So much to see, so much to learn.

Hello everyone, I won't bore you with my life story but I would like to give you some info about myself. The name you'll normally see me go by is moving_target but my real name is Mike. I'm 20, and I still live with my parents. All jokes aside I work for my parents family business which gives me a good bit of free time for things like video games and hopefully in the near future, tabletop games. I've known about p&p games for a while now but never got to play any, I've read the rule books and player handbooks for a few and loved to mess around with character creation but was never sure if I was right in what I was doing so never really got the hang of it. I even wanted to DM because of all the ideas I had for stories, plot hooks, npc's and everything but because of where I live there are no groups withing a 50 mile radius to even talk about playing games.

I only ever got to play a few sessions with a close group of friends before they all moved away, it was a homebrew d20 system set in a post apocalyptic world. It was based off a book the DM was writing and it was quite enjoyable until we just quit and they up and left. I wanted to play more but other than them, there wasn't a group near me at all, so I started looking about finding a group online. At this point I'd known about 4chan's /tg/ board (it's where I learned about a lot of new systems and made a few good friends), but any time I tried getting in on a session it just ended up being a dead end, until now. Jax posted in a thread about dm's and he said to just email him, I got in contact with him and he sent me a link here. So here I am, hopeful that I'll actually get to play with a few good people now.

Thanks for reading,
Mike

This is exactly why I wanted to bring both GMs and players together because there is so much to see and learn! But when you're on your own, these books can be intimidating and bothersome plus without any real way to test or experience the systems many are unsure how some rules/guidelines can be resolved.

Asides that, this place can be a living rally point to connect GMs to players and vis versa so people can form groups and use whatever communication medium for it. The beauty behind online gaming is that people can feel less self-conscious about actually role playing and we can schedule the games around our lives.

It's a long process at times and those with patiences are ultimately rewarded so lets work together and get the creative juices flowing!

A baptism of fire with simple encounters was pretty much how I (and my group) got started. It was Shadowrun 4E, with a character generator program. Armed with that, and one of those "cheat sheets" listing what to roll, and what to subtract, handy, my group's first session began.

Our group consisted of two Aussies and three to five Yanks (both on East and West Coast) via Ventrilo and OpenRPG. Comparing that experience with stores in /tg/, I concur with Nyo's statement. While you can lose the narrative advantage of voice, atmosphere, and so on, there is a clear distinction between in-character and out-of-character. There's not much shyness as result of people looking at you as you speak in-character.

Or rather, that was my experience. We more or less kept the "texts" in-character, and interruptions in Ventrilo out-of-character.

I can't really play RPGs anymore, after what went on in our PNPRPG sessions. So restricting. =/