Not sure if this is common or appropriate here? An RPG forum I have been part of for ca. 15 years has a section where new forum members can introduce themselves. Hope it is ok.
My name is v1nce/Vince. Living in Berlin for 6+ years now and been GMing for almost 30 years. Played 1 or 2 sessions of AD&D 1e, but spend almost my entire "career" GMing AD&D 2e, (for 100+ persons and counting) was not a big fan of 3e and especially 4e, due to the complexity and power / feature creep mostly. Last few years hosting two dozen 5e sessions but found system too complex. Was looking into OSR for few years but while I liked many and appreciated almost all of the systems, none was close to what I wanted to play, until I found BFRPG.
I did the usual thing, downloaded PDFs and then was like, let me buy all the printed books I can find for about €50 to give at least a little support, should arrive in few days. A big thank you to Mr. Gonnerman for creating and especially open sourcing his system as well as keeping it so affordable, much appreciated indeed. I have always been into lower power, simpler, more roleplaying based and less combat based (and fast/simple combat at that) RPGing. Hosted and run games for people in Barcelona, Chili, Bangkok, Netherlands, Berlin and beyond. From my first session to last I have always had women in group, sometimes a majority of them, I think it is important to involve all people in the hobby, also GMed for some kids. I have never found having more feats/rules/complexity to be necessarily more fun, much less a great way to get new people to start and continue playing, the investment cost in time, learning and money can often be too great.
I intend to switch my group to BFRPG once I have spend some time really grokking the system. Also I am working on my own hack/version of it. Have played Shadowrun and GMed Fallout a few sessions.
Am very excited and have been for a few years now that RPG has become bigger, more accepted, popular, diverse and even "cooler" than it has ever been before. The OSR is a big part of that. I never dreamed any of that would happen in my lifetime, there were some years after 2e/3.5 were out and before 5e appeared, I almost despaired that it was a fast dying hobby that was becoming more like WOW or other video games (nothing wrong with those, just not a style I personally prefer for tabletop) and for very few players at that.
Anyway, I made about 1500 replies/posts on that RPG forum I still frequent, not sure if I will do that here. XD Regardless, very happy to be here and that it is a forum! and not a subreddit or FB group, here too I Prefer Old School. Besides RPG I like Punk, Ska, Skateboarding, Playing bass and guitar at Jams, Linux, Thinkpads, audiobooks, podcasts, bicycles etc.
See you around the boards,
Vince
