RPGaDay 2022 #31 When did you first take part in #RPGaDAY?

 I've actually been doing RPGaDay since it began. Like I said yesterday, the thing I probably am the most in my gaming life is a collector and that early "shelfie in prose" set of prompts appealed to me.

I kept going more or less out of habit and to try and extend my readership with the gaming public. Not sure if that worked.

It also reminds me to put myself out there. Without some sort of pressure, it's very easy for me to crawl into a very small hole and hide from the world. I know that's not really good for me, so some reminder to interact with people and get out in the world is important.

With any luck, I'll use this writing group to work on my gaming content and keep things updated here.

RPGaDay 2022 #30 What should #RPGaDAY do for its 10th anniversary next year?

 When RPGaDay first started, it interested me because it was a chance to talk about the games on my shelf. A sort of written "shelfie," if you will. Since I was very much a collector (still am when I can get away with it), that appealed to me.

The other thing that I am is a GM. While I haven't run as many games as I've collected, I've enjoyed answering questions about games I've run or that I want to run.

 While I do enjoy playing at times, I have never really been able to do it enough to collect a lot of stories to fill all of the questions about playing.

If I had a suggestion, it would be to have questions that either work for a player or a GM, or maybe questions that can be "flipped" to apply to someone on either side of the screen.

RPGaDay 2022 #29 Who would you like to see take part in #RPGaDAY?

Kris Newton.

I know that I mentioned him before, but I really appreciate his insights.

He's not much of a blogger, and he's stepped away from podcasting for the foreseeable future, but he's a brilliant guy and a heck of a player and GM.

Also, John, Rudy and Chris from the San Diego Roleplayng Association Meetup group. Mostly because I know them only very casually/virtually and it would be an opportunity to get to know them better.

RPGaDay 2022 #28 Style Sunday: Roll 1d8+1, tag that many friends with your favourite RPG cover art.

 Tooting my own horn a bit, I'm going to say that my favorite cover art is my own. Well, not that I did the art itself, but I did commission it for the cover of my game, Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road.

Although AiO is not technically licensed, there's a tendency for games based on existing properties to feature the main characters on the cover in some way. Star Trek RPGs usually have the cast from one of the shows on the cover, for example. Some other games will have characters on the cover that resemble the characters you could be playing. The most recent Star Trek RPG went this route, with unidentified Starfleet characters on the cover.

I didn't want to put existing characters on the cover of AiO for 2 reasons. First of all, one of the main reasons to do an Oz RPG is to expose people to the wider world of Oz from the books and putting Dorothy & Company on the cover would feel like just another retread rather than offering them something they might not have seen before. The second reason is that I had intended to release my own edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and they were going to be on the cover of that.

In fact, because of that plan, I commissioned the same artist to do both covers and intended them as companion pieces. The WWOz cover featured the characters from that novel, while the AiO cover featured characters from the deeper canon that shared some similarity with one of those characters. So I wound up with the best of both worlds: I got canon characters that fans of the novels could appreciate, while those coming with fresh eyes would see something familiar, but also distinct.

RPGaDay 2022 #27 How has the character changed?

In terms of what they've done in play, Ealdred hasn't changed at all.

She only existed for about 2 weeks in total and maybe saw 2-3 days of in-game action during the initial run of the campaign. Not enough time for much to happen. And when things start again, she'll be reset back to her original state.

On the other hand, she's grown quite a bit in my head as I've been preparing this campaign.

One of the reasons that I pre-rolled my random encounters was to make sure that I knew what I was doing. Have that time to learn a monster's stats and powers. For neutral and friendly encounters, it meant taken the time to roll up quick personalities for them.

But the one thing that I didn't count on was having not just weeks of prep time for the campaign, but ultimately years. It's been over two years since I rolled her up with all of her quirks and treasures. And while there are other encounters on that list waiting to be unveiled, Ealdred is notable for being the most friendly of them and the most likely to be a powerful ally for the party.

RPGaDay 2022 #26 Why does your character do what they do?

 She hasn't gotten the chance to do much, but Ealdred's goal is to rule a country. This was randomly rolled from a table.

