Welcomes and Introductions---Start here! šŸ‘‹

Great to have you, @Johann, @thekernelinyellow, and @perfischer!

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Hi everyone! Finally, I overcame some personal struggles and found the time and space to join this new space!

Iā€™m Matteo - passionate about RPG, cats, and so many other stuff. Iā€™m a (video)game designer by day and ever-GM by night. I really like to talk about rules, systems, and the way to convey a feeling or an image with them, playing around the table. So, a couple of years ago, I started to publish some small games (like many of you, I wrote games for my entire life, but now I like to share them with players worldwide).

The games of my youngest era

unosguardo [/grid] [grid]dd [/grid] [grid]cyberpunk[/grid] [grid]toon[/grid] [grid]coc[/grid][grid]download

The last games I played and enjoyed

trophy[/grid] [grid]agon[/grid] [grid]mausritter[/grid] [grid]bbay[/grid] [grid]blades[/grid] [grid]cyborg

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Welcome, Matteo, itā€™s great to have you here as well.

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Hello everyone!

My name is Andres Nicolas ā€œNicoā€ Zarta, and Iā€™m really happy to be here. I have been playing role-playing games for the past 18 years, and have enjoyed a wide variety of different experiences and styles of roleplaying. Iā€™m originally from Bogota, Colombia but I have been living in New York State/City, USA for the past few years.

I was invited by my friend @Paul_T, who for the past 5 or so years has been kind of a mentor figure when it comes to exploring different roleplaying paradigms outside of the more traditional systems. In my exploration of ā€œstory gamingā€, which is the paradigm I adhere to the most lately, I have come to fall in love with PbtA games, particularly those that follow closely the model of implicit conflict that AW outlines.

Lately I have also been exploring the OSR scene and its been really fun! Iā€™m happy to live in an age where different RPG cultures can be appreciated and enjoyed for their differences.

Iā€™m really passionate about the theory of RPGs and a voracious reader of all things The Forge, AdeptPlay and Lumpley Games. I will probably engage in conversations that address any topics that are closely related to those ā€œschoolsā€ of thinking.

I have lately played Apocalypse World, Old School D&D, Ironsworn Starforged, Avatar Legends, The Wolf Kingā€™s Son and Root RPG. I have also been getting into journaling games and I really enjoyed reading @PaulCzege 's ā€œThe Ink that Bleedsā€.

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What a kind introduction! <3 Welcome, Nico. Really nice to see you here!

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Sorry for being late to thisā€”much to do! But Iā€™m really glad youā€™re 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 :sweat_smile:

Iā€™m glad to see a community with people with the same specific interests as me :grin:

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Welcome @sam_1234 and @dereel!

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Hi, gang! Iā€™m 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 couldnā€™t be bothered to learn most of the rules and always tried to ā€œbreakā€ encounters. He had no experience playing rpgs but he was fascinated by their limitless potential. When I first played in a ā€œrealā€ 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 ā€œproperā€ session of d&d. (Thatā€™s 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. Iā€™ve 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 ā€œoral tradition onlyā€ rules: just the procedures ā€œwe all knowā€, no specific edition, any character from any system welcome.

I have had a great time playing Monsterhearts, though itā€™s been a while since Iā€™ve played it and Iā€™m not sure how Iā€™d feel about pretending to be a horny teen nowadays. My best session of all time was a horror one-shot in Donā€™t Walk in Winter Wood. And Iā€™ve enjoyed the few sessions of Mothership Iā€™ve played as well.

As far as current projects: Iā€™d really like to get into a phd program in philosophy this year. Iā€™m writing a zine about wolves upon the coast with my co-gm. And Iā€™m 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 Iā€™d also like to get some more experience playing ā€œnarrativeā€ 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 Iā€™m really glad to see you here.

Regarding ā€œnarrativeā€ games, Iā€™ll 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 meanā€“like ā€œnarrative gameā€ā€“are 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 weā€™re actually talking about. Rather, we can safely dump discussion of ā€œnarrativeā€ play and mechanisms and just talk about the actual things and how they operate.

Generally Iā€™m in agreement and I donā€™t see any point in taxonomising roleplaying like that.

However, all of that aside, I think what you mean is that youā€™re looking to find people to play games outside of your comfort zone, and youā€™ll likely find them here. I myself am available to play anything youā€™d like, time allowing.

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Yo! @Froggy, this place is great. I suppose nowā€™s a good time to introduce myself.

Iā€™m 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 ā€œgenre fictionā€. I dove in and had a ton of middling experiences with a few mountaintop highs, thinking that maybe thereā€™s something to this roleplaying thing, I want there to be something to it, but Iā€™m 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 Eminemā€“still 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 ā€œgoing onā€ in roleplaying (if we can say keeping tabs on Kickstarters and new games is what is ā€œgoing onā€, which it definitely isnā€™t) from about 2014 to 2017. The last few years Iā€™ve 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. Ronā€™s course ā€œPeople & 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.

Iā€™m 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 ā€œcommunityā€. Iā€™m not saying this place canā€™t be a community, to be clear.

Iā€™m 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. :slight_smile:

Most recent things Iā€™ve been playing (tried to use pics but it didnā€™t 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 Iā€™d like to use.
  • My Life With Master
  • 4e
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Very interesting, Hans! Iā€™ve 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!

Iā€™m 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, itā€™s great to see you here. I donā€™t think I need to add anything to your post thereā€”agree 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 Iā€™m playing as the GM. You can find some actual play of that in the second half of this post:

Hi - Iā€™m Jon Hastings. Iā€™ve 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 Iā€™ve 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. Iā€™ve 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, Iā€™m Lorenzo. Iā€™ve 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. Iā€™m 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. Iā€™d totally play it with you, though!

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Welcome, @Jon_H and @LorenZo-M !

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Thanks, Hans! Do you have a rules text?

Welcome, Jon and Lorenzo! Nice to see new and old faces here :slight_smile:

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