Beshare

Nikos crafts compelling stories that deeply involve and revolve around the player characters. However, his two greatest strengths, in my opinion, are his understanding of mechanics and strategy and his hybrid narrative/sandbox style of storytelling. Nikos’ classic hallmark is a team of powerful villains at odds with the party, each of whom is paired off with at least one other who mechanically synergizes with them flawlessly. Each pair of villains work as a single unit, terrifying on their own, but nightmarish when they combine their efforts together to fill in each other’s weaknesses and bolster each other’s strengths. His understanding of the battle strategy of tabletop games is surpassed by few people I’ve ever played with, making his combats with these villains tense, uncertain, and incredibly rewarding. I’ve also found among the GMs I’ve played with, Nikos’ ability to combine narrative and sandbox storytelling styles together is quite unique. While playing in his Natuto DnD game (using his own system for modifying DnD to the Naruto universe), he had a schedule of events which happened in the show, with dates and times all listed. Every day that passed in game, the calendar ticked down, looming towards disastrous events in the future. But until those events occurred, we had free reign over what we wanted to do. There were always several different pursuits that we could endeavor to accomplish, but it was almost impossible to do it all in the time allotted. We could go just about anywhere in the world, pursuing any of these missions; exploring ancient abandoned temples, discovering defunct illicit research centers, searching for our long-lost family, etc. but every day we did, the calendar advanced towards planned plot moments. Our actions up until those moments could impact how they occurred, or if they occurred at all, but we had no idea when they would happen, nor how, nor what. This maintained a strong through-narrative while also allowing us to do pretty much anything we wanted, a harmony of the two major camps of tabletop play styles that I’ve rarely encountered.