan to do a deep read and comparison of them, and then decide which one Iād like to use.
- My Life With Master
- 4e
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Very interesting, Hans! Iāve read Silver & White with some fascination, and would love to learn more about it or play it sometime (if you have some experience with it, I invite you to start a thread!). Welcome!
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I hear that, Canyon!
Iām not allergic to such terms, and I know what you likely mean. I enjoy sharing tools and techniques for this kind of play goal; perhaps at some point we could chat and/or attempt some experiments. For instance, @Ouroboros-Binary02 and I were just reviewing a lengthy chat we had on the topic some years back - I think it can be really fruitful (and fun!) to look at various tools we have each developed to make this kind of thing work, and the resulting play tends to exciting as well as educational.
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@Hans, itās great to see you here. I donāt think I need to add anything to your post thereāagree with everything, despite our personal histories being very different. It might be good to compare them at some point.
Hans plays Paulina in our Silicon Valley Sorcerers series where Iām playing as the GM. You can find some actual play of that in the second half of this post:
Hi - Iām Jon Hastings. Iāve been playing RPGs since the mid-80s (with some gaps, though have been playing something consistently for the last 7 years or so) and have been talking about them online since 2001 or so (most recently and with the most amount of satisfaction at Adept Play). Favorite games over the years have been Marvel Super Heroes, GURPS Supers, Amber Diceless Roleplaying, The Burning Wheel, and Sorcerer.
More recently Iāve been interested in older games and games based on older games: the last few years have seen a lot of play of Champions Now, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, James Bond 007, Legendary Lives (and some other Fantasy Heartbreakers), and Tunnels & Trolls. And lots and lots of The Pool. Iāve been a little less active over the last few months, but am getting ready to start up a game of Bushido and hoping to play more Tunnels & Trolls.
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Hey everyone, Iām Lorenzo. Iāve been into RPGs for a long time, started with the Red Box 30 years ago, then took a break from the hobby and got back into playing about ten years ago. Iām into masterless, dicelessā¦ freeform games. I like story games and solo journaling games.
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Unfortunately my memories of Silver & White are circa 2011-12 so not much remains anymore. Iād totally play it with you, though!
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Thanks, Hans! Do you have a rules text?
Welcome, Jon and Lorenzo! Nice to see new and old faces here
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Nope! I did at one point but I donāt now and it seems Jackson took it off the internet, which is a very him thing to do.
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Moro kaikille,
Tommi, living in Horten, Norway, originally from southern/central Finland. I started roleplaying around 2000 with Miekka ja magia (first game mastering experience of two session showed me that planning things for players to do does not work), various homebrew games, and everything I found from the fine libraries of YlƶjƤrvi and later Tampere/Tammerfors. It did not really work, aside from one campaign with a homebrew system where dragons where coming back to the world.
Trajectory thereafter: Burning wheel and some other classic games from the Forge (still struggling to make these work), plenty of mediocre play with various games like Praedor, Cyberpunk, D&D 3 and relatives, fairly successful play in OSR style, now really successful wargamey OSR play in Coup de Greyhawk campaign. It is amazing to actually play in a group where everyone knows what they are doing and then does their best to do just that.
I also read some rpg theory (very widely understood) and write weekly summaries about it on my blog: teoriakatsaus ā ropeblogi . The language varies from week to week.
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Hi, Tommi! Nice to see you here!
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Nice to see you here, Tommi. Iāve been talking about our Sorcerer game here, if youād like to contribute.
A very important task, bringing games across language boundaries. Iām glad you do that and enjoy it too.
Thank you for your service!
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