Apollo
he/him
5.0
(8)
Timezone
Language
Identity
About Apollo
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.
At a glance
Less than a year on StartPlaying
36 games hosted
Highly rated for: Creativity, Storytelling, Voices
Average response time: 1 hour
Response rate: 100%
Featured Prompts
I became a GM because
I love telling stories and engaging in worlds beyond my own. The fairy tales we weave reflect so much about us and about the ultimate matters of the universe than we often realize. It is the magic of an enchanted reality that is reflected back at us in these tales, not the fiction of the real world.
My favorite books are
The Lord of the Rings (including the Silmarillion) by J.R.R. Tolkien Out of the Silent Planet by C.S Lewis 14 by Peter Clines Gun with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi The Humans by Matt Haig ...and a great deal more (even some nonfiction ones!)
My favorite system of all Time is
GURPS
How Apollo runs games
I love character voices and roleplay, and work hard to bring that energy to all of the characters I play (whether as a GM or not). Additionally, I'm interested in telling stories, not necessarily in just kicking down the door and killing and looting. However, that doesn't mean those elements aren't there, it's just not the sole focus of my games. Generally, I think it is safe to say that I try to split my games into a 60/40 roleplay/combat ratio, but that's not always stable. That having been said, my style is often narrative and cinematic and isn't dependent solely on the rules to tell the tale. Players can expect an engaging, collaborative story, consistency in game mastering calls, and a focus on story beats rather than on getting to the next fight or loot zone. Furthermore, players should expect subtle and not so subtle characterization, narrative, and occasional exposition. If it helps, imagine my approach more along the lines of Star Wars: A New Hope rather than Star Trek: The Next Generation. That's not a knock on Star Trek, it's meant to provide an illustrative contrast to my style.
Featured Prompts
My favorite trope is...
heroes. I don't necessarily mean overpowered monster stabbing machines, but heroes. I love good guys and heroics and nobleness and valor and all that. Fairy tales, after all, are the truest stories in existence.
My games focus on...
the heroes' journies and how little things become heroic in the context of the story. I focus on themes like goodness, sacrifice, the power, and magic, of friendship, and the nature/power of narrative, especially within "traditional" lenses.
Rules are...
part of the TTRPG experience, just as they are a part of reality. Rules cannot, both in reality and in the context of a game, be interpreted woodenly. Rules are what develop the shared space for a shared narrative.
Apollo's ideal table
Featured Prompts
If you're into ___, you're going to love my table
collaborative story telling fun, epic shenanigans thrilling heroics
I think min/maxing...
is a little silly. I get that some people like optimizing or like power fantasies, but those have never appealed to me as part of a narrative game. Being too optimized is boring, and, frankly, tedious. Why play if every time you decide to build with the same magic items or feats?