Luke
he/him
5.0
(8)
Timezone
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Identity
About Luke
I've been hooked on TTRPGs since 1990 when I stumbled upon some friends playing D&D. Afterwards, I immediately bought the Rules Cyclopedia and have been GMing games of all types ever since. During the pandemic, GMing TTRPGs online rekindled and maintained strong relationships with my high school friends. This really crystallized for me the vital role I could play. Like any sports coach, theatre director, or scout leader, I can create and nurture a space for community, recreation, and shared struggle. And I love doing this through TTRPGs because they create shared stories, which taps into a shared human truth: we are a narrative species. We thrive and strive based on the stories we cherish. TTRPGs give us the chance to collaboratively tell the stories we want to tell, while also engaging in play. And shared play is a chance to practice and fail without real-world consequences in a supportive environment. TTRPGs are so important to me not only because I get to be part of such freakin’ cool stories but also because they feed the souls of my players and me. I strongly believe that game mastering is a sacred and crucial role. I would do it for free if not for groceries and bills. So come join my table. Where else do you get to hear lines like, "I want to throw my magic acorn to try to sprout a tree into Cthulhu's eye." I strive to create a safe and inclusive space to try all your so-crazy-it-just-might-work shenanigans.
At a glance
Less than a year on StartPlaying
Highly rated for: Inclusive, Storytelling, Beginner Friendly
$30 per session
Featured Prompts
I became a GM because
I wanted to share the experience of playing TTRPGs with all my friends and I wasn’t willing to wait for someone else to take the time to learn how to GM.
My favorite system of all Time is
A year ago, I would have said Fate Accelerated. I love it’s narrative focus and bare bones mechanics. But Daggerheart is proving to be a nice middle ground. Lots of narrative focus and less of the crunch and slog of D&D.
When I'm not running games I'm...
often listening to actual plays while cooking, cleaning, and keeping house. I like to exercise when I have the energy for it. I love to read, mostly sci-fi, horror, and urban fantasy.
How Luke runs games
Because this game is inherently social, I like to make sure we take some time to check in as friends and real people. I want to create a space where the players can build and maintain friendships. In the game itself, I love interesting, compelling encounters that happen for a reason and have stakes. I enjoy using interesting maps, intriguing lore, and thrilling adversaries to inspire you to fun, exciting, bold approaches and strategies. I want to give you a chance to use the cool things on your character sheet, but also come up with surprising other options. I want to create situations that invite you to embody the personality you’ve dreamed up for your character. I like systems that incentivize and reward role playing. If the system we’re using doesn’t already do it, I usually introduce home brew rules that will. I want my players and their characters’ choices to inform and shape the story we’re telling together. Puzzles in my games are less likely to be riddles and Zelda-style shrines (as much as I love those). Those are hard to come up with, and often feel contrived. I tend to favor puzzles that are simply a situation that is difficult. Three parties all want the same briefcase from the one shady seller. The meetup is in a crowded market full of innocent bystanders, guards, and hidden backup. Is it a heist? A chase? A con? A double-cross shootout? What will you do? I deliberately didn’t solve this puzzle so that you could surprise and impress me with your solution!
Featured Prompts
If my games were Movies they'd be directed by...
One Wachowski sibling and one Coen brother. The Wachowski sibling would bring the amazing action like in the Matrix. And the Coen brother would provide the interesting characters with powerful ambitions and poor impulse control.
Rules are...
A tool to help us suspend disbelief for the sake of the story while maintaining a sense of fairness about the outcomes of the choices we make. And subject to change if we agree on how the story SHOULD go.
Luke's ideal table
First and foremost, my ideal table is Inclusive. We welcome and respect your lived experience, whether that be LGBTQ+, person of color, rich or poor, or some intersection of identities. My ideal table is a group of people becoming better friends with the gameplay as gateway. They are different types of players who can appreciate each other’s play styles. They enjoy creative approaches, even when those approaches don’t work. Sometimes especially when they don’t work… We decide together what kind of story we want to tell. We use the rules to help us do it. We follow the rule of the cool when we want to take our story somewhere the rules don’t go. We are all here to play. Let me get academic for a moment and be specific. Play is: 1. Self-chosen and self-directed. 2. Intrinsically motivated—means are more valued than ends. 3. Guided by mental rules, but the rules leave room for creativity. 4. Imaginative. 5. Conducted in an alert, active, but relatively non-stressed frame of mind. But if you’re reading this, I don’t think I need to tell you: play is important. We take our fun seriously. 😉
Featured Prompts
I love it when a player
Surprises me! I love when a player comes up with an approach to a situation that I just didn’t see coming. Or an idea for a new direction for the story. Often I have spent a fair bit of time considering different ways a scenario might go. It’s nice when the story also surprises me.
Luke's Preferences
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Game Mechanics