Gaming Career Report - Part 1: The Ill-Recorded Times

18 May, 2025

Unlike most people in the scene, I am in the unique position of having mostly played TRPGs online via live text, and of having almost all of them quickly available and easy for me to access. Because of that, I've decided to go through all that is still left and reflect on where I came from, what I've learned, and what I forgot from these experiences.¹

2012

Growing up I had always been a bit of a theatre kid, though I never had been to any school that had any form of theatre. I just liked playing pretend and being extra about it. This had made me interested in writing as a kid, but also in personalisation. I loved the idea of "building a character for a game" like The Sims, but I didn't like the building so much as the "making it interact with the world" bit.

On Saturday, July 21 2012, when I was 12, in the highest point of winter, I started dabbling with something resembling tabletop RPGs with two friends. We started playing pretend over MSN Messenger, discussing our characters, how cool they were and what they were able to do. I then egged them on so we could write it all down on a blog and make one million dollars out of it.

The blog is still up, albeit in Portuguese, and it's obviously quite juvenile. We started off that Saturday with "greetings" from all of the three hosts, a "character sheet" for each character which included their name, favourite weapon, method of transportation and other such trivia, and the promise of a prologue for each of them before the big "chapter one".

We never got to chapter one. My friends were clearly less interested in the idea than I was, so pretty much all of the posts on the blog are mine. On the last day of that winter, September 21, I wrote my buddy's prologue for him, and that is the last post on there.

Just a couple days later, around the 25th, I was introduced for the first time to the concept of Tabletop RPGs on a hipster podcast episode about "What Is Steampunk". One of the hosts offhandedly mentioned how his character from an Iron Kingdoms campaign had installed all sorts of interesting prosthetics - specifically a piston in his arm - which made my tween brain catch on fire. I reached out to him on Facebook and asked him what videogame he was talking about, and then he said it was no videogame, told me to torrent it as well as Evangelion, and left things at that.

Not knowing how to torrent anything at age 12, I instead picked up a copy of the Brazilian TRPG 3D&T, a Toon hack made by anime enthusiast and writer Marcelo Cassaro, and convinced my friends to play it over MSN messenger over that fruitful spring.

I distinctly remember thinking my players didn't quite "get it". I thought they didn't take things as deadly serious as I did. Probably related to how one of them had made a centaur and started discussing his massive amounts of cum.

Still, I badgered different people to play with me and they did, every now and then, but it had no future. One of those friends moved away and we slowly had to reckon we didn't have anything in common, as he was much more interested in the lowest form of videogame, the MMORPG, while I had a trashy PC that struggled to run anything that moved. A change was due. I wanted a community.

What I remember from those times was taking the whole "the only limit is your imagination" thing very seriously. I didn't like saying "no" to players, which is standard first RPG experience, but I also didn't roll dice at all, as I had no dice to roll and didn't know about online rollers. It was a very ad hoc experience.

That "the players aren't taking this as seriously as I am" problem would repeat itself for the rest of my gaming career.

2013

On Monday, March 11 2013, very late in the summer, I joined RRPG Firecast at the ripe old age of 13. Things could only go downhill from there.

This is also the worst documented year as most of this stuff has been deleted. Part of my interest in writing all of this down is to do so before more can be lost to the rot.

The One Piece Game

My early days on RRPG were marked by confusion and attempts to fit in. I "played" in two games at this time whose dates are lost, both by the same guy who seemed to have not a clue what he was doing, and I don't think I have retained any lesson from it.

I was eventually accosted by another user who said he wanted to do a One Piece game and needed help building the chatroom, and asked if I could help him. I said yes, and unbeknownst to me he was copying the system and assets from a different game on the platform, the DM of which got extremely mad at me for the longest time over it.

That user quickly disappeared in the night, leaving me with a bunch of players for a game of One Piece - a manga I had not and still have not read - and without any know-how at all on how to set these things up.

The One Piece days were extremely improvised and worked pretty much by DM Fiat. From what I remember, the players fought amongst themselves a lot more than they did with any NPC, and we had multiple "reboots" during the game as the players wanted to change their characters powers and such.

