Fan Club Video #8: The TTRPGs that "Made me"
Added 2025-07-02 15:02:30 +0000 UTCIn this Patreon video, I set myself up to give you a tour of the TTRPGs of my youth. What fun that would be! Chatting about Deadlands...
In this Patreon video, I set myself up to give you a tour of the TTRPGs of my youth. What fun that would be! Chatting about Deadlands, Legend of the Five Rings, Traveller... if you watch the Mythic Bastionland review where I tease this video, you can see me describing it in terms.
...That was before I sat down to write the script.
What happened instead is sort of a long, oddly-guilty reflection of how hard it is to start a TTRPG campaign, let alone keep one going. The idea of this video becoming a mini-essay about perfectionism, but here we are. So if your TTRPG-playing life isn't where you hoped it would be, take heart! These things take time.
-- Hugs and kisses, Quinns
Comments
The rpg that made me fall in love was actually a game that falls into the cupboard LARP category you recently blogged about. I'd been playing DnD and CoC since college, but it was a meetup group in Edinburgh in 2019 where I played Rider's Last Rights (can be found on itch.io). The story sees 5 people sitting vigil for a mech operator with different ideas about how the situation should be handled. Think Alice is Missing, but it's more like Shinji is Dead. Imagine 5 strangers, sitting in a pub reminiscing, sitting vigil, arguing, making cases, two of us cried for our loss and in anger... I legit think about it once a week.
Frankie Frank
2026-03-17 21:47:27 +0000 UTCMy first campaigns were D&D 3.5e dungeon crawls with almost no roleplaying - like, a very brief few lines of in-character dialogue per session at most, often in the form of establishing the impossibility of reasoning with malicious goblins, or liches who had totally lost their minds and just wanted to kill us/everything. These games were run by my friend's dad, and all us players were aged around 9-12 with zero prior understanding of the hobby. My entire concept of TTRPGs was therefore "me and my friends having magic powers and solving puzzles and getting caught in traps and fighting bad guys is pretty fun". (We all wanted magic and/or animal companions, so there wasn't much in the way of party balance!) Cut to university: I get invited to a game of Pathfinder, it has in-character moments and a non-dungeon area to explore (huh, neat!), but similar prewritten-adventure vibes and a heavy combat focus. But then, due to being in that campaign, I get invited to a Runequest game that a friend of a friend wants to run. And it was a REVELATION. My mind was completely blown in an early session when the GM reacted with surprise (followed by pretty solid roleplay of agonised terror) after my character harpooned a bandit in the leg and dragged him back to my teammates in order to stop him escaping and interrogate him. Which, to me at the time, had seemed like the only 'correct' course of action based on my experience of TTRPGs. I was so shocked that, despite all those years of conditioning to think otherwise, NPCs could be, like, people? Actual people who felt pain and emotions and had understandable motivations related to systems of oppression and lack of opportunities to survive/thrive? Not just disposable cartoonishly-evil enemies to feel smug about defeating?!? ...Wait, did that mean I'd just done something that had ethical weight and meaningful narrative consequences? If I had realised that was a choice, rather than an inevitable 'correct' gameplay move, would I have chosen differently? What did it mean for my character that I'd made him be the kind of person who would feel no reluctance to harpoon a retreating peasant bandit in the leg, just for convenience and strategic advantage? Was I going to play him like that forever, or would this experience be a turning point for him? It probably won't surprise anyone reading this that I did indeed make it a turning point, as he realised his time on a pirate crew had desensitised him to violence in a way that did not mesh with civilian life or reflect who he wanted to be now that he was relatively free for the first time in his young life. It was a narrative beat that had a huge impact on the rest of both our lives. That was the point I fell in love with TTRPGs - that Runequest campaign completely changed how I thought about what they could achieve as an art form, and how I could engage with them, and I never looked back. Over a decade later, now with experience of a wide variety of game systems and GM styles, that GM remains the best I have ever played with and the one I model my own GMing style after the most.
