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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fox Lee" data-source="post: 6129129" data-attributes="member: 4346">I had a female friend bring me to a local gaming club when I was in high school, in around 1996. My mum was pretty worried about it, because she was still on the tail end of her religious phase; she had been bullied into believing all sorts of crap about the Evils of Fantasy, despite the fact that she herself was a a lover of Lord of the Rings, Pern, David Eddings, Julian May, and everything else easygoing 70s kids were likely to have encountered.My very first decision as a gamer turned out to be fundamentally indicative of my "thematics are your own" approach to game systems; I took somebody else's abandoned AD&D2 male human ranger, figured I'd have more fun playing a female elf, wrote that in instead, and had fun. My other character at that time was in an unnecessarily ridiculous Judge Dredd campaign (really unnecessarily. Her name was Judge Hairylegs.). For me, this was the "Hollywood tough girl" phase of character building; everybody (well, except Judge Hairylegs) was a hot, smart, independent young woman who yelled at men for ogling her big boobs even when she herself chose to wear sexy revealing clothes, and would inevitably have something horrible happen to her so she could be emotional and important. Ugh, I am embarrassed by that phase. In my defence, I was like 13.So I played lots of stuff over the first few years, including Shadowrun, d6 Star Wars, TMNT, 2e Ravenloft, Call of Cthulhu, Palladium, a bit more Judge Dredd, and a homebrew system one of the guys made. When 3e D&D was  launched, it was divisive enough to make some of my more grognardy gaming companions retreat a bit from the club, but solid enough that most games we started after that point began to default to it. Exceptions were a few systems/settings that leaned more towards our anime interests (Usagi Yojimbo and BESM). Unfortunately my particular group within the club also started going through some awkward bad blood at that point; my self-esteem was so trashed in high school that I had never really considered how being the only girl present might have been relevant to several my male friends, and the tension was not helpful. There were a few genuine fights after I brought my boyfriend along on the grounds that I reckoned he'd be a good GM (turned out he would, though dumping him headfirst into finishing somebody else's BESM game was in retrospect a bad choice). For me, this was the "playing broken baby bird boys" phase of characters; I started one emotionally damaged prettyboy and never really got to play through all of his development, so I made another and another until everybody was thoroughly sick of them.It was also when I first planned to run a game - a Legend of Zelda campaign running in BESM - though it never actually happened thanks to the size of the potential group, me and now-fiancee having to leave the club for work reasons (though we still played regularly in games that could come to us). For me, this was the era of "actually playing nicely rounded characters"; I had matured enough that my female characters were no longer hypocritical action movie cliches, and my male characters were no longer worthlessly emo waifs. Memorable faces were Sidhe Smith, a hammer-toting half-elf blacksmith who had unofficially adopted the younger characters in the party; Cayden Willowby, a shield-bearing human paladin raised by halflings; and Kyrie Bladeborn, a stoic fist-fighting half-giant police officer with one fake arm.In the year or so we were away, financial issues with finding insurance (what insurance company knows what a "Role Playing Club" is anyway?) finally managed to kill the club; what was left of it merged with the gaming club at university nearby, and when work issues eventually went away, that's where me and now-husband wound up. We were very solidly invested in 3e at that point, to the degree that we had developed a ton of homebrew/custom setting stuff for it, so we had a strong trend toward playing that (though we did a little d20 Modern as well). Most GMing was done by husband at this stage, to the point where he was often running multiple campaigns at once. We had also begun to pick up 4e; though highly sceptical of it at first, but the GMing tools won over those of us who ran games, very quickly indeed. For me, this began the "modern age" of characters; I more or less alternate between tough girl and pretty boy, with an eye towards trying not to make the same archetype too often within that mould.I finally did run my first game right on the tail end of D&D3.5e, a heavily-homebrewed Bleach campaign that went quite nicely until two of our players had to move away. Since then, our group has almost exclusively run/played 4e campaigns, though there are often rumblings about d20 Modern or Exalted. Currently I am two modules deep (having skipped the second) into War of the Burning Sky, albeit a heavily homebrewed version where Leska is a male religious zealot and Simeon is a a strict English-accented headmistress <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

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