Despite not remembering much about the game itself, I think of those days fondly. We would play the game by live text while also being on Skype call, so it had this strange dynamic of voice being less important, you need to canonise your actions by text. My whole schedule during this year was getting home from school at 12:30 PM, fucking off for the rest of the afternoon until 7 PM, and playing RPGs from then until sleep around 10 PM.

It quickly crystallised a little friendgroup at this time: me, the kid who would come to be known as Pathfinder Paul, and another guy I'll call Hitman. We were inseparable for that year, and Hitman would often wax poetic about these times as our golden days.

These were some of the freest games in my life. I went fully balls to the walls with what I could do - references to other media abounded, there was even a time when I removed the players from the world of One Piece entirely and transported them to another universe for the duration of an adventure. The lesson I didn't learn at this time, but learned in hindsight, is that group loyalty and buy-in allows you to get away with pretty much anything as long as you do it well.

It's very strange for me to think that this all lasted for perhaps 7 months or so. It loomed so large for so long, and yet I've now had temporary minor interests which lasted for a longer time than this.

It's strange too the human relationships that were borne out of this. Pathfinder Paul is still a close friend, and Hitman was someone I looked up to for a long time before we fell out. It makes me appreciate the heroic scale of a single month, and how much can change there.

The One Piece game eventually burnt itself out. I don't remember why, but I do remember that we were on our way to One Piece's Water Seven or Marineford (we had been following the same route as the manga does), so it was pretty advanced. Hitman and Pathfinder Paul followed me to the next game, the other players didn't.

The Percy Jackson Game

All three of us enjoyed Percy Jackson as kids - Pathfinder Paul and Hitman more so than I, as they were reading the many other lines of books in that same universe, whereas I had hitched my wagon to the Greek Olympians and decided I would die without giving a shit about the Roman, Egyptian, or Norse gods.

Over the course of a few months in late 2013 to early 2014, we played two different campaigns. The first had been in Ancient Greece, and the second in modern times.

I was at some of my best and worst behaviour here. Pathfinder Paul very fondly reminisced about how much freedom and interesting setups I had provided for him and Hitman, and how he feels like neither of them yet knew how to take advantage of those just yet, so he feels like they ended up squandering their opportunities there.

As for me, I was playing around with a more sandbox approach while also having very little idea of how to do this adequately. I had no map, very little preparation, and based all of my prep on cool images I'd find online - something I would keep on doing for years. I would see an interesting illustration online and then attempt to fit it into the game, no matter how much this stretched the believability or the system. In hindsight, while this isn't a bad way of doing things, it also constrains oneself to the tastes of online digital artists.

I was also playing with "moral greyness" in a very heavy-handed way. I would often put them in situations where they had to make a tough call and wowed them with "the depth" of the question of "who really is the monster here huh". It got to a point where both of them complained about the monsters being way too reasonable, and how they ended up missing more straight up brawls with uncomplicated evil baddies.

In hindsight, this might also be due to the more manipulative tactics I had started employing. Whenever they cared about an NPC, I would either kill them or imperil them, often in needlessly gruesome and gratuitous ways that I would never do today. It was a very "take that" approach towards DMing.

What I find unusual about the Percy Jackson game was how much romance there was between players and NPCs. It might be because we were all pubescent adolescents, but my players would very often get interested in NPCs on a deeper level and try to get to know them, have interesting character moments, and generally actually care about them in a way I hardly have seen since then.

As to plot, from what I remember they were following the directions of Chronos to collect a certain amount of dragon eggs around the world so Chronos could take down the Olympians and free himself from Tartarus. They eventually got on a yacht that would take them all over the place, but in practice they just spent their days knowing and meeting the NPCs around the yacht. It really wasn't a terrible setup, all things considered.

The Percy Jackson game ran its course somewhere over the holidays from 2013 to 2014, from what I can remember it was at least in part because the players had just gotten despondent and weren't following anything except the characters, so my interest in the game waned.

From here on out, things are a lot better recorded and I'll be able to actually read the sessions themselves and its events, so I'm looking forward to that.