Paul started his gaming life playing “Choose Your Own Adventure…” books, graduating onto Final Fantasy and then Advanced Final Fantasy where he could take his friends (and Dad) along the journey with him. This developed into Dungeons and Dragons (the basic set), graduating onto Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition.
Roleplay remains his first gaming love; there is genuine magic in a group of players getting together and bringing to life situations and places that didn’t exist before, as well as applying a character’s skills and capabilities to whatever puzzle is facing them.
As an ever-so-slight control freak, Paul tends to run more games than he plays in, the highlight of his GMing career being a multi-year Mage: the Sorcerers Crusade campaign based in Renaissance Italy.
A chance encounter at the FLGS with Phil, led to an introduction to Lord of the Rings LCG and then into Netrunner, Conquest etc and a wide range of other board games.
Whilst he doesn’t have a lot of spare time to learn the card-pools and build tournament winning decks, he is always interested in knowing enough about the games to play competently and, at least in theory, understand the underlying mechanics.
It’s this drive to understand games at a deeper level, and help others in the same place, that has led to co-founding Mostly Offtopic and to contribute articles on roleplaying and card games on both the website and podcast.
Outside of gaming he spends his time plotting to get a Penguin sanctuary into the back garden or training to run longer than anyone should think about running.