But exactly why she's chosen this goal for herself is something that I still need to work out.

One of the other thing that I rolled for her is that she is secretly religious. Exactly what this means in the "blank map" scenario I've worked up is very unclear. There are no established churches and the divine landscape is as undefined as the terrestrial. It could simply be that she believes that she has a Higher Purpose of some kind, which makes sense considering her advantages. She's a werebear (whether she knows it or not), has a bear companion and a lair full of treasure.

Or maybe her ability to understand alchemy is an indication of a generally high intelligence and she's got some idea of Natural Order and Natural Laws. Her desire for a more orderly world could extend from science to politics.

The other option is that exposure to the PCs influences her. They've been charged with the mission of establishing civilization in this newly created world, and her exceedingly positive Reaction roll could mean that she's an eager ally on this mission. It could also mean that she's infatuated with one of the party members and is trying to help/impress them.

RPGaDay 2022 #25 Where has the character been?

Unfortunately, Ealdred has not traveled far.

For one thing, she hasn't been alive very long. In my initial run of the campaign, she encountered the party on about Day 12. Exactly when she'll turn up in the next run of the campaign has yet to be determined.

Also, even though she's technically a "wandering monster," she is encountered in her "lair." So until she appears, she has no fixed abode. Even if I were to tell you which hex she appeared in during the initial run, it wouldn't help you predict where she'll turn up next time. Just know that her bear companion Garey Hancy will not be far behind. Even she realizes that he shouldn't be left unsupervised for very long.

So all she's really seen has been the Starting Forest. It's a placeholder name that I hope the players will improve upon once the campaign begins. Though there's no guarantee that anything they come up with will be an improvement. Knowing players, they're just as likely to name it something dumb/vulgar than significant. Which is part of the fun.

RPGaDay 2022 #24 When did you start playing this character?

 Like I said in my last post, Ealdred came about as an NPC during the quarantine period of 2020. That's when I rolled her randomly, got really excited about her and put her through a couple of her paces.

As to when she's getting rebooted, along with the rest of that campaign? Unknown at this time. I was trying to do prep for the campaign, building the dungeon maps by hand in Roll20 during my writing club time, but now that I'm trying to do RPGaDay, my focus is here rather than there.

Maybe the end of September? One can dream.

RPGaDay 2022 #23 What situation are they currently in?

As yet, Ealdred has not entered play, since the campaign has not properly begun.

In fact, as part of the premise of the campaign, Day 1 of the campaign is the first day of history. There's no backstory spanning millenia, so on Day 1, Ealdred will wake up, adult, knowing everything that she needs to know, but with no past.

She is a true random encounter. She has no fixed location until she is encountered, at which point her lair will become a fixed point on the map.

Since she won't have a lot of time to gather her hoard, I'm going to assume that she woke up on Day 1 right next to this collection of stuff. She's turned as much as she can to practical purposes. She actually managed to turn some of her alchemist's supplies into a potion and might be able to do more.

Day 1 was a new moon, so she probably doesn't know that she's a werebear. When I ran a preliminary version of this game during quarantine, the party did meet her and get along quite well with her. On their way back from the dungeon on Day 13 or so, she invited the party to stay with her at her camp for the night as she underwent her first change.under the first full moon in the history of the world.

In fact, even though I have decided to reboot the campaign, I'm keeping those random encounter results mostly because I have sort of fallen in love with Ealdred and want to see what happens should the campaign actually take off this time.

RPGaDay 2022 #22 Who is your current character?

I don't get too many chances to play, so let's explore the process of creating an NPC as a GM.

I've talked about my dream of running that sort of long term, sandbox campaign, but I haven't talked about the work that I've done so far on it.

As much as possible, I've tried to lean on random results for my initial conditions. The map is randomly generated and randomly generated dungeons are placed randomly across it. As the party explores the map, they will experience random encounters. And to make sure that I'm prepared for these encounters, I've got a selection of them rolled in advance.

This is very important for encounters with intelligent creatures or creatures that are in their lair, since both of those can add complication. So imagine my surprise when one of the encounters I rolled was for an intelligent creature in their lair. Now I had to roll up a random description and personality, as well as a random treasure hoard.

