About me

** Because of Hasboro's/Wizards of the Coast's attempts to revoke the original OGL and replace it with an agreement that will effectively kill off all third-party content, I will be boycotting all Wizards content. This means that I will no longer be run any games of Dungeons & Dragons. ** As a kid, my introduction to roleplaying games were video game titles like Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. I found it really frustrating to be limited to only one of a few dialogue options, or when I was unable to do things that I really felt like my character would do in that situation. When a friend introduced me to tabletop roleplaying games, I was mesmerized by the limitless possibilities the genre offered. Unfortunately, that friend lived far away, and so I didn't have the opportunity to play. I really started playing tabletop roleplaying games in college, where my appetite to play quickly outpaced the available game masters in my friend group. I figured that if I wanted to play, I should just start my own game. I wanted to start off with a simple system, and didn't want to be restricted to just a kitchen-sink fantasy setting, so I picked up Fate Core. Soon I was running games set in all kinds of wacky homebrew worlds. As of right now, my system of choice is Pathfinder 2. I picked it up during Paizo's public playtest and absolutely fell in love. I'll also play 5e and I still have a soft spot for Fate, although through the years I found that I have some gripes with the system. I've made so many house rules for Fate that at this point it's basically another game entirely - so I'm working on my own system called the Wyrd Roleplaying System. (which I'm always down to playtest btw.) As a gamemaster, I'm still passionate about the same things that got me into tabletop roleplaying games in the first place. KOTOR made me feel like I was really a jedi, but the limited dialogue options and artificially restricted choices frustrated me and sometimes took me out of the game. And of course, at some point the game ended, and there were no new worlds to explore or enemies to fight. I want to provide players with the kind of game I wish I could play, and sometimes I even succeed. To me, a roleplaying game should be a game where your choices matter, where you can solve problems creatively instead of being locked into two or three predetermined choices, and where the horizon is as endless as it is in the real world. Players should feel like they really ARE a jedi, knight, or wizard, with all the joy and pain that entails. That's the promise tabletop roleplaying games make to their players, and that's a promise I'd like to keep.

GM Style

When most people talk about roleplay, they usually mean a whole session where no one rolled any dice and just talked to NPCs. When I talk about roleplay, what I mean is a game where your choices matter and where the world responds to the actions you take as a player. For me, that kind of roleplay is the centerpiece of the game. I enjoy mystery games, or intrigue-heavy political games. I also enjoy hexcrawls and really difficult dungeons. I can be crunchy and tactical or we can have a dinner party where you talk to twenty different NPCs. I'm flexible, and I run a lot of different kinds of games. The common thread among them all, however, is that I love to worldbuild and I love to tailor the mechanics of the game to fit the style of play. So if we're playing a political intrigue, you know I'm going to be keeping track of player's reputations and introducing some mechanics for rumors and gossip. And backstabbing, because what would politics be without murder? Whatever game we're playing, I'm going to favor a sandbox type approach. As players, YOU decide what "winning" looks like to you. I'm just here to present the game world to you - I'm deciding which factions are fighting each other and just how trapped a kobold lair would logically be. I'm not here to "tell a story" or decide whether you win or lose. You - the player - do those things, through your choices. That's not to say that I never add a "main quest" or an epic story thread - in fact, I usually do. But sometimes you just want to study magic in your frosty, secluded college while a civil war rages around you. I can work with that. I usually don't run kitchen-sink fantasy. The game will feel more immersive, and lead to better roleplaying, if the characters feel grounded in the world. To this end, sometimes it's better to have a group of human fighters than a group of mismatched characters that don't feel like they really belong. For this reason, I will often restrict race, backstory, and class options, and I also tend to insist that players use pregenerated characters or generate a character for the campaign instead of players grabbing a character off the shelf that they've already made. (If you have a character concept you just can't let go of, contact me about running a custom game built around that character's setting and backstory. That will be much more fun than shoehorning them into a setting they don't belong in.) Feeling as though the world is real and that your character belongs in it is crucial to good roleplay, and it's not worth sacrificing that just to accomodate a "cool character concept."

Games played

Game platforms used