Best posts made by Ezra

I can definitely attest to doing this in both TTRPGs and MMOs. Honestly, it originally started as me getting fed up with dating men who just sucked at wooing. I was convinced that I would be better off as a man because I knew how to treat a lady, how to have respect, and how to just say all the right things lol. But in later years it helped me define more of who I am. Like I am annoyingly demi now and I need to maintain that status with someone in order to keep romantic interest.

@SwampCreature Funniest thing to happen to me was back in my White Wolf days. I was trying to roll for stealth/subterfuge and ended up being mistaken for a prostitute by my target. I was suppose to follow him, not bed him, oh well.

@mianngu I feel this in my bones lol. It is sooooo critical to be flexible as a DM. I have never done it before, but I can definitely see the pitfalls of being to rigid and set on the story you want to tell. I think it would take a master storyteller to successfully manipulate all their players to unknowingly flawlessly follow a script. But then what fun is that? I feel like half the enjoyment from DMing would come from seeing what your players do with what they are given. In my opinion, it is like a performer giving a performance to other performers who are in turn giving one back.

I definitely had a few boring DMs in my day. I think my least favorite is actually when the whole game is nothing but combat. Just straight forward mindless killing of faceless hordes. Week after week. I play for the story, not the fighting.

@TableTopProphet lol actually I am pretty sure it comes from wishing my mom had named me something different. I have spent my whole life having people misread my name and call me "Justin". So naming is just a weird deal for me now. I have learned to live with my brain's self imposed hysterics.

Soooooooo

It's me again.

I am curious, since I think this is more of an MMO thing than a TT thing, but I want to know, what's your opinion on having mounts? Or familiars? Or any kind of beastie companions?

I will admit, that having played in both camps, I really enjoy having creatures you can interact with because it makes the world seem more real to me. I remember when I first got started with Guild Wars (god I'm old) I was weirdly psyched to play a ranger because you could have a wild cat as a companion that would help you tear up enemies. Granted I was 17 and my tastes have slightly changed. But it is what it is.

When I played White Wolf, I always enjoyed mages who got down with the beasties too.

I don't know how feasible it will be to put in ridable creatures if someone's tale called for it, but I would elated to have them in gameplay.

Wondering if anyone else has this ideal for their sample submissions, or just in general?

You may choose to answer one or all three of my questions.

1. Which birthday was your favorite and why? Tell your tale!

2. What do you like to do on your birthday, if you celebrate such things?

3. What would you do for your birthday if you had zero limitations?? Tell me your dreamz.

@SwampCreature Honestly it came from reading more. Like at first all I could do was make cool characters. But I never liked bland fiction that takes place in "our" world so I kept building. It really is a world 10 years in the making lol. I just need the time to write, and ideally, to not feel so stressed as that doesn't help for shit lol

@Alexander-Salkin

I had a few themes back in my childhood. Most memorable was Cookie Monster theme lol.

@mianngu Space would be nice, but man, I would kill to go scuba diving lol. There are some truly beautiful sights underwater and enough creatures that I want to be friends with them all. I love seeing videos of stingrays and eels and octopuses that just love to come hang with divers lol.

If anyone is interested~

I spent my birthday getting not one, but two great dinners and then doing my best to be as lazy as possible lol. Which for me, was not that lazy. I still had to exercise the dogs, clean, and run errands lol. But I tried!

@Alexander-Salkin said in Tell the Truth now!:

My question is have you ever had an unplanned lucid dream that enlightened you to something?

Oh definitely. So even before I started dealing with insomnia as a side effect to meds, I would occasionally have lucid dreams (among day dreaming, regular dreams, and basically just letting my imagination run wild) and there have been several that inspire philosophy, writing, and just creating in general.

I honestly look forward to those moments and try to write down everything I can remember. I suck at trying to trigger them in any way, so when it does happen, I have to be ready and pay attention lol.

They always make me feel small. Not like, small in a bad way. More like, there is so much more to the world. It gives me perspective. There could be great and powerful cosmic forces outside of time and space, and here I am worrying about rent, my job, and whether or not to get pet insurance for my accident prone dog.

My question~
Do you feel most of your "self talk" is mostly positive or negative?

Ok ok, that makes it sound worse than it actually is....

Ok, yea, my dreamy S.O. kinda did dump me and I kinda didn't take it well.

We all know the ridiculous advice we get post breakup, some of useful, all of it well meaning, none of it wanted at the time lol.

So what are your go-to things you try to do when heartbroken? Because lets face it, if you are doing the breaking, that mess rolls off like water off a duck. I am looking for any and all distractions, advice, or hell, even to read about some of the wacky things you were told.