The result wound up being quite fun.

Ealdred the werebear has a bear companion named Gary Hancey that is basically an enormous overly-friendly dog. Her goal is to be a ruler some day, though whether this puts her with or against the PCs has yet to be seen. As of yet, she has a positive reaction towards them and charm or flattery could make her willing to ally herself with them.

Among her personal effects, she has a potion as well as a good amount of alchemist's supplies. While I'm not using a skill system, I decided that it would be fun to let her be an alchemist.

RPGaDay 2022 #21 Setting Sunday: Share an intriguing detail from a game setting you enjoy

The RPG Stars Without Number is an OSR take on sandbox style space adventure in the style of Traveler. One of the conceits of the setting is that there was a large space empire that was run from Earth, but the technology that made that possible collapsed. This has the benefit of enabling freewheeling adventuring without worrying about what the big space empires had to say, as well as ensuring that most of the worlds you visit will have people that are similar enough to you that you can deal with them.

A later Sine Nomine game called Other Dust homages Gamma World just as Stars Without Number homages Traveler. But if you're familiar with SWN, you would realize that the default setting of Other Dust is actually the Earth of the SWN universe, isolated from the rest of the galaxy.

Sine Nomine then went back and did their own take on fantasy roleplaying with a game called Worlds Without Number. WWN's setting is called Latter Earth and if you're familiar with Other Dust, you can see that Latter Earth is actually the far future of the Earth as described in Other Dust.

RPGaDay 2022 #20 How long do your games last?

 It varies a lot.

There was a time that I would run a game for 3-5 months, then move on to something else. The estimated length of each session was roughly 4 hours. Once or twice, I would try to run a "sequel" campaign that built off of a prior stretch that I had run, but that didn't work too well.

Then I decided to run The Castle of the Mad Archmage, certain that it would last no longer than any other campaign I had run, but that wound up lasting 5 years.

I've spent most of my time since running one-shots, but at the same time dreaming of how to recapture that magic of long term play.

RPGaDay 2022 #19 Why has your favourite game stayed with you?

I think the game that has stayed with me the longest, at least most recently would have to be OSR D&D.

One of the big reasons is that I was actively using the materials as everything got boxed up for my move. My prior favorite game, GURPS, wound up in boxes so I couldn't read them at leisure or contemplate what madness could emerge from randomly pulling 3 of the books off my shelf and trying to combine them.

OSRIC and the Castle of the Mad Archmage gave me the longest campaign that I've ever had the pleasure of running. There were things that I wish I would have done better, but it was a lot of fun and something that I had never done before.

I think the reasons that it went on as long as it did, and why I want to go back to that well even though I'm not a fantasy fan or a modern D&D guy, is that I didn't have to prepare a story. I had content. I had a setting (more of less). But I didn't sweat the story. The story was what came out of the session, not anything that I put into it.

RPGaDay 2022 #18 Where is you favourite place to play?

 My favorite place to play is my house.

Game stores are cool places to game. I've played in late night coffee shops in Eureka and San Diego. And there's always gaming at someone else's house.

But my house has one very important feature: My stuff is there.

I don't have a fancy gaming table with little shelves for character sheets and all that jazz. But I do have a lot of gaming books and accessories. Even when I'm not running the game, very often I will have the rulebook and maybe even a supplement or two, which often found their way into my backpack. And big, wonderful gaming books get heavy quickly.

So the ability to not have to worry about hauling a portion of my collection to a remote site does appeal.

I only wish my current living situation allowed me to host games where I am and that most of my collection wasn't in storage.

RPGaDay 2022 #17 Past, Present, or Future? When is your favourite game set?

I'm generally not a fantasy fan, so the fantastical Past as it's presented in games like D&D has minimal appeal. The things I like about the OSR are only slightly about the fantasy elements and more about the design.

I have nostalgia for a Tabloid World campaign I ran in d20 Modern back when that was new (and brought that back for one day a few months ago). So I've had good fun in the Present. I've dipped a little bit into The World of Darkness, but horror seems to be my weakness there, rather than the time period.

