Tyler

he/him

5.0

(5)

Timezone

America/los Angeles

Language

English

About Tyler

Hi! I'm a screenwriter with 10+ years of experience as a player with 6 of those years either actively DMing or studying storytelling techniques to make my games more engaging. I currently have two home games of Public Access where I test different narrative and interactive techniques to see how my players engage with style and mechanisms in a low stakes rules-light setting. Outside of gaming, I play bass and love miniature painting!

At a glance

Less than a year on StartPlaying

Highly rated for: Storytelling, Creativity, Teacher

Featured Prompts

I became a GM because

I love creating puzzles and scenarios for people to dig their teeth into, and GMing combined my puzzle-master cravings with my love of narrative storytelling in a beautiful way. GMing has also made me a vastly better writer in my free time!

My favorite books are

Dune, 1984, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Can you count House of Leaves? If so, add House of Leaves

My favorite system of all Time is

Public Access! It does a great job of making players feel helpless (a positive in a horror setting) despite the large amount of agency they are cursed with. I love how easy it is to pick up the system both as a GM and as a player, and I wish it was more popular/a household TTRPG name w/ players

How Tyler runs games

I love to roleplay with my players and allow them many opportunities to roleplay amongst themselves as a party. When combat arises, I always try to make the environment dynamic in some way so that it's not just a roll-off. I believe that games work best when the players have lots of possibilities to explore character, interact and invest in the world, and problem solve creatively. Additionally, I love when players supply me with dynamic backstories. I submit to the "knife" theory of character. The more you give me in terms of character, the more I can torment that character with interesting moral dilemmas and "you can't save them all" scenarios.

Featured Prompts

I prep by

Putting on some hype-up music (Primus sucks!), reviewing my notes from last session, and getting a good stretch in before I sit at the table for roughly four hours.

My favorite trope is...

"Lando!" I encourage my players to include an old friend or connection in their backstories who may or may not still like them. That character very well may appear in the campaign and help (or secretly hinder) the party, a la Lando Calrissian in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

My games focus on...

Character. It's very important to me that the PCs feel like they are part of the world and not visitors. As a result, I take backstory review very seriously and encourage creative and unorthodox thinking for my players at every level of the game.

Tyler's ideal table

My tables, first and foremost, are a hate-free zone. My tables are typically where inside jokes are forged. The games and the scenarios are still taken seriously, but there's definitely room for brevity and the errant bit. I believe in the healing power of "Yes, and..."

Featured Prompts

I love it when a player

Attaches to an npc! In my home Public Access game, the players are absolutely in love with a librarian named Ms. Stoneglad who really hasn't done much for them except be a whole vibe and a half.

I think it's a red flag when players...

Steamroll over other players and what they want out of the game. We are all here to enjoy a collaborative experience together, and we are all the heroes in the story. If the majority of the party wants to diplomatically engage the Bugbear Prince, and you cast fireball on him unwarranted, not cool!

I think min/maxing...

is fine to a limit. It makes sense to want your character to perform as well as you can, but my tables emphasize the roleplay in roleplaying game. During each stage of character creation, I ask "Why this choice for this character? How did they get this skill?" and so on.