My journey to becoming a Hands-On Deity.

Everyone has a story. Not every journey is long; I have a friend who began playing D&D simply because the whole school viewed him as a nerd and assumed he already played, so he gave it a shot.

Me? I looked down on D&D when I was young. I thought PnP RPGs and TCGs were stupid because they required that one spend obscene amounts of money buying stuff to even be able to play. Until my brother brought home the Star Wars TCG Starter Set. That was when I first learned of how easy it was to get into... and cheap. All the extra stuff turned out to be unneccessary to play, just to expand. So I spent months bugging him to let me play with him. He thought I was too young to understand the complexities of the game, but I couldn't wait to try my hand. In the end he eventually taught me how to play the Pokemon TCG, which was simpler, as my first card game.

I had been bitten by the bug. I knew from the beginning that Pokemon wasn't an awesome card game, but it taught me something about myself: I am a tactician. By this point I had been playing Final Fantasy for a couple years and I already knew that I was a Power Gamer. And I had been playing games in general for most of my life, and I knew I cared more for fun than winning. But deck building was an art form, an art form I was good at.

I spent days building the best deck I could with the hundred or so cards my brother had given me. Not an easy task when the deck had to be 60 cards. That tradition kept throughout the years as I gained more cards and got into Yu-Gi-Oh!. Now I had a good card game with a lot of options to work with... And I finally had the money to expand. I went to the Yu-Gi-Oh! League at the local mall and participated in tournaments. I developed a reputation there as a Rules Lawyer and a master Deck Builder. People knew(even older kids) that I could make a winning deck out of any amount of cards. And I reveled in the challenge.

As more time went by I got into Magic: The Gathering - An even more detailed and good game than I had been playing. And by this point I was obsessed with a PS1 gem called Final Fantasy Tactics. My favorite non-numbered Final Fantasy. The story was kind of hokey and the translation was sub-par, but the combat! The combat system was incredible. Not only had they perfected the Job system from previous games as best as they probably ever would, but the grid style movement and tactical fights were so awesome.

Then one day, several years later, I moved up north with a friend of mine. He and his friends played PnP RPGs every week. Sure it was mostly home-brew systems(they weren't happy with D&D 3.0 and I don't blame them), but they had 3 games going at once so there would always be one to play. So he invited me to come and I did. I mean, I loved the combat style already, and I was aware that FFT had its roots in PnP.

And I fell in love all over again. The two home-brew games were awesome and open ended in the amount of character classes(if we could think it up, the DM would make it work). And the D&D 3.0 game was fun too, if overly complicated in my opinion. I immediately went home after session 2 and began writing up my own universe to play in. I started modifying rules to work the way I thought they should, and changing races and classes. To this day I've never played in that world, but it sits on my external hard drive ready to be thrown into action when I feel the time is right.

So that was my first official foray into PnP RPGs. But what about my first time as a DM?

When Green Ronin released the Dragon Age PnP RPG as a companion piece to Bioware's video games, my brother was right there with the starter set. He said: "It looked interesting and we both like Dragon Age. You wanna play?" I said hell yes. So we grabbed his two sons and rolled up some characters. We fought some Blight Wolves(which we had almost no difficulty with, despite how hard the gaming community thinks that fight is), saved a dying elf, and made our way to town. A good first session considering most of the party hadn't played PnP before.

It took us a few months to finish that adventure due to work and school schedules, but by then my brother had decided he liked being the DM. When it came time for the next session, we didn't have anything ready just yet. Fortunately for us, I had come across a copy of White Plume Mountain for D&D 3.0 and loved what I had read. So I converted the monsters and loot to the AGE System and our party ran through 2/3 of it. Being that I had already read the whole adventure, I was temporary DM; and I loved it. The rush of knowing that you control the whole world, the power of sending enemies after your friends. And the ability to play multiple characters at once.

By this point in my PnP career, I was well aware of my desire to play every class/race combination in every game. So being DM made that really easy. And, like my brother, I found the ability to be creative with the story a great thing. We are both writers and writing stories for PnP games lets us do what we love, even when we are stuck with our novels.

Currently: I am DM for a Dragon Age game with my regular Sunday night group and a home-brew superhero game with the family group; and a player in our original family Dragon Age game as well as a D&D 4e game with our regular Sunday group.

As a player I control an Elven Circle Mage(Support magic) named Liandra(Female) and a Human Apostate posing as a Warrior(Male) in Dragon Age. In 4e I play a Tiefling Swordmage named Damasei(Male) who focuses on teleportation powers. In the games I played while I lived up north I played a Gnome Samurai(Akara/Male), a Wind Magic Monk(name escapes me/Female), a Mugwai/Gremlin(Rosco/Male), a Human Jedi(Shiori Jesra/Male), and a Human Druid(Kutal/Male).

So there you have it: This blog is called Advice from a Hands-On Deity because I am both the Voice in the Sky and a lowly Adventurer. And I plan on dispensing all the knowledge I have gained in these roles, some of which I had to learn on my own.