Hey there! Tell us what you like! Share your interests, you might find some other buddies who share interests with you. Either way, think of this as sort of a show and tell. Share as much as you’d like. Feel free to show/link some examples if you’d like. Let’s have fun with it =)!
I’m really into radio tech (licensed amateur operator), tabletop RPGs, video games, and fictional religions.
Yo, what do you play?
Radio tech is cool, ever knew one person who dug it. My childhood bestie’s dad. He finessed the hey outta his van and just chilled out in his 70s style decked out phat ass van and would listen to his RV.
Right now I have a very solid rotation of TTRPGs:
I also have a solo game of Pathfinder 2e using the Mythic Gamemaster Emulator going on that is just… insane, it really went out of control fast. It started with three guys, Dave, Grimgir, and Goru, who wanted to find Dave’s missing father. They went to a place a few days’ journey away from the capital and came back to find that the local wizard academy had started a coup so they could have their own independent government, Dave’s dad is a massive criminal with a rap sheet a mile long, and he got turned in to the government by the revolution he helped start. Where I last left off, Dave and co. ended the siege of the academy by deactivating their defenses from the outside, and then asked dad why he did it. Turns out he had sold his soul to a devil long before Dave was born in exchange for a perfect marriage and a happy family; they found that out moments before justice was carried out on him.
Radio is one of the most complicated fields of electrical engineering. What should work doesn’t, and what shouldn’t work does. It’s amazing that these little gizmos work at all, given that the guy who discovered radio waves for the first time said he thought it was completely pointless. When my class wrote an essay on the most influential technologies of the early 20th century, everyone else wrote about the car. I wrote about the radio, because it paved the way for nearly every wireless technology we have today. If radio didn’t exist, we’d all be stuck on landlines and ethernet forever.
Yooo, you are the person to go to when it comes to TTRPGs for sure. You are immersed! I recently had a convo with a friend about either a solo, or a micro-Carin sess. I’m pretty new to the whole thing (only gamed (Pathfinder) or D&D5e pre-pandemic). I am constantly astonished at what the shenanigans of your imagination (anyone’s) can get into when you let it run wild. I think about how Junji Ito described his work on Sensor. He said he wanted to know his “main character” but she just kept running away. Which really sounds like what’s happening with your solo-crew because Dave is about to unearth some kind of new power or something pertaining to being “half-formed” due to his dad =P! Sounds pretty epic by the by =)
I did think about radio a couple of months back. Like radio, radio - radio stations. On account of being some kind of social monster-butterfly and getting my gooey fingers all over the joint. I thought about the college radio station pre-covid and how I liked the jams people played but also how interesting it was to see as it is something relatively antiquated by this point in our culture. But that DJs are wonderful, in the sense that they very mindfully assemble a simple playlist and then share it hoping for the best. I guess I mean college DJs, things shift a lot when you leave that domain. Super observant bit at the end about the essence of radio. I think that would be peak “neurodivergent” thinking right? I remember it was the same for me. In school, people would always be looking one way and it would be a lot of leap-frog and I would always be looking the other and smacking things together to see if they worked. I used to be ashamed about it, but I think it might be our magic touch. Eh!
Thank you for sharing =)
What RPGs? I’m currently reading through Girl By Moonlight, which is a derivative of the Blades in the Dark system, and it’s fantastic. Also Brindlewood Bay is charming AF
They’re all tons of fun. I also have a solo game which I mentioned in another reply.
I have yet to try Pathfinder 2nd, but I’m glad to hear it’s good! We had a really fun first edition campaign running for awhile.
I’ve heard that 1e and 2e are very different games, but I haven’t played 1e. What I like about 2e is the consistency of mechanics - for example, pretty much every spell and effect with a saving throw has results based on whether you rolled a Critical Success (10+DC or more), Success (>=DC), Failure (<DC), or Critical Failure (DC-10 or less). This applies to attacks as well, any time you roll 10 or higher than the enemy’s AC you get a Critical Hit which doubles the damage you deal. There’s also a standard set of conditions that all spells, special abilities, etc. draw from that are clearly explained.
I don’t have any serious experience GMing 2e, but everyone I’ve talked to online says that the encounter math is extremely well thought-out. Whereas some TTRPGs value simplicity, or the player power fantasy, or any number of things - diversity is the strength of the hobby - PF2e’s focuses are balance and consistency. You can still have a ton of fun in PF2e (I smile when I think of the time my three party members and I held off no fewer than thirteen enemy bandits in one frantic combat), but you can reliably expect two parties at a given level to be about the same power level, building your encounters accordingly. A big part of this is the fact that rolling for stats is a variant rule rather than the default. You get fixed bonuses to certain stats during character creation based on your ancestry, background, and class. Your health starts at a number based on your ancestry, class, and Constitution modifier. Your health goes up a fixed amount every level based on your class and Constitution modifier. And finally, the full multiclassing system that exists in D&D is replaced with the Archetype system by which you can pick a feature of another class, or just favoring a specific playstyle, every time you get a class feat. (A popular variant rule that a lot of tables use is the Free Archetype rule, where you get a free Archetype feat in addition to your class feats. Helps spice up the build variety without letting things get out of control.)
If you’re curious about playing Pathfinder Second Edition, you can read all of the rules text for everything they’ve ever published on Archives of Nethys for free thanks to a special partnership Paizo has with that site and the very permissive license that Paizo uses. Foundry VTT also has legendary support for the system. If you like books, you can buy PDFs for a steep discount on Paizo’s website.