Bryan E Rye
5.0
(7)
Timezone
Language
About Bryan E Rye
When I was 5, I would sneak my older brother's AD&D Dungeoneer's Survival Guide away and pore over the pictures of places strange, dark, and deep. The first game I ran was a duet session where my friend rolled up a 7th level character and I sent Baaz Draconians after him (we both loved Dragonlance). The first long-running AD&D campaign we finished ended after the party saved the world from the villain only to have one of their own betray them and destroy it anyway on his way to godhood. I've been game-mastering for over 30 years: AD&D, 3e D&D, Pathfinder, Star Wars Saga Edition. My friends and I have hold a lot of stories together – not a few of them have been epics. I love to go to a world, settle down, and stay awhile with fellow travelers.
At a glance
2 years on StartPlaying
45 games hosted
Highly rated for: Storytelling, Knows the Rules, World Builder
Featured Prompts
My favorite books are
The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, The Solar Cycle by Gene Wolfe, and the Lord of the Rings by Tolkien.
My favorite shows/movies are
Ikiru by Akira Kurosawa, the Original Star Wars Trilogy, and David Suchet's portrayal of Poirot.
How Bryan E Rye runs games
My campaigns are defined by sustained play that goes beyond a single main arc. When players fall in love with a world and its people, they should be able to explore and know them fully through playing in the Grand Campaign tradition, setting down roots and running multiple characters across decades of in-game time. Between the play styles of open sandboxes and linear railroads, I run living, lore-rich settings where history is in motion and players impact the world through meaningful choices. My NPCs are memorable and have motives of their own, and they don't just go to sleep while the PCs are out adventuring. There are real stakes including character and party death. Challenges arise organically, by circumstance, not by calculator, and combat is as tactical as the opposition makes it. For combat, I use a mix of theater of the mind and overhead camera with minis. I'm a proponent of consistent and reliable refereeing, the importance of time and resource management to deepen immersion, and characters as heroes who build communities (even if they're scruffy-looking nerf herders like Han Solo).
Bryan E Rye's Preferences
Systems
Game Mechanics