Inclusive Investor
2026-02-25 16:03:30 +0000 UTCMy first DND campaign, the GM had an NPC named Yugdab. As a party, we immediately referred to him as Young Dab. We all knew Young Dab was solid beyond a doubt. Until the GM revealed the anagram (bad guy), spelling it out for us Tom Riddle style and, we had our big bad boss fight. TPK. Perfect. No notes.
Collin Hancock
2025-12-31 00:30:05 +0000 UTCMy first campaign was DND 5e, and the fascinating thing about it is that I can barely remember it. It wasn't some childhood thing either: I was 20. I think the reason I only remember fragments is because one decade on, I can see how intensely my (at the time) unmedicated brain chemistry affected my behavior. I was such an anxious perfectionist that in certain social situations, I must have done something close to dissociation in order to cope. The reason I wanted to share this story is because my journey of dealing with my mental illness is one where I've employed RPG's as a therapeutic tool, to practice building routines, scheduled socializing, and defusing the impulse to value only perfectionist visions. I've since run a handful of short campaigns in 5e, and now Quinns Quest has compelled me to put different games in front of my friends. Mythic Bastionland is great. Hopefully, I can look back in decades to come on the games that made me healthy again.
Peter Robinson
2025-12-29 23:56:03 +0000 UTCI was spoiled at an early age: though I'd dabbled with Basic/Expert D&D in the earliest of days, a friends older brother run a multi-year campaign of his own system. It let me appreciate great storytelling. I haven't yet been able to replicate the experience, though I looked through so many systems and what it might run like. Games incd: MERP/ICE (oh those tables!), TeenageMutantNinjaTurtles, Heroes Unlimited, TopSecret, PsiWorld (i was big into psionics back then), Cyberpunk (1st gen), Paranoia (1st gen), James Bond RPG, Star Frontiers, Gamma World, VTM... Then nothing til SUSD/QQ dragged me kicking and screaming back into my fave hobby. Quinns et al -- I'd like to learn how to cultivate a good gaming group from nothing. I really fail at this now; though my kids are guinea pigs, I find it hard to find players. I've used Blood on the Clocktower as a potential 'filter' for people who might try. But a good group feels so critical to a great game....
Chris Stark
2025-11-08 12:51:05 +0000 UTCLove this video! So good. The only part I felt a little weird about was the bit about L5R. While I understand the cringe inherent in a group of white teenagers roleplaying "honorable samurai" (because, well, I've done it) I don't think that it means games like L5R shouldn't exist. As an American of European descent, am I only qualified to design and play games set in those cultures? Should a Japanese game designer be told she cannot touch the Wild West as a setting idea without consulting a cattle farmer from Texas first? While cultural sensitivity is a net positive, I think an overemphasis on it only serves to stifle creative expression and restrict the worldviews and experiences of all. I know very little about what it was like to be an honorable samurai, it's true, or if historically that was even a real thing? But my clumsy roleplay of L5R did lead me to watch Kurosawa movies and broaden my cultural understanding much more than I ever would have done without that game. Trying my best to inhabit the mind of a samurai was an exercise in attempting to empathize with someone's interpretation of another culture and, while not perfect, I struggle to see more empathy of this kind in the world as a bad thing? I get that when it strays into exploitation, there is a big problem, though. Like most things, there is nuance. Would love to see Quinns dive deeper into topics like these in the future!