My favorite is that my half sister's mother believes a good sh*t will fix anything. Tired? Go poop. Migraine? Go poop. Stub your toe? Poop. Car won't start? You guessed it....

@Mariano I am going retro. My new paramour has never seen all the way through Yu Yu Hakusho and I feel this is a slight against my soul. So I'm going to make him watch it during all our rainy days.
Ergo Proxy is definitely one of my favorites. I struggle to enjoy certain anime when they put in too many fan service scenes personally. One anime that I was weirdly surprised by was Fruits Basket, the real one, with 4 seasons. Not that half baked one they released like 20 years ago.

@SwampCreature Oh yea I am big on character customization lol. The more I can do with appearance, backstory, race, profession, morality, etc the better. I generate characters based off ideas, names I like, or even a couple of people I know lol. I firmly believe that most millennials are big into customization and this is the hill I will die on lol.

@K-O I literally sat on character creation screens for hours because I had no idea what name to pick, this usually happens after my preferred name ends up being "already taken". Those two words wound me greater than anything else lol.

@TableTopProphet I do love one or occasionally two syllable names, it really depends on what I am playing and how epic vs fun I want it to be. I also had to learn a hard lesson at the tender age of 17 when I first got into MMORPGs because my guild didn't use real names and I didn't think about choosing a name carefully, knowing I would be called that for the rest of my time with them. Suffice to say, I joined up with this guild with the name Tzimisce Experiment (from the TTRPG White Wolf, vampire the masquerade) and the leader declared it too hard to pronounce, so I was nicknamed Weirdo.

In another completely unrelated instance (because that's how my brain works) my friend and I loved playing laser tag in high school and you could get your own customized profile that would show your name on the score board. She had picked Random Hobo, but the display actually cut off the last two letters soooooooo...........

@joey I have not tried to make my own game before, but I will say thank you for introducing me to everyone is john, because I just laughed so hard at work people came to check on me.

I might be interested in trying though, at present I am trying to crank out a couple submission stories because deadlines are a thing and just giving them my jumbled pile of notes from the last ten years probably isn't ideal lol.

@SwampCreature As a huge lover of Final Fantasy, I am honestly surprised I haven't seen some big FF number anything for a TTPRG. They went and made an MMO for everyone (that I never got to play cries*) but I don't think I have seen a table top. Maybe I am just not looking hard enough?

They might have done something in Japan. I know they have plenty of cool stuff that never makes it to the US. I just learned they are big on having like every flavor imaginable for kit kats lol.

Hmm, I would play a drum. Or a hand pan. Or both? The drum I would use to exclusively play the executioner beat no matter where I am, and the hand pan would be used to put everyone to sleep with its soothing sound.

I got to watch other kids play games on NES and such, and I recall playing solitaire on my mom's old windows pc... but the first gaming system I truly had that was all mine was a Playstation. The very first two games I had (that were not the demo disc which was the only thing I had at first lol) were Spyro the Dragon, Rayman, and Crash Bandicoot. I think I eventually got Tekken but that might have just been the demo. Spyro ended up being my favorite.

The hilarious part is that my mom didn't buy me a memory card so I was forced to replay the same levels over and over (she wouldn't let me just leave the system on) until she finally bought one. I think she got tired of watching 8 year old me play the same 3 levels.

In the end though, the real reason I stuck with PlayStation games is because I discovered Final Fantasy IX. I had tried to play VIII but couldn't get into it and VII just annoyed me as a child lol.

Though when I think of gaming nostalgia, I think about my gameboy color, which the salesman managed to convince my mother that I would need in order to play the latest Zelda. And of course, Pokemon red/blue/yellow/silver. Now THOSE get me excited. Playing Let's Go Eevee was like high fiving my elementary school self.

Sorry for the absence my loves,

I had some unfortunate health crap come up because life is a bowl of chocolate covered lemons.

Also I am like... suuuuuuper loopy so this should be a really exciting week for people who aren't me.

So, I spent my down time watching Vox Machina, and getting into Critical Role because my paramour is unabashedly OBSESSED with them. But weirdly, I had never heard of them until he brought it up. So, I'm curious if there's any fans in the forums? Or haters lol.

So something has kind of been on my mind for a while.

Do you think there will be romance role play stories?

Do you guys even want that? I know I have seen apps that do that kind of thing, and I know they were somewhat popular in Japan.

I think those attract a certain kind of hopeless romantic. But so far, it seems most of submissions will be adventure types and most TTRPGs and even MMORPGs focus more on the epic world building, quests, save the cheerleader save the world etc.