As much as I enjoy sci-fi. I've done shockingly little sci-fi gaming. My most recent attempts have been Starfinder and have not been good. Not always the game's fault, but still. So no real luck in the Future.

It looks like the Present wins.

RPGaDay 2022 #16 What would be your perfect game?

 That's a tough one.

I've found Fiasco to be good fun for a pick-up style game.

I want to do something big and intricate in the OSR and am making motions to do that.

So I think the perfect game for me right now would be something that requires a small amount of prep from the GM, but still has campaign potential. Sort of between those two extremes.

Maybe something Fate, maybe something Powered By The Apocalypse. 

Like many perfect things, it's something that feels out of reach at the moment.

We'll see.

RPGaDay 2022 #15 Who would you like to Gamemaster for you?

 Kris Newton.

Even though he's got some really awesome podcasts under his belt, this isn't quite a celebrity crush. He used to be a guy that I would game with often. Sometimes he would GM, other times I would. Every now and again someone else from our little group would step up and run something that we could both be players in.

Then he moved away.

I loved listening to his podcasts, at least partly to bask in his gaming wisdom (and get dragged a few times for my old bad habits), but also to keep up with him as a person. Although I had met his current wife briefly when they were still in the area, I got to know her a bit better as she co-hosted the Gameable Podcast. I discovered his trials and tribulations as a new father through small asides and comments in between jokes about bad games on his MegaDumbCast.

Then he moved away again.

Thanks to the internet, it would take more than just moving to break this connection, tenuous as it is. But recently, he announced that family circumstances will take him away from podcasting for the foreseeable future.

So I would love the chance to play in a game that he runs, preferably in person (though I understand this puts it firmly in the realm of fantasy), partly for the game, and partly for that chance to catch up with him again.

RPGaDay 2022 #14 Suggestion Sunday: Roll 1d8+1, and tag that many friends and suggest a new RPG to try.

 One of my challenges lately is that I don't have a lot of friends. I'm hoping to change that, but I don't think I can safely roll that d8 at this time.

I think I've been going on for years now about how I would like to give Fate a serious try. I've done a couple of one-shots at DunDraCon, but haven't really taken it for a serious drive.

I'd also like the opportunity to try out the It's Not My Fault scenario generator for Fate Accelerated.

RPGaDay 2022 #13 How would you change the way you started RPGing?

I think I would have started sooner.

The reason that I only made a few sessions of that Rolemaster game was that it was a couple of buses away from the university. But considering that I was on a university campus, I'm sure that there were a few gaming groups or clubs if I had put in the effort to find one. That could have gotten us gaming sooner and more frequently. Plus, the effect of friendship and social connections would have done us a lot of good at that time.

I don't know if I could have gotten started writing my own material sooner. Maybe if I'd started gaming on-campus, I would have gotten more practice and more confidence. It would have also been before D&D 3e, so I might not have started with a game that surrounded me with modules and I would have had to roll my own much sooner.

Who knows?

RPGaDay #12 Why did you start RPGing?

 This is a really tricky question.

I don't know that I had many of the hallmarks of the budding gamer in my youth. I was an avid reader, but I preferred science fiction to fantasy. I was more interested in the logic of things than any sense of magic or wonder.

Perhaps that's what did it. Once I was exposed to GURPS through my future wife and my local gaming stores, I had to understand the logic of it. I had to understand how it worked and I had to see it in motion. I needed an "older cousin" (this is starting to become a theme) to guide me across the final leaps of logic to "getting it."

The other thing was that RPGs helped me make friends. As an introvert, especially then, I was not great at small talk. Having a game to play and talk about made the whole process easier. Especially as I made that early leap to GMing, that became a magnet for people and a few of those people became friends.

So I think there's a reason that I started, and a separate reason why I kept playing.

RPGaDay 2022 #11 If you could live in a game setting, where would it be?

 I'm not sure I would want to.

As much fun as games are, the idea of a "world of adventure" doesn't appeal to me. I've got enough anxiety in my life, so I don't feel the need to add to it with epic stakes and risk of death or dismemberment.

Though there are a couple of fictional settings that I could see wanting to live in, and as luck would have it, they both have RPG adaptations.

