Post by DM Lord Neptune on Jul 27, 2017 14:53:37 GMT
Greetings, everyone! My name is Ryan, but I generally will go by DM Lord Neptune around here (or just Neptune, no need for formalities). The username comes from about 20 years ago (goodness gracious it's been a while) when I originally went from Sir Edrick, named after one of my roleplaying characters, a paladin in the old Palladium Fantasy days. I then joined a Quake clan (anyone remember those?) based on the Sailor Moon scouts where I was happy to be able to choose to represent Neptune, thus morphed my username into [SMC] Neptune or Sir Neptune in various games. (I would be immensely surprised if anyone here has ever played against me back in the day and remembers that name.) Eventually, this morphed into Lord Neptune, as this felt more intimidating. Around this time, gmail was first released (Yes, I'm getting old) and this is what I selected for my email name, so it finally stuck. Lord Neptune was cemented as my forever forum identity.
But that's enough backstory to why the username, though it does give some insight into a bit about myself, more about my relevant RPG and DM experience. First, as you can probably deduce, I tend to be somewhat lengthy with my expositions. It's a habit I find is difficult to shy away from, which is ironic since I'm somewhat shy in person to where I have to force myself to interact like a normal person at times, though, also ironically, it comes across as the opposite of shy when that happens. I know, I confuse myself sometimes, too.
Where was I... Oh yes, my first experience with roleplaying stems back to my days in 8th grade. One day, my best friend showed me a small ad that was placed in the school newspaper. This ad talked about getting together to experience some roleplaying games, and our minds instantly went to things like Final Fantasy which we loved playing on the NES and SNES. So, we went together and met some great people who I will call Nate and Jason, because that is their names, and they had all of these strange books everywhere.
To answer the question that I brought up regarding this newfangled activity and what was it about, Nate explained it to me in superhero terms. "Imagine you are a superhero and you have the ability to turn yourself into fire as well as manipulate fire. Now, imagine you are walking down a dark alleyway and it sounds like trouble up ahead, but you can't see it. What would you do?"
My first thought was "Ok, I can probably create a torch with my hand to see further and then get ready to fight any trouble that my light revealed," and it just clicked in my head. He asked one simple question and, already, I could see the entire scene play out in my head. I was this superhero that could do these cool things. Roleplaying was like playing a cool video game, but with endless possibilities. You just say what you would like to do, and, dice willing, you could do that thing. It blew my mind! I was instantly hooked and all in at that point.
We ended up playing the Palladium roleplaying systems, mainly. I have a definite love/hate relationship with the system itself, but with some decent homebrew rules, overtime it became an interesting place to tell stories, especially in the superhero world of Heroes Unlimited. After some time, my good friends and I split off from the original group and started our own group so we could play more often and have our own games going on. This was mainly because the original group started delving into the Rifts world, which became much too convoluted after a time. Though, I did have fun playing a memorable Juicer as well as a runaway Blind Warrior Woman from Atlantis.
Eventually, our sessions went from "I need to be able to do as much damage as possible, so all of my characters carried a .50 caliber machine gun and, for some reason, liquid nitroglycerin since it did an insane amount of damage, to actually caring about the story about the characters. We started bringing villains to justice. We started having arch nemesises... nemesi... reoccurring bad guys that added great flavor to our stories. I went from literally a new character every session for a couple months since my other characters kept dying way too fast, to having one character last for over a year or more.
I have played both male and female heroes in both a modern superhero setting and a fantasy setting, simply because it wasn't until college years where we had a female player, so we were almost always male characters, but also because I found it an interesting exercise to try to explore playing a character of a different gender. It opened up new avenues of roleplaying within the game system that we didn't have before, which was very interesting for me. It also helped me to get into the mind of a female character in a way that it would, eventually, help me to write better female characters for both my games and for the future novel that a truly hope to find time to get to writing before I'm 50.
During this decade of roleplaying, I also indulged in the computer and console roleplaying games, specifically going to point out Baldur's Gate. My friend, the one who showed me that ad years prior, and I decided to do a run through of this game together. We each made custom characters (myself a paladin, him a wizard) and filled out the rest of the party with 4 other NPCs, mostly of good alignment. This was the first major exposure to D&D that I had since starting roleplaying, I believe. Though, now that I think about it, does anyone remember the Pool of Radiance games from way way back in the day? I can't remember if that was pre-tabletop roleplaying or not... No matter.
These games, along with a shout out to the Sega Genesis gem "Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun" from years prior, have given me a taste for D&D itself, outside of this Palladium system that I've grown accustomed to. So, I got the 3.5 edition books and tried to do something with my group, but most of my other players weren't really feeling it. The most we got out of it, at the time, was carrying the alignment system from D&D and inserting it into Palladium's games. This is probably because the rules were so different than Palladium, that it was just off-putting to some. But I still loved the system, and my best friend still loved it, too. But we also enjoyed Palladium enough to stick with that.
Sadly, college ended and friends moved away. Eventually, we just decided to not roleplay anymore as people were starting families and time quickly drained into those endeavors. It's been about ten years since those days, now. Back then, we would each take turns GMing, but we all GMed in the same world. So, we all generally had a DMPC who became our real PC when it was our turn out of the GM's chair. A few years ago I decided I wanted to do this roleplaying thing again. We played some D&D 3.5 with a new group, but that fell apart when one of my friends had a child (noticing a trend here). Then, I started playing with my oldest friends, one over Google Hangouts and using Roll20, and one in person. This was going great until my wife and I had a child as well.
Now, I'm trying to start things up again, and it's all thanks to the Dungeon Master's Block. The ideas I got from this podcast have sparked my imagination to a great degree. I wanted to delve back into the world I was working on for my fantasy novel, and thought the best way to flesh it out was to play in it. I already had one section of the map that was built for the D&D 3.5 group from a few years ago. The world map was always generally there as well, I just needed to refine it. And D&D 5E has been out for a little while now, and I'm really loving the sound of how it plays, so everything is aligning to get back into this once again, only this time, I'll be the only DM, which is fine because I love telling stories and helping people become heroes. I'm looking forward to the time where my son gets old enough to DM for him as well as his friends. From here, it feels like DMing will be a prominent part of my life for quite a while. With that in mind, I decided to jump into the forums I kept hearing so much about, and start participating when I was able, whenever there was downtime at work. I look forward to discussing new ideas with all of you, and I promise (mostly) to be less long winded from here on out. We'll see how that goes.
But that's enough backstory to why the username, though it does give some insight into a bit about myself, more about my relevant RPG and DM experience. First, as you can probably deduce, I tend to be somewhat lengthy with my expositions. It's a habit I find is difficult to shy away from, which is ironic since I'm somewhat shy in person to where I have to force myself to interact like a normal person at times, though, also ironically, it comes across as the opposite of shy when that happens. I know, I confuse myself sometimes, too.
Where was I... Oh yes, my first experience with roleplaying stems back to my days in 8th grade. One day, my best friend showed me a small ad that was placed in the school newspaper. This ad talked about getting together to experience some roleplaying games, and our minds instantly went to things like Final Fantasy which we loved playing on the NES and SNES. So, we went together and met some great people who I will call Nate and Jason, because that is their names, and they had all of these strange books everywhere.
To answer the question that I brought up regarding this newfangled activity and what was it about, Nate explained it to me in superhero terms. "Imagine you are a superhero and you have the ability to turn yourself into fire as well as manipulate fire. Now, imagine you are walking down a dark alleyway and it sounds like trouble up ahead, but you can't see it. What would you do?"
My first thought was "Ok, I can probably create a torch with my hand to see further and then get ready to fight any trouble that my light revealed," and it just clicked in my head. He asked one simple question and, already, I could see the entire scene play out in my head. I was this superhero that could do these cool things. Roleplaying was like playing a cool video game, but with endless possibilities. You just say what you would like to do, and, dice willing, you could do that thing. It blew my mind! I was instantly hooked and all in at that point.
We ended up playing the Palladium roleplaying systems, mainly. I have a definite love/hate relationship with the system itself, but with some decent homebrew rules, overtime it became an interesting place to tell stories, especially in the superhero world of Heroes Unlimited. After some time, my good friends and I split off from the original group and started our own group so we could play more often and have our own games going on. This was mainly because the original group started delving into the Rifts world, which became much too convoluted after a time. Though, I did have fun playing a memorable Juicer as well as a runaway Blind Warrior Woman from Atlantis.
Eventually, our sessions went from "I need to be able to do as much damage as possible, so all of my characters carried a .50 caliber machine gun and, for some reason, liquid nitroglycerin since it did an insane amount of damage, to actually caring about the story about the characters. We started bringing villains to justice. We started having arch nemesises... nemesi... reoccurring bad guys that added great flavor to our stories. I went from literally a new character every session for a couple months since my other characters kept dying way too fast, to having one character last for over a year or more.
I have played both male and female heroes in both a modern superhero setting and a fantasy setting, simply because it wasn't until college years where we had a female player, so we were almost always male characters, but also because I found it an interesting exercise to try to explore playing a character of a different gender. It opened up new avenues of roleplaying within the game system that we didn't have before, which was very interesting for me. It also helped me to get into the mind of a female character in a way that it would, eventually, help me to write better female characters for both my games and for the future novel that a truly hope to find time to get to writing before I'm 50.
During this decade of roleplaying, I also indulged in the computer and console roleplaying games, specifically going to point out Baldur's Gate. My friend, the one who showed me that ad years prior, and I decided to do a run through of this game together. We each made custom characters (myself a paladin, him a wizard) and filled out the rest of the party with 4 other NPCs, mostly of good alignment. This was the first major exposure to D&D that I had since starting roleplaying, I believe. Though, now that I think about it, does anyone remember the Pool of Radiance games from way way back in the day? I can't remember if that was pre-tabletop roleplaying or not... No matter.
These games, along with a shout out to the Sega Genesis gem "Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun" from years prior, have given me a taste for D&D itself, outside of this Palladium system that I've grown accustomed to. So, I got the 3.5 edition books and tried to do something with my group, but most of my other players weren't really feeling it. The most we got out of it, at the time, was carrying the alignment system from D&D and inserting it into Palladium's games. This is probably because the rules were so different than Palladium, that it was just off-putting to some. But I still loved the system, and my best friend still loved it, too. But we also enjoyed Palladium enough to stick with that.
Sadly, college ended and friends moved away. Eventually, we just decided to not roleplay anymore as people were starting families and time quickly drained into those endeavors. It's been about ten years since those days, now. Back then, we would each take turns GMing, but we all GMed in the same world. So, we all generally had a DMPC who became our real PC when it was our turn out of the GM's chair. A few years ago I decided I wanted to do this roleplaying thing again. We played some D&D 3.5 with a new group, but that fell apart when one of my friends had a child (noticing a trend here). Then, I started playing with my oldest friends, one over Google Hangouts and using Roll20, and one in person. This was going great until my wife and I had a child as well.
Now, I'm trying to start things up again, and it's all thanks to the Dungeon Master's Block. The ideas I got from this podcast have sparked my imagination to a great degree. I wanted to delve back into the world I was working on for my fantasy novel, and thought the best way to flesh it out was to play in it. I already had one section of the map that was built for the D&D 3.5 group from a few years ago. The world map was always generally there as well, I just needed to refine it. And D&D 5E has been out for a little while now, and I'm really loving the sound of how it plays, so everything is aligning to get back into this once again, only this time, I'll be the only DM, which is fine because I love telling stories and helping people become heroes. I'm looking forward to the time where my son gets old enough to DM for him as well as his friends. From here, it feels like DMing will be a prominent part of my life for quite a while. With that in mind, I decided to jump into the forums I kept hearing so much about, and start participating when I was able, whenever there was downtime at work. I look forward to discussing new ideas with all of you, and I promise (mostly) to be less long winded from here on out. We'll see how that goes.
. I already am loving your posts around the forums. Really creative stuff. That vial of godsblood stuff was really neat. Can't wait to see more from you. 
