D&D General Tell us about yourself

[OB1]

Born in Cologne, Germany in 1975 to American parents, my dad's buisness took our family to Atlanta, Paducah and finally St. Louis through my childhood. As a storyteller at heart (fueled by my love affair with Star Wars), I went to college in STL for Film Production and made my way out to Los Angeles in 1998, working on various TV shows and films while trying to get my big break as a screenwriter.
I moved up to the mountains north of LA in 2004 and moved my focus to marketing and promotions for the studios, eventually finding my way to a startup doing augmented reality experiences tied to blockbuster films in 2017, where I work today.
Always interested in Sci-Fi and Fantasy, D&D came in and out of my life since I was about 13, until 5e, when my wife and a group of our friends started playing regularly after all getting addicted to the Critical Hit podcast back in 2013. We've been playing 10-12 hours a month ever since. Being able to exercise my storytelling impulse in the game as a DM has scratched that itch that brought me out to LA originally.

 

[James Gasik]

47 (for a month longer at least) from Illinois. Spent my early years in the urban sprawl of the south suburbs of Chicago, and later Joliet. It was in Joliet that I first encountered Dungeons & Dragons, as the public library had several 1st Edition books, that I fell in love with. Then moved to Kankakee county, a more rural area to the south- and I hated it. No hills, no trees, nothing to do, no place to go- I went from being able to ride my bike anywhere I wanted to go to...zilch.

Then at a garage sale with my mom, I found it- the 1st Edition DMG. The cover was slightly water damaged and battered, but the pages were in great shape. I brought it to school to read at study hall, and a kid walked up saying "I want to play that game". And that's how it started.

I was a DM from the very beginning, and I had NO IDEA what I was doing- I just wanted to tell stories. I bought 2nd Edition the instant it came out (assuming that this naturally was an improved version of the game- the reality is...a little bit yes, a little bit no). Back then, I was a rules lite kind of guy, but soon I had players running roughshod over me, and that's when I decided to sit down and read the rulebooks cover to cover.

I've been a "rules guy" ever since, as I discovered a love for how systems work, and what the thought processes behind their creation were. If a game designer wrote down their thoughts in an article or interview, I made sure to read it.

When the game started to get stale (and it felt like everyone playing was a grubby powergamer), I got out of D&D to start playing other games. Vampire the Masquerade, GURPS, Rolemaster, Palladium, and a slew of indie games most people have never heard of. But fantasy roleplaying was my first love, and when a friend swung by my work to tell me about 3rd Edition...I was hooked all over again.

I love D&D, even if it, the people in charge of it, and sometimes, the players, drive me crazy. I still try new games, but this is the one I always circle back to.

 

[Oofta]

Born and raised on a farm in southern Minnesota, graduated from High School with the biggest class (and one of the last before the school consolidated) they had seen for a while, a whopping 28 kids. Started playing D&D when a friend's brother brought this new game back from college in 76(?) with dwarven fighters, hobbit thieves, elven fighter mages and the only alignments law and chaos.

We didn't really know what we were doing but all of us were fans of Tolkien and various fantasy authors. We switched over to the blue box basic set when it came out and then AD&D and I continued to play of and on in college. After graduating and getting into software development had a dry spell for a while until a group formed at work and I joined a game with my wife to be.

The rest is history. Moved around some (well, too much) because jobs dried up where we were largely because I tried to stick with the same company that was slowly shrinking. But we formed new groups everywhere or got involved in public games and it was a great way to meet people. Ran one game day and helped run another game days during the transition from 3.5 to 4E and then for most of 4E's run. About the time 5E came out the game days were dying and I had switched to home games. A few years ago we moved to a suburb of Minneapolis in Minnesota to be closer to family. We started up yet another home group I run and my wife runs a game for me, my sister, nephews and 1 significant other.

Back in High School I did a lot of traditional dungeon crawls, with fun things like a dungeon who's hallways spelled out things like DOOM and DEATH. But even back then I started mapping and building out a world that I still use to this day. Once I got back into D&D in the 90s, our DM eventually burned out and rather than just admitting it decided to see how unfun he could make the game before we quit. It didn't take long. Since then I've been DMing about half the time, either in public games (from Living City to Adventurer's League) or with my wife running a game.

Outside of gaming, last year was pretty momentous because I retired and turned 60. Thankfully everyone we game with is vaccinated so we're back to gaming in person, although we don't get together as often as I would sometimes like. Oh, and we have too many cats.

 

[payn]

The skinny on Payn;

• 42 year old borderline Gen x'er
• Born and raised in the Twin Cities Minneapolis/St paul, Minnesota (Whats up Oofta!)
• Purified in lake Minnetonka
• Bourbon > Scotch > Whisky
• Play Guitar sorta well, play piano sorta bad
• Have a Masters of Science in Technical Communication
• I am a project Manager for Target Corp (Come June will be 20 years with Target!)
• First got into RPGs with Nintendo Power's Final Fantasy Guide
• Late bloomer didnt really RPG until late 90's and didnt really really RPG until 2010's
• Favorite RPGs currently; Traveller, Pathfinder classic, Forbidden Lands Free League.