The first is the United Federation of Planets from the Star Trek universe. While being a member of Starfleet has its excitement and its challenges, just being a citizen of the Federation is actually pretty chill.

The second would be Oz. Again, if I want an adventure, I can find one easily enough. But if all I want to to tend an orchard of trees that grow unlikely things, that is also very possible,

RPGaDay 2022 #10 When did/will you start Gamemastering?

 I've been GMing for quite some time. I started shortly after I started gaming.

In the distant future of the Year 2000! (wait, that's not the future anymore, is it?), the Third Edition of Dungeons & Dragons was released to much fanfare. Lots of people were eager to play. There was almost a constant buzz of "Let's play D&D!" at the local gaming store.

But one thing that any game of D&D needs is a Dungeon Master. But it wasn't easy being a DM in those days. For one thing, the three core ruilebooks were given a staggered release. While everyone could readily buy a Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual had yet to be released. The first printing of the PHB came with a "Y2K Survival Guide", which consisted of a brief overview/preview of the rules from those books, so you could cobble something together.

Also, thanks to the Open Gaming License, a lot of (too many, really) publishers were releasing adventure content, among other things. So while everyone was picking up PHBs and third party supplements, I was one of the few people picking up adventure modules. Everyone had Dragon magazine, and I had Dungeon magazine.

So amid the steady buzz of "Let's play D&D," there was a vanishingly small number of people who were willing to be the DM. But it turns out that I was one of them. (I commented earlier this month about the "older cousin model" and how DM/GMs get short shrift in spite of how essential they are to the growth of the hobby).

This started with simple willingness, rather than enthusiasm. And there was a very long time that I was completely dependent upon adventure modules before I had the confidence to write my own material.

RPGaDay 2022 #9 What is the 2nd RPG you bought?

 This is an interesting question.

I think everyone remembers their first RPG.That sticks in your brain. The first RPG that I invested in was GURPS. My wife showed me her copy of GURPS Wild Cards as a guide to the novel series. I bought a copy of GURPS Horror, First Edition as a gift for her because of that. I encouraged her to spend spare money from her job at the university food court to get the GURPS Basic Set so I had a chance to understand what the numbers and details from the supplements actually meant.

Over the summer, her cousin got us jobs at a Renaissance Fair and I got a nice little income from that. And most of it went to The Last Grenadier, a game store in Burbank. I got a number of other GURPS books from them, so technically, any one of those would count as my second RPG purchase.

But the second RPG ruleset that I bought was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness RPG from Palladium Books. It was from before the TV show, so it was based on the comics. There were even a couple of short comic stories in the book. It's still in my collection somewhere. And yes, it is the edition with the Insanity table that includes homosexuality as an entry.

RPGaDay 2022 #8 Who introduced you to RPGs?

I typically credit my wife for this, and have told that story for the umpteenth time earlier this month.

So for this one, I'm going to take a mulligan and tell a different story starring my wife.

I might have mentioned my friend Jordan. He was a gawky teenager when I first met him and taught him about the joys of RPGs. After losing touch with him for a good number of years, we reconnected to find that he was a fully grown Game Master. It was in a game that he was running that this story takes place.

The game was GURPS Monster Hunters. Her character was an ex-Marine named Naomi who was the sole survivor of a combat with what she can only describe as a demon. My character was a small town sheriff named Dale Harper who had seen some pretty strange things. Along with a bunch of other ragtag monster hunters, we were sent to the Deepwater Horizon oil platform (shortly before its accident) to deal with a ... "situation."

Naturally, it was a monster infestation that was made all the more difficult to deal with by a heavy tropical storm. One of the monsters attacked Naomi, piercing her left leg and injecting it with a mysterious secretion that completely destroyed it. (Another character was also attacked in their left leg. Supposedly, the results were rolled separately on a random hit location table, but it was starting to become a trend.) She wound up using a rolling office chair as an improvised wheelchair. In the chaos of the situation, she also lost her sniper rifle.

