Marty

Vancouver, BC based forever GM Marty here - I run two weekly GURPS games in a homebrewed 1920s Cthulhu-esque Horror world, so if any Vancouverites are looking for in-person play and can consistently be available weekday evenings I may have a seat at the table for you. Having just retired though, I'm looking to add more gaming goodness to my life - maybe even get to actually play rather than GM! So I'm open to both local in-person and alternate timezone Online groups that equate to mornings/afternoons in PST - e.g. GMT 4pm-midnight-ish. I've been playing since Red Box days, but I found myself just not loving the core concept of D&D in any of its editions - Munchkin scratches any rare itch to kill things and take their stuff! Actual ROLE-playing rather than ROLL-playing is what makes is fun for me - conflict yes, but not necessarily much violence. Investigative games with lots of in-character social skill use are my jam - I've been playing Call of Cthulhu since the 80s, more recently Brindlewood Bay was an absolute joy to discover, and I'm trying out other PbtA games in hopes of finding a similar sort of vibe. On the more traditional Fantasy side of things, I like The One Ring - the Mirkwood campaign especially - mostly because of the 'off camera' between-adventure parts where your PCs really feel part of a community, and Earthdawn (the whole Kaer/Horrors angle gives a strong in-game rationale for dungeon crawls, and ED was doing 'orcs and trolls are just people' literally decades before the Critical Role crew brought that angle into mainstream D&D circles). In general I run Adult but not Smutty games - if they were movies they'd be mostly PG rated, with the odd 15-18 scene: scary, angsty stuff happens, if there's violence I describe it viscerally, cursing is pretty common, but the curtain gets drawn as soon as things get more romantic than would be acceptable in a public place. I have no problem dialling back the limits all the way to G-rated levels though - I've run games of Toon for elementary schoolkids and several 'cosy mystery' style games where the only saucy things that happen involve a stovetop ;-)