Xanther's page

Are they just less popular?

I run games in my homebrew setting which is a gothic horror victorian era-esque world and it baffles me how many players seem to find it confusing.Most of the character applications seem more suited for traditional fantasy

examples:

'my character is a barbarian working as a mercenary to whatever king hires him'

'I play a knight whose job is protecting a castle from foreign hordes'

'I play a bard who goes from one village to another to play his lute in taverns'

Or when I do non european medieval fantasy settings(middle eastern, japanese, chinese, indian, etc), people always brings in characters who are westerners travelling to the region, some refuse to play locals.

Are most fantasy fans just stuck on Tolkien-esque middle earth style type of settings?

IF your talking Pathfinder, the game mechanics and classes are geared to a heroic fantasy setting, not gothic horror Victorian settings.

First disconnect, maybe try Call of Cthulu.

On the western vs eastern, sounds more like player preference of what they are interested in. It may be as well that what brought people to RPGs was their love of middle earth style fantasy, hence why they want to play in such settings.

Misspeaking a characters gender.

A friend picked up playing a druid from a player who left. Over a couple of sessions people kept slipping and saying "she" or "her" instead of "he" or "him"; even the player slipped up; it became a kind of running joke.

Of course only really funny in the context with a few beers in us.

So it became a running joke to "needle" the player with; he's a good sport and a master needler himself.

After a couple years into the campaign (we've be going about 10 years now) the druid player ending up getting a wish from the Fey (for some pretty heroic s*~+ for them). Now this was the first (and only so far) wish in the campaign, one within the Fey's power. As a GM was of course wondering what would be asked for, having to think how the Fey would respond to very greedy or overreaching wishes.

The player ends up wishing for the druid to me changed from male to female. It was epic, awesome, hilarious as he went on to regale the Fey with his problems with gender identity harkening back to our in joke.

I had to rule of course that the Fey would love this kind of mind bending thing. They switched his animal companion gender, and species from feline to canine; fire protection magic to cold (a good thing actually for the next adventure), etc.

The hard part was convincing the party who he/she was. :)

Hooked from the first adventure. I may have died, don't recall. I loved the freeform nature of it compared to war games.

I was big on game and war games growing up. It's what I preferred to do inside, especially in the era when we got 3 TV channels, maybe 4 or 5 if the weather was good.

D&D for me was what we were already doing with Squad Leader, letting our leaders gain experience from scenario to scenario and personifying them.

It really was the perfect kind of game at the perfect time.

Still play tabletop RPGs to this day :)

12 years old, Original D&D, 1976 edition! White box 3 little brown books.