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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 1036856" data-attributes="member: 99">Great thread.  It's funny how you gradually catalogue info about the various posters on the boards and form a mental concept of them.  Sometimes you're dead on and sometimes not even close.Anyway, I'm a very, very lucky man.It's not because I'm rich (far from it) or famous or extremely good looking.  I'm just fairly happy and I always have been.  My special gift from God was contentment.  Trust me when I say that it has it's downside (mostly that I'm not very ambitious).I'm now 32, married to a fantastic woman for 8 years and have a beautiful little girl who just turned 2.  I never finished college (there's the lack of ambition thing biting me in the butt again) but I managed to find a career as a commercial real-estate appraiser that doesn't require a degree.  I live in the same general community where I was born and I love North Carolina.  I've got a great group of friends, most of whom I've known for at least 10 years.  I game with many of them.It seems that I'm a people person and generally funny guy.  Don't know how I got that way, but I like it.  I host a lot of parties and love to just hang out, play all manner of games and chat with my friends about all sorts of things (which sometimes makes it hard to focus on our game sessions).  I listen to all kinds of music, but not a lot of heavy metal or rap, which makes me somewhat abnormal in the gaming community.  I guess growing up in the 70's gave me a taste for the more mellow, singer/songwriter kind of music and my CD rack contains a lot of Jackson Browne and Bonnie Rait.  You'll also find that it is overloaded with almost every album that Jimmy Buffett has recorded.  Maybe I'm so happy all the time because it's just hard to be mad or upset when you are listening to music about boats, beaches and bars.Other than rpg's my hobbies include reading (all kinds of stuff from fantasy & sci-fi to history to astronomy texts), computer games, camping, hiking, canoeing and scuba diving.I started gaming in around 1980 with D&D, tried most of the early games (Gamma World, Star Frontiers, etc.) and then left AD&D behind in favor of Rolemaster, just before 2nd edition came out.  I played RM fairly exclusively for about a dozen years and wound up co-writing a companion book (The Essence Companion) for the Role Master Standard System.  Just about the time our game group was getting burned out on the complexity of RM, I heard that WotC was about to release a new edition of D&D so I asked for the books for Christmas (I didn't really intend to play but I've rarely seen a game system that didn't have some idea worth stealing).  To my surprise, 3ED&D had an almost perfect mix of the elements we wanted in our games and soon the whole group switched over.I found ENWorld a short time later when I was looking for an answer to a rules question and I was captivated by the high level of discourse at the site and by the friendly nature of the people here.  It became one of the places that I stopped every day to check out rules threads and I soon became hooked on way too many story hours.  Eventually I started writing my own story hour, which I just recently finished.  Along the way I noticed that a lot of posters were from NC and I proposed a NC Game Day.  Before I knew it, I was in charge of the thing and I'm pleased to say that it went great.  The second NC Game Day is now coming up in a few weeks and I'm sure there will be many more to follow.To sort of bring this back to the purpose of the thread, the NC Game Day allowed me to meet a lot of ENWorlders in person and without exception they were a great group of people.  In some cases my mental concept of them was way off and some were pretty close.  But every one of them were nice people and I can't wait to see them again and meet more of you.It also sounds like there is a good possibility that Piratecat may come to game with us sometime in September and I'm thrilled at the prospect.Like I said, I'm a very, very lucky man. (wordy too)</blockquote>

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