Another creature got their hands on Harper and stung him with paralytic venom. Bizarrely enough, he made just enough of his rolls that he survived the attack and could get around by wriggling. Unfortunately, when things got too hairy (or slimy, or chitinous, as the case may be) and we called for evac, he was not able to make it onto the escape raft. Needless to say, Sheriff Harper did not survive the adventure.

Naomi eventually returned and used her pay from the mission to buy replacements for her leg and her rifle. The leg was something of a downgrade from what she had before, but the rifle was a definite upgrade. To remind her not to leave it behind, she had the stock of the rifle etched with "Fatal Error" in an 80's computer font.

RPGaDay 2022 #7 System Sunday: Describe a cool part of a system that you love.

My favorite subsystem is probably social combat from Diaspora.

Diaspora is a pre-Core Fate game of gritty science fiction adventure. It's got rules for all sorts of typical science fiction stuff, like technology and spaceship combat, but it also has a social combat system that I really like.

One of the challenges of representing social influence in RPGs is that it tends to be "one and done." You make the Diplomacy/Intimidate/Seduction roll and that's how things go. This contrasts with physical combat, which usually requires several dice rolls to make anything significant. So designers have tried to make social influence more engaging, typically by borrowing and repurposing some of the physical combat rules into something that is often called "social combat."

While it may be more engaging, it often doesn't feel like something that actually resembles how people actually try to influence one another. Instead of bashing each other with swords, you've just started bashing each other with words.

Diaspora, however, does something very different. Social combat in Diaspora is based on drawing a map and moving characters around to accomplish your goal. While this map can resemble a physical space, it can also be more abstract. For example, if your goal is seducing someone at a house party, the map would be of the house and your goal is represented by a bedroom in the house. A hostage negotiation might be a simple line of spaces with "Release the hostages" on one end and "Kill the hostages" on the other.

Each player then uses their social skills to move themselves and other characters around this map. In the seduction scenario, you might use an Empathy skill to move yourself closer to your intended seducee, then Seduction to move them towards the bedroom, and Intimidate to push potential rivals away.

There are a few other wrinkles. Such as, you can attempt to "attack" someone on the board and "stress them out," but succeeding is going to remove them from the map, immune to further influence. This could be useful in the case of the romantic rivals in the last paragraph, but it's not often the best move. And with this being Fate, you can create Aspects on the other people in the scene, or even areas within the scene itself, to help or hinder social influence. So part of the house party seduction could be having the DJ play choice music to create a "Romantic music," "His favorite song" or even "Crowded dance floor" Aspect to get what you're after.

RPGaDay 2022 #6 How would you get more people playing RPGs?

 The important thing to get more people playing RPGs is creating more Game Masters.

Unfortunately, most games these days are not built for this. The standard method is what's called the "older cousin method." The GM doesn't learn their craft from the rulebooks, but instead learns at the knee (or table) of another GM. Typically, the prospective GM starts as a player in someone's campaign, then decides that they want to run their own game. So they take what they've absorbed from their gaming experience and start to apply it in their own campaign. Add a few lessons from the Gaming School of Hard Knocks.

The end result is that every RPG book has an obligatory chapter for GM advice, but it's more often written for the experienced player who will be GMing for the first time rather than the total n00b who might have gotten the book for Christmas by some clueless, but well-meaning relative. As much as I wanted to make my own game, Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road, as n00b-friendly as possible, I can't really claim that I broke this trend. Maybe something to keep in mind if I ever do a Second Edition.

RPGaDay 2022 #5 Why will they like this game?

 I think this question is assuming that my prior posts have built up some sort of narrative about introducing someone to gaming. But since I didn't do that, I'll just have to improvise.

If I am introducing someone to RPGs, I will try to find a game that they will like. If someone is an Oz fan, I am more than happy to run Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road. Fantasy fans will have me breaking out D&D or some other fantasy game. Trekkies will be invited to play in a Star Trek campaign.

More often, the process works somewhat in reverse. I'll decide the game that I'm going to run and recruit players based on that game. If I want to run D&D (preferably OSR), I will look for fantasy fans in my social circles to recruit. When I finally get around to writing a Star Trek campaign, my Trekkie friends will be first to know.