 

[el-remmen]

When I first joined the boards, before they were the ENWorld forums and were just part of Eric Noah's Unofficial 3E News site (circa 1999), I used the handle Nemmerle (like the archmage from The Wizard of Earthsea) but after one of the many forum collapses back then (around 2001 or 2002), when I re-signed up I put my name backwards on a lark and it stuck.

I'm Puerto Rican and grew up in Brooklyn, NY and while I have lived other places, it is where I lived longest and most often - that is until 2019 when I moved to Pittsburgh with my wife (who is from here). I've been playing (and mostly running) D&D games since the summer I turned 12 (1983 - so yes, I turned 50 last year).

During my first stint on the boards I was a web developer for a company that owned a myriad of trade mags making the move from print to online, but my return to grad school and change in careers coincided with my not running games (though I played in one or two sporadically). I got my PhD in English Literary Studies with a focus on Post-War and Contemporary American Literature and Popular Culture (you can get a sense of my public scholarship from my blog The Middle Spaces anything else is behind stupid paywalls) in 2014- near the end, before giving up on academia, I was focused almost completely on comics studies and was on the board for the International Comics Art Forum. However, when the tenure track job market turned out to be even worse than I was warned it would be and when I decided the contract faculty job I had at NYU was not necessarily a great fit, I agreed to the move I mentioned above. I have been unemployed ever since. Thankfully, between my wife's successful-ish career as a YA novelist and some freelance editing on my part we've been able to make ends meet - since the pandemic made finding a new job and switching careers very difficult.

My wife is not into RPGs but we have a huge board game collection (which she prefers) and play games on the Nintendo Switch regularly.

I am currently running two 5E games based on Ghosts of Saltmarsh. One is a local game my wife's good friend talked me into starting (and whom helped me recruit people) and the other is a remote game with friends as far afield as Los Angeles and Milan, Italy - which I started after the pandemic forced my first game to be temporarily remote and I got the hang of running that way. I still prefer in-person gaming and I don't use a VTT.

I love painting minis and making terrain and you can follow some of those projects and general D&D reflection on my instagram account: HOW I RUN IT.

 

[Hawk Diesel]

I like cats. That's probably 90% of who I am.

Shoot! I forgot to mention my two cats! Lord Baelish and Tad Cooper.

 

[pukunui]

Shoot! I forgot to mention my two cats! Lord Baelish and Tad Cooper.

I forgot to mention mine as well: Missy and Rascal. They are four month old siblings. (My children named them.)

I’m a dog person myself (had a miniature dachshund I named Memphis Belle when I was a kid), but I’ve grown to like these kitties.

 

[FrogReaver]

I forgot to mention mine as well: Missy and Rascal. They are four month old siblings. (My children named them.)

I’m a dog person myself (had a miniature dachshund I named Memphis Belle when I was a kid), but I’ve grown to like these kitties.

I once worked with a woman who was fascinated with minutiaer snauchzer butts being cute. She even joined a Facebook group for it.

 

[Brotton Goodfellow]

I’m a 36 year old Canadian. Born and raised in big city Ontario, who has eventually moved to medium city British Columbia. Currently in my 13th year of policing (yes we have crime in Canada).
Started out with Palladium’s “After the Bomb” and a homebrew zombie game my brother ran for just me. From there cut my teeth on 3.5E as both player and DM. Enjoyed a few years of 4th Edition before jumping head first into 5e. These days I’m looking more into the OSR and using some of the older editions ideas and principles for my next campaign, which will be the mega-dungeon of Barrowmaze.

 

[Lyxen]

Born in France in 1964, so a while ago now. Always loved to read and started to write software really young especially for France at the time. Also read lots of science and discovered about D&D in the scientific press, just a very short article that I've been unable to find since then. But also incited me to read the Lord of the Rings, about the only fantasy widely available in France at the time. Then went on a fateful linguistic trip to the US, talked to the family about D&D, and they managed to find and offer me the basic set. My english was too bad at the time to run it for the boy of the family and his friends, but started right way with high school friends when coming back, and been playing ever since. Did a number of work experience in software before graduating from Ecole Centrale, then went on to work as a software, then systems engineer for a large French company, then branched into product management, then pure management. Started heavy LARPing in parallel to TTRPG, organised large events and ran multi-years campaigns. Got married, one, then two, daughters, moved to the UK where our third daughter was born. Stayed 5 years in the UK, great time there, lots of roleplaying with new friends. Went back to France, stayed a few years, then moved to Australia. Branched into managing into different domains, security and defense. Did some roleplaying there, but mostly kept playing with my old friends over Roll20. Then moved to Singapore, alone with my wife since my daughters were in the UK (now Australia), Italy and Canada. Ended the marriage, moved back to France, found another partner. Resumed playing mostly face to face until Covid hit. Now CTO of a French-US Joint Venture in the Defence sector for NATO (so very hot these days with Ukraine), quite happy but getting a bit tired of the politics at high level in company and parent companies, looking forward to retirement in a few years to increase the level of roleplaying and LARPing, and taking care of grandchildren.

Edit: Forgot to mention that, for my most frequent games today, our weekly campaigns, 3 other players are friends that I've known since engineering school back in '84, so not far from 40 years ago. And 2 people are also people that I've been organising LARPs with/for since '88. And although we have younger players and others recruited more recently, especially in other games, I think it's great that some gaming friendships lasted for that long, especially with my long overseas periods...