Cass

she/her

4.9

(13)

Timezone

America/detroit

Language

English

Identity

LGBTQ+

Queer

Veteran

Disabled

Neurodivergent

Women/Femme Identifying

About Cass

Bottom Line Up Front: passionate and knowledgeable long-time dungeon master looking to become your dungeon master. You don't need to finish this bio; read it until you're hooked and then book me or sign up for one of my games! I'm not the best voice actor (yet!) but I am very good at narrative, encounters, characters, and rules. I am very LGBTQ+- and neurodivergent-friendly partly because I am both. I am an anarcho-humanist determined to appreciate people heedless of national, religious, ethnic, geographic, class, and other boundaries (but maximally respectful of personal boundaries). Session 0 is important to set expectations; ongoing communication is absolutely crucial to manage and maintain them. Look no further if you're looking for: an expert on tabletop RPGs and their systems and settings; a nerd that has read most of Wookieepedia (among many other fiction Wikis) and tons of Wikipedia; someone that can spend anywhere from one brief sentence to ten dense pages to describe a given person or place, at your request and preference; someone borderline obsessed with the concepts of player agency and choice leading the story of a game involving character statistics informing semi-random results; or someone that should've gotten their degree in philosophy instead of computer science. I am the DM for you! I've been engaging in cooperative imagination involving increasingly-elaborate characters and stories for 30+ years, running structured role-playing groups in a narrative/game-master capacity for 21+ years, and running crunchy games featuring a lot of challenging situations (including but not only combat) for 9+ years. Some of my reviews are from an extremely high-mortality Warhammer 40k game about Imperial Guardsmen drafted into the Inquisition, while others are from a cuddle-fest Dungeons & Dragons campaign about a half-naked halfling barbarian and shivering kobold chemist liberating the people of Ten Towns from Auril's everlasting rime. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about tabletop rules, encounters, stories, and worlds. I actively seek to pillage and repurpose ideas and tropes from books, games, shows, and movies. One of my first and most frequent questions for players is what they want for their character's story going forward. Unless I'm running a module for you (and even then to a lesser extent), my goal is to create a believable world to explore, with reasonable obstacles that challenge your characters' attempts to achieve their goals. We'll discuss how challenging those obstacles should be in session 0, and feedback will help me fine-tune to hit the sweet spot. This bio in progress; do you know me? Message me to contribute!

At a glance

2 years on StartPlaying

264 games hosted

Highly rated for: Creativity, Knows the Rules, Inclusive

Average response time: 24+ hours

Response rate: 100%

Featured Prompts

I got started GMing...

Because I couldn't find groups except for a few moderate-to-bad experiences that still fell apart, and I'd been kind of organizing cooperative imagination for most of my life anyway in one way or another. I started professionally because a free player said I should, and he pays for games now.

My favorite books are

I could make a much longer list, but I'll talk about some a bit: Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson (1). A good sample. Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson (2). Examines arkships, convincing. The Dark Forest, Cixin Liu. Examines Fermi paradox. Also Robin Hobb, Brian Staveley, Peter F. Hamilton, much more 1&2.

When I'm not running games I'm...

Thinking about the games I run or want to run (Majora's Mask inspired D&D, eventually). Other than that I play a variety of video games (mostly RPGs, Owlcat being a recent favorite), read a lot of books (see other prompt), and struggle to watch anything unless I'm too drained for anything else.

How Cass runs games

I'm great at characters and settings and not great at voices. I'm very comfortable with D&D's features like rules-light roleplaying, rules-heavy/crunchy tactical combat, resource management linked to that combat and exploration, and relatively few and/or simple puzzles. The ratio between pillars of the game (social, combat, and exploration for D&D) will depend heavily on player preference.

Featured Prompts

I deal with rules issues by...

Making a call immediately based on the text of the feature in question, then later noting it in my rules thread if I (or the table, I guess) feel it's a departure from rules-as-written. 90% of the time the group and I come to a consensus on interpreting the feature and play based on that.

I prep by

Finishing the recap for last week's game so the topics are all fresh in my mind, finding ambience to play, and making sure I've got enough problems to throw at the party that session. It's hard to predict how long players will take on anything, so I try to have an abundance of ideas ready to go.

My games focus on...

What the players choose to do and how they choose to do it, but the system we're using is going to filter that heavily. In D&D, you're going to be doing a lot of resource-based combat in between talking and looting. In 40k, you'll die. In WoD, you probably won't fight much at all.

Cass's ideal table

My tables are light-hearted, with jokes breaking up the dialogue and combat, and generally trend toward difficulty in combat but with a mostly heroic tone -- even bleak modules, like Icewind Dale, have rays of hope; even tough ones, like Tomb of Annihilation, have easy tavern scenes (to the extent the group wants them). My groups are a mix of heavy- and light-RP, and I'm generally comfortable running the game however you want to play it.

Featured Prompts

I love it when a player

Thinks about the game between sessions. If you've been working on a scheme in the intermission, I'm excited. Combat or negotiation tactics, same deal. If you're telling me things you want to happen to your character eventually (a betrayal, a moment of growth, whatever), I'm ecstatic.

I think metagaming...

can be fun to turn upside down. Sure you know vampires need to be invited inside, but your character doesn't... so you should invite that stranger in for tea! Delightful, like the opposite of being genre savvy; perhaps not ideal for your survival IC, but so much fun OOC.

I think min/maxing...

...is fine, even when it's kind of extremely silly like 15/15/15/8/8/8 point buy, as long as you lean into it and are operating within the rules. Weaknesses are fun, and/but adventurers that are bad at their jobs don't live long. In this way min/maxing can be a good thing inspiring creativity.