Hey what’s up. I’m Sam, aka Kid the Geek. I’ve been playing and dming Dungeons and Dragons 5e since fall of 2016, and dming Pathfinder 2e since Falls of 2021, it took a while but I managed to find a Pathfinder 2e game to play in early 2022 . I’ve also played Pathfinder 1e, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, a custom Fates Accelerated/Core mix system, and a slightly customized Palladium system.
My interest in table top rpgs started with a manga called the King of RPGs. It’s a neat little OEL manga about table top rpgs. It also compares them to both MMOs and my personal favorite type of video games, JRPGs. I’ve been a gamer pretty much my whole life, and was hooked on JRPGs ever since I played Final Fantasy 6, or 3 as it as known back then in North America, when I was like 6 or 7. They influence my thoughts and what I want to build in my campaigns.
Before TRPGs though I did have some other experience with just regular rp, both on boards and with friends on msn. I had a lot of fun with that, probably because I’d always been a dreamer, thinking of storylines or modifying plots of shows and stuff I liked…I guess that would qualify as fan fiction lol.
So that’s my history, in terms of dming, I started in fall of 2016 with Lost Mines of Phandelver as my first ever campaign. I introduced some homebrew stuff and it helped me learn the basics. I definitely screwed up more than a few times, but I learned. I continued the story on a bit, however as many know, D&D groups tend to fall apart. That’s what happened here, people moved, work schedules changed, etc.
Around this time I started to run Hoard of the Dragon Queen as well. It went well for a few months, then summer hit and everyone’s schedules got messed up. Again we had someone move and just didn’t get back together for a long time. I did however run my first one shot during this time. One of my players had a group of youths for whom I ran my first custom one-shot, “World of Dreams”. They all had a good time so huzzah.
In fall of 2017 I started playing D&D at a local board game café. There were a few dms there, but I was not one of them, I just wanted to play. I ended up playing a few sessions before the DM quit though. Having been in a few campaigns now that fell apart I knew how badly it sucks so I offered to take over as DM so the group could continue. The players agreed and so I started running that campaign, Of Gods Old And New. I had very little story set up in the campaign, really just a single city, a bad theocrat, a bad necromancer, and the fact that gods were no longer responding. As such this was really my first homebrew campaign. I ended up with a group of 6 core players. We continued playing with a couple small breaks here and there up until Covid started in March of 2020. Not all of my players are able or wanting to play online, and as such this campaign is currently on break, although I very much look forward to starting it back up.
I also started back up with up the Hoard of the Dragon Queen in 2020, although with a slightly different group. That got cut short due to Covid. Bad Covid, I’ll say it again, bad Covid.
That being said Covid did give me an opportunity. Since my groups had fallen through, both the ones I ran and the ones I played in, I decided to try an online group. I invited people from various groups to make a new small group. At the time I did not like roll20 at all, and that might be on me. I was using a garbage laptop and it ran terribly on it. So this was my first time using theatre of the mind. This lead me to discovering that I don’t like theatre of the mind for more tactical based ttrpgs. I like having a board and tokens. This did however allow me to start my very first ever homebrew from scratch. This was entirely my campaign, with nothing else already in motion that I had to work with. Thus started Winds of Change. This went on for a while until some of the Covid restrictions lowered, and my one group started playing in person again, which caused the online to not work out anymore. That’s ok, I really love the story and plan on building a full world of my own, at which point I can properly run Winds of Change.
As of 2021, I decided I wanted to give running D&D with a VTT a try. I had been playing Palladium on Roll20 and thought it would be worth a try. As per usual, when I’m not sure of something I decided to run an official module. The module of my choosing was Storm King’s Thunder. I have a different group and they are somewhat different than the ones I’ve played with in the past. It’s been a different experience but overall has been good. The group has changed a few times as players are no longer able to paly for various reasons, mostly being work schedules, the advantage of online campaigns is it is easier to find new players. The campaign ended in Summer of 2022, and taught me to enjoy pre-made modules. We have now started Tomb of Annihalation.
Another thing I started in 2021, was running Pathfinder 2e. This was a brand new system to me. I had to learn it all on my own with no one to help, which was a different experience. When I had played everything in the past, I had a dm to rely to help me learn the system. D&D 5e had been the only system I had dmd, but I had learned it as a player first. I have and always will have some issues with D&D 5e. I wanted something more, and was thinking back to Pathfinder 1e. I had loved this system, and thought maybe I should give it a try. I knew there was also Pathfinder 2e out now. Originally when I had looked at Pathfinder 2e I had no real interest in it and thought 1e was much better. I still decided to give it another shot. Rather than just looking at a few things here and there, I decided to give the core rulebook a full read through, and boy did I fall in love with the system. I knew I wanted to run this system. I started working on my own campaign, and decided to give the starter box, which had a single short dungeon in it, a try as the start of my campaign. Thus Infra was born. I’m having a blast with the campaign and system, and oh, did I forget to mention this is an IRL campaign. Haha I had really missed those.
I also took this time to add a second IRL group for Pathfinder 2e, we are running through Outlaws of Alkenstar, a western themed campaign. Only one session as of writing this but beep boop had me laughing like crazy.
So that’s me as a DM, that’s my history. If you want to reach me I can be reached at kidthegeek7@gmail.com.