If I know that I'll be someone's first Game Master, I will make the effort to be supportive and talk them through their options for character creation and during play. Hopefully this ensures that they have a good time and are more likely to play in the next session or the next game I run.

RPGaDay 2022 #4 Where would you host a first game?

Hosting at my house right now is not practical for a number of reasons. And since a first game would probably involve people that I am still in the process of making friends with, the rules of where to meet for a first game would closely mirror the rules of where to meet for a first date.

Meet somewhere public, preferably with other people around. A Friendly Local Gaming Store is good for this, but a coffee shop that's open late is also a good meeting place. Gaming conventions also count, but by the time you've gotten them to the convention, this is unlikely to be their first game. Maybe the first game of whatever you're running, which is still good.

Make sure that if anyone is uncomfortable, they can leave. Meeting in public addresses some of this, but also make sure that your location isn't too far from their home or in a neighborhood that they're not comfortable being in.

RPGaDay #3 When were you first introduced to RPGs?

 I was first introduced to RPGs in 1999 at the age of 20. I had met the woman who was going to become my wife the previous year (though the wedding wound up being much farther off) and she had shown me her copy of GURPS Wild Cards. I had caught the bug, but it wasn't until 1999 that I actually played a game.

She was going to college, living in the dorms and I spent a lot of time hanging out around the campus in between her classes. A good portion of this time was spent on this crazy new-fangled thing called the internet. I found someone's personal website that had played GURPS, was within what I thought was a reasonable distance from me, and listed an email address. I took a leap and emailed him. His current campaign wasn't GURPS, but another game called Rolemaster. He was kind enough to create a character for me (though it would be a few more years before I realized how much of a favor he had done me) and we played a few sessions before the challenges of traveling to a neighboring city by bus became overwhelming.

Over the summer of 1999, I became a regular at a game store conveniently close to my grandmother's house, where I stayed when I wasn't spending excessive amounts of time with my girlfriend. That's where I got invited to a game of Legend of the 5 Rings, a samurai-inspired game. It might have gone on for a few more sessions, but the money ran out and we had to run back to northern California at about that time.

I didn't get introduced to an actual campaign until 2000, when D&D 3rd edition was released.

A lot of small introductions, but that's the point where I considered myself a gamer.

RPGaDay 2022 #2 What is a great introductory RPG?

 Of course I want people to play Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road.

But the secret ingredient to any great introductory RPG is making it easy to run for a newbie GM. I certainly tried to do that with AiO, but I can't confirm that.

Fiasco doesn't require a GM, so it's got a leg up there. The new card based version adds a nice tactile element as well.

I am a big fan of Fate Accelerated for this, as well. The low cost, the simple rules and the sample characters designed to be slightly off of your favorite YA franchises are all good points. Coupled with the "It's Not My Fault!" story starter cards, you could have a lot of fun with just a little work.

With the popularity of online roleplaying via chat, forum or blog, the idea of a game to add structure or variety to that sort of activity could be fun. There are solo RPGs that use journaling to some degree, but not a lot that involve more than one player. The only one I"m aware of is Dear Elizabeth, which is played by writing letters to a partner.

Earlier boxed versions of D&D could also work. By leaning more strongly into the structured, boardgame style of play, it's much more approachable.

RPGaDay 2022 #1: Who would you like to introduce to RPGs?

 Well, I certainly think more people should be playing RPGs. It's great fun and there are lots to choose from, so there's an RPG for nearly every taste.

One idea that's been on my mind for a long time is to introduce people at an Oz convention to Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road.

I think it's important to meet people where they are when trying to get them to take on a new interest or hobby. D&D got its start during a surge of popularity for The Lord of the Rings and other fantasy fiction. The creation of cyberpunk fiction led to a number of cyberpunk games. Vampire: The Masquerade rode the wave of the Goth subculture.

It's common to think of the gaming hobby/industry like a pie chart, with the wedges representing which games are being played or purchased. Most publishers and designers are content to struggle over their share of the pie to see if they can make it larger. Actually growing the pie by turning non-gamers into gamers is much harder, and therefore less cost-effective from a financial standpoint.

So just like the old Coke commercial wants to teach the world to sing, I would love to teach the world to game.