Adam K Bunnell
2025-11-05 17:43:59 +0000 UTCvery late comment, but I subscribed here because I ran a mythic bastionland oneshot based on your review, which spiraled out of control into the first campaign I am GMing since high school some 20 years ago. To address both your feelings of perfectionism, which I share to this day, and to spin it back to mythic, I've been experiencing the most uncanny third man factor playing it. I've never before really used pre-made settings or adventures outside holiday oneshots for the group, and with mythic nearly demanding I do no prep and improvise 90% on the spot, I feel an unbelievable lightness on my shoulders before the game, but then an incredible feeling of perfectionism simply not applying to the situation. Neither does the sesh have to go like I imagined (I didn't imagine it at all!) nor do I have to maintain the author's vision of the premade (there isn't one!!), I simply go with the flow, the shared space ends up being exactly what it was supposed to become. It really is an incredible game. I really might get the book.
moe
2025-10-26 22:17:59 +0000 UTCAs far as actual TTRPGs (before was imagination games with no rulz) my journey was really similar! I started with DnD 3.5 and Dead lands, and similarly did not know what I was doing while running those. Deadlands in particular felt like the priest addicted to peyote, rolling (literally) up to bandits to point blank shotgun them seemed like an unbeatable strategy. After I got into 5th ed (sorry 4th) and started collecting and reading (I guess also playing)more games.
Patrick Mahon
2025-10-07 18:31:15 +0000 UTCCampaign that made me a GM was actually a setting, PLANESCAPE BABY. I run a home conversion of the planescape setting using the Patrhfinder rule book. Best dnd setting, nothing comes close for me ;)
tompuce84
2025-09-17 22:39:51 +0000 UTCI have two big moments from running games that still really stick with me because they were both powerful examples of the players being invested in the characters and setting. Near the end of one long campaign, my players had to kill a powerful mage under a corrupting influence. As the fight drew to a close, the mage's un-corrupted mind resurfaced, and they begged for mercy. Even though they knew going in that they could not save this person, the players paused to consider, and the one who dealt the final blow later told me it was a very difficult and moving moment for him. At the end of a different campaign, which was the prologue to a different campaign we'd played some time before, may players faced down what was intended to be their final enemy. However, in a moment that deeply surprised me, the players all stopped, discussed everything they'd been through, and decided to trust this person they'd been pushed into opposing. After a good deal of talk, we spun out how this choice would lay the seeds for the state of the world many years later.
Jeremy Herrera
2025-09-17 19:02:51 +0000 UTCJust got to this video and on the point of using 52 card decks in play more: just yesterday i played Despair Dilemma, a ttrpg about danganronpa/hunger games/squid game esque killing games, and not only was it absolutely FANTASTIC but I also adore how it uses cards. Its essentially an action point mechanic where having odds, evens, face cards, aces etc etc lets you do different stuff. What it turned into was essentially this roleplaying game (which is vaugley pvp) that we played almost like a strategy game, and then afterwards interpreting what happens. I feel like it did the main thing i appreciate DnD5E for doing, using gamesy rules to create a level of separation that made it more comfortable for new players to be vulnerable roleplaying (including a player for whom this was their first ever game!), but in contrast to DnD5E still telling a story through those rules instead of in spite of them. Really ace stuff, great use of playing cards, amazing PvP game. It instantly shot high up on my list among my favorites.
JustAMia
2025-08-22 06:21:59 +0000 UTCI only started getting into role playing games in 2020 (unfortunately the first campaign I ever played in got cut short by Covid), but I didn't get into running games until 2024. I have been pretty exclusively running Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green. My love for Delta Green is so great that I don't think I can really even bring myself to run Call of Cthulhu again. I have some interest in running Kult: Divinity Lost and maybe one of the Cypher system settings, but I have found my home in Delta Green for now and I'm happy about it!
David Stephanoff
2025-08-06 15:27:23 +0000 UTCI don't know if you'll be delighted or horrified to hear this but I can report that there is STILL, TODAY, in 2025, a persistent online MUSH that uses Shadowrun 3rd Edition (Shadowrun: Denver) and - as you might expect - they have literally tens of thousands of words of house rules in order to make Shadowrun 3rd Edition into something that works. Anyway uh, I just had to share that. Great video :)
Rose Knight
2025-08-04 16:54:15 +0000 UTC
