recurve

I'm a 30-something groomed polite non-LARP mostly-RPG gamer open to joining a good once or twice monthly RPG group of similar folks around Costa Mesa or Irvine.

I own and like the idea of art and story games like Nobilis, although pure-story games sometimes lack the investment, surprises, random outcomes, and fear provided by traditional dice-systems and GM-driven stories where players feel more investment (and risk) because of quantitative advancement of their characters.

My ideal is a lightweight, flexible, realistic, dice-based system that doesn't overload the players with tactical options and minimaxing opportunities and doesn't cripple encounter resolution or story-advancement, yet presents the sense that a few particularly bad die rolls could seriously set back the story or even kill a character -- while in practice very rarely actually doing the latter.

TORG was great in that it provided a flexible, logarithmic system that could handle Faberge-egg crafting to starship weights and also featured a hand of cards that players could spend to turn the tide of important scenes.

Great GMs don't play "against" the players or to gratify their egos: they act first and foremost for the enjoyment of the players, which doesn't mean always giving the players their way, but instead challenging and surprising the players just enough and presenting enough sense of realism so that the players feel they have to invest in and have earned their characters' achievements.

In my opinion, the best and most difficult sensations to evoke in gaming, reserved to the master-class games are: fear, sense of wonder, surprise, emotional investment, loss, sadness, and the contended closure of a well-earned heroic arc.

I'm up for d20 if it's not exclusively hack-and-slash or joking around at the expense of story-telling, although alignments, "detect" spells, too much magic, minimaxing, and overfamiliarity with setting and rules often erode surprises, sense of wonder, and interesting plots in traditional flavors of D&D.

Shadows over Camelot is one of my favorite boardgames and I feel is a great way to "break the ice" with a potential new group or new member.

RPGs I've played or run: Harn, Call of Cthulhu, Traveller: TNE, Ars Magica, Primetime Adventures, several editions/flavors of D&D, Vampire: The Masquerade, Warhammer, West End's (excellent) Star Wars (before it got d20-ed), TORG, MERP, Shadowrun, 007, FASA's Star Trek and Doctor Who, and several systems I've written