thread: 2005-04-27 : The Open House 4: Handshaking
On 2005-04-27, Jeff Rients wrote:
Howdy, my name is Jeff. I live in Urbana, Illinois with my wife Amy and our 3-year-old daughter Elizabeth. I work at a bank as "the guy who desperately doesn't want to foreclose on your home but will do so if you leave him no other choice". I usually just tell people I meet that I'm a "banker".
I started with the '81 D&D Basic Set (the orange book with the cool Erol Otus art). I've played more games than I can really remember, including an intense fascination with HERO in the mid-nineties, but I always come back to crawling through dungeons, killing orcs, and taking their gold. But I'll try almost any RPG once.
If I'm using the Forge terminology correctly I like mostly gamist play, with my preferred modes of challenge being "can I beat a dungeon written without close regard to the party attacking it?" and "can I outdo the other players with my suboptimal character design?" I also like setting-heavy simulationist Traveller games and I've done narrativist things when I can find the players. My best effort in the latter mode would probably be a Wuthering Heights con game I ran a few years back. All the PCs ended up dead, insane, or incarcerated but the players had a good time driving their characters to these unfortunate ends.
