This is a relatively long post about me, my group and how I became a GM again after so many years.
I have been a role-player for almost 20 years. It all began in my very early teens as my family were walking our dog in a local woods and we saw some folks doing Live Action Role Play gaming (LARP). I was on my first read-through of the Lord of the Rings trilogy at the time and as I stood transfixed my parents spoke to the organisers. For the next several years I spent most of my Sundays in those woods LARPing.
At some point the organiser of the LARP group decided that he wanted to play with the same characters and world when he was tabletop gaming as he did when LARP gaming. He cleverly converted the LARP system such that he could use it for tabletop gaming with a simple d6 mechanic.
In the meantime, I’d recruited some of my friends from school to the LARP group and we too, desiring to develop stories and build characters more than an afternoon in the woods could allow, started a separate game with these d6 tabletop rules. We eventually gave up LARP altogether and played tabletop almost every day of the week throughout school and 6th form/college.
As we all went to university in different cities we played less frequently, but any time there were 3 or more of us in the same place at the same time dice were rolled. I relied mostly on video game RPGs for my role play fix for the next several years. At one point our entire group stopped gaming for a year or so as the mechanics of the d6 system were beginning to feel too brittle and restricting and keeping them relevant to the game was deemed too much work – our GM was burned out.
About a year ago I moved and was now close enough to my gaming group that I could drive back one evening a week for their weekly session. They had spent some time during their year off polishing the rules around that d6 mechanic and adding flavour to the system and had begun gaming again having regained the passion that felt missing when the dice were retired.
Not long after I rejoined them the groups GM confided that despite the polish he still found the d6-based rules wanting – past level 5 most characters, especially martial classes, were about as good as they were ever going to be at their chosen focus and play-testing and balancing an entire system was no small task for him to handle in preparation for a few hours gaming a week. He’d even bought the three core D&D 4e rulebooks with a view of using our beloved world within that system.
He and I concocted a plan to find a new mechanic with which to game. We had a few criteria, but the key was that we could use our world and maintain a similar feel to the sessions as we were used to. D&D 4e was ruled out pretty early on for various reasons which can be easily summarised as it being epic fantasy and too WoW-like, whereas the world we inhabit is best described as high fantasy.
We checked out a few other systems, most thoroughly GURPS, for which we read the freely available GURPS Lite rulebook, and were still unconvinced. Maybe our plan wasn’t going to work?
Then, after initially ignoring it a few times, I read more and more about Pathfinder. It had its own world, and tonnes of rules available, but several articles I read online made me think we could easily bootstrap our own world with just the core rulebook. I spent £6 on a PDF copy and it didn’t take much reading before my excitement was high and I knew I was on to a winner. The groups GM to started reading the rules too and shortly thereafter we discussed it with the rest of the group and made the switch.
Since then, recently in fact, D&D 5e has come out and from what I’ve heard that probably would have worked just as well for us. However we’ve had several months of adventuring with the classes in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook and I am very happy with the system and looking forward to unlocking more cool stuff as the group begin to use more books – we’ve recently introduced Ultimate Equipment and the Advanced Players Guide.
As we’ve been adventuring with the Pathfinder rules I’ve been reading more RPG related content on the internet, now that we’re using a standard and widely adopted system there’s a lot more relevant content for voracious web readers like myself to enjoy. This, perhaps unsurprisingly, has re-awoken my long dormant storytelling muse and I began writing down ideas for how we might develop our homebrew world further.
As I sent him increasingly many world building ideas and group members in countries and counties too far away to join in on a regular basis opined their desire to get involved with the game again, our groups current GM, who has held the mantle since I passed it on some 13-14 years ago, asked if I wanted to take over as story teller once more.
I had been telling him of my desire to have the group try Roll 20, in order to save myself a couple of hours driving on game night, and he felt that I would be better positioned (through motivation and technical familiarity) to GM the group through this transition. That and he was really enjoying the world building ideas I had been feeding him.
He is ready to focus on playing a character with these new and exciting rules and see the world flourish in the hands of another. I am itching to develop the world we have inhabited for so long. All of that, and our distant group members can join in regularly with little concern for the distance other than the inconvenience of timezones.
The phoenix rises, the game continues!