Sufficiently Advanced Magic

I'm Apollo, a game master with about 20 or so years of tabletop gaming experience, and I've spent the majority of those years as the GM. My tables are often places focused on story-telling, collaboration, and a fun atmosphere. I let the dice help us a tell a story and use the rules as a guide through our worlds. The experience at my table is sometimes scary, sometimes epic, sometimes silly, sometimes heartwarming, but, I think, always fun. I have played a wide variety of systems, including Shadowrun 4th Edition, Vampire: The Masquerade, Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 and 5e, Pathfinder 1e, and GURPS 4th edition. All told, I've been playing story driven games of all types for about 30 years. My games have run the gambit from totally homebrewed settings with creative world building and development to running published adventures and campaigns. I have experience in, and enjoy, a wide array of genres, settings, forms, and styles. I've built and run games in varying granularity, but always with an eye to the characters achieving thrilling heroics and fun shenanigans. I find self-defined originality to be as cliche as a knight storming a castle and recognize the unpretentious fun present in both. I'm drawn to all elements of the medium, with a strong emphasis on characters, story, and the narrative experience. Having said that, I prefer my tables and my tales to have a destination or story in mind, with characters having arcs and moving through a storied world, rather than simply trying to live in one world for too long. I have run groups as small as two and as large as 12, but I tend to prefer 4 or 5 as the max these days. Additionally, I find that I don't mesh well with extreme optimizers and min-maxers. I'm not interested in solving the math of the game, I'm not one to indulge a power fantasy purely as power fantasy, rather I'm interested in telling stories, compelling, comical, heroic, and, frankly, fun. Finally, outside of gaming and game mastering, I'm always looking to learn something new. I've two degrees, a Bachelor's and a Master's, and am a devout Christian. I'm interested in re-enchanting the world, and telling stories as part of my larger personal mission.