Beginning this week, I'll be posting interviews with the various members of my gaming group (who also serve as my playtest group). I've sent all of my current players a few questions that they were nice enough to answer, along with a brief background on who they are.
First up is James Taylor.
James serves as my back-up GM in the Midnight Legion and often the occasional sounding board for some of the ideas that have seen light within the Acts of Villainy series. In total, I've known him for twenty years or so, with some of that being in our youth and finding one another through a friend as adults. To this date, he's one of the finest GMs that I've had the pleasure of being at the table with and is a damn good player as well.
Years Gaming: I think I was 11 when I rolled my first
d20. So that would be… holychit, almost
28 years! Like most, it was D&D
first. I still remember my first
crit. I nailed a Harpy, "nat 20", with a
crossbow bolt, which passed through that one and into the one behind it. Thank you D-Bos for that bit of flavor text
that sealed the deal.
Midnight Legion Years: Sketch and I hooked up again, after a
HUGE break, about 17 years ago.
Favorite RPG: My favorite RPG world is probably the
Palladium stuff. After D&D, I
enjoyed Rifts, TMNT, Palladium Fantasy, Nightspawnbane and Robotech for many years, before the Midnight Legion
opened my eyes to all of the other great games out there.
Favorite Superhero RPG: Mutants and Masterminds. I also very much enjoy HERO, and the Marvel
SAGA RPG.
Past Superhero RPG Characters: OMG… I’ve had NEARLY as much fun making
characters as playing them. I think my
first hero character with M&M1e was Goth, a teenage mage, followed by
Umbral, Façade, Dr. Killroy (AKA Dr. Slot-Machine), Psicho, Spinderella,
Redzone, Kid Vanguard, Comet Girl, Agent Perfect, Animalia, and quite a few
others.
Favorite Superhero RPG Character: IMO, the opportunity to
play a character long enough to create some history and development makes a
favorite for me. I’ve had two characters
in particular that I’ve been able to do that with, those being Façade, and
Psycho. Please don’t make me pick a
favorite! Uhm… okay. I would have to go with Psicho. I am playing him still, and I’ve been able to
experiment a lot with the character and create a lot of development with him.
Favorite Comic Book Character: Absolutely Cable. I waited until the early 90’s before catching
the comic book bug, and Cable was the best!
I was pretty invested in Spawn as well.
Favorite Comic Book: Currently
GI-Joe or the Walking Dead. Budget and
time constraints have caused me to fall out of synch with current superhero
books, but I’ve kept up with TWD, and am finally catching up to the current
GI-Joe series.
Tell the readers a bit about yourself.
Well... I’m 38 years old. In the past, I’ve also been 32, 28, 21, 14,
5, and many others. I’ve worked in
retail for the majority of my life now, and currently work in a membership
warehouse store. I enjoy RPG’s, video
games, movies, TV, books, music, board games, doggies, camping, traveling and
other random stuff. I’m a child of the 80’s;
I love 80’s music and pop-culture. I’ve
been married to my husband Ralph for over 12 years in two States.
How did you get into role playing games? How old were
you?
I was 11, I think. Some of my friends had discovered what their
older brothers were playing, so they would grab the books whenever they could,
and we’d play. It blended well with the
other things we enjoyed at the time, like fort-construction, GI-Joe-style
war-games, other imaginative stuff. We
didn’t just play tag and hide ‘n seek.
When we played tag, you could earn a shield which protected you for one
tag, there were safe zones, and you could “tag-back” the tagger under certain
situations. We created mazes out of
leaves and pine needles. Hide ‘n seek
was a battle of stealth skills, and if the hider could tag the seeker first, he
was the winner. Imagination was our
greatest toy, and table-top RPG’s became an extension of that.
What do you like about superhero RPGs?
I guess I love
building a super-hero, from the ground-up, and giving him/her a story that
plays out over time. The Super-hero
genre has allowed me to play SO many different kinds of characters with
different personalities and backgrounds.
You listed Psicho as your favorite superhero RPG
character. What makes them your favorite?
There’s been a lot of
great story development with that character.
I think I’ve been playing him for like, 12 years? He is a mutant mentalist with Dark-blue skin
color. He’s gone through a lot of neat
stuff over the years. He has a tragic
background. He started out filled with teen
angst and distaste for the authority. He
was a temporary criminal. He managed a
split-personