I have been gaming for about 25 years. My first introduction came in the form of the board game HeroQuest. We were away for summer vacation in the mountains, and my older brother and his friend had this exciting new game they wanted to play, but there was only two of them. So I got roped in. I was already involved in youth theater and like any child had grown up playing make-believe with my toys. HeroQuest wasn't much different. When my brother and I were younger, my princesses and fairies would go on adventures with his GI Joes. In HeroQuest we had a mechanic for how they accomplished their deeds.
Very soon my brother and his friends got involved in D&D, and little sis got brought along for the ride. They were definitely boys only games that I was left out of, but as I went from being a kid to a teen, I was less little sister and more part of the group. Sure I was relegated to being the healer most of the time, but I didn't mind that. And as we got to know third edition more, my clerics became pretty darn powerful.
My older brother and his friends all went off to college, but by that time I had also pulled some of my other theater friends into gaming. Around this point we discovered Vampire, the Masquerade, and being angsty teen goth kids (I grew up on Anne Rice’s vampires, not those shiny Twilight things), we dove right in. I got my first experience storytelling then, and even though in the years since most of my GM experience has been in 3.5 or Pathfinder, I still view the role as more a storyteller than a Game Master. Throughout high school we explored a lot of systems, but focused mostly on 3.5 edition and vampire.
At 18, off to college I went, and so began the task of finding a new gaming community. I unfortunately ran into my first case of gamer trolls in the setting, where being a female meant either I had to constantly defend my place there as a ‘real gamer’, or I was simply there to be eye candy and the butt of lewd sexual comments and actions in game. Luckily I found other friends, again through theater, who were also into gaming, and abandoned that scene fast.
In the decade plus since college, I have gamed with a mix of friends spanning across all three of those groups, plus a few additions we've met along the way. In that time, I would say a third of my time has been spent as a GM, with the other two thirds as a player. I enjoy crafting a story and empowering my party to explore, challenge themselves, and be creative. Not everything has to be a slaughterfest (though those can be fun too).
After relocating for work in 2015 and having limited access to my past gaming groups (only one able to play via skype at the time), I made a foray into the play-by-post scene on paizo.com. I had known of its existence for some time, and figured it would be an easy way to play. Sadly, that was one of the periods when the website was auto-logging people out and going down frequently. So one of the games we exchanged email addresses for. One of my fellow players took it upon himself to make the gaming experience very uncomfortable for me, then pushed it further in emails. I requested he stop, he refused, so I blocked his email. He simply started bombarding me from other accounts, and doing the same to my mailbox on Paizo. So I closed that email and left the paizo boards, having been active for less than 3 months time.
In 2019 I tried to make a return to the boards, and within days, he popped back up in my direct messages. Sure enough, I turned away again.
I returned to the boards in the summer of 2021, having missed gaming during COVID and hoping to get involved again. I tracked down his account and saw that he has not posted in over a year. Given that timeline, I have decided it may be safe for me to re-enter the water. I ran a steady WotR campaign for a few months. Unfortunately my harasser resurfaced right around the same time that I was getting rude, controlling, and disrespectful messages from one of my players, so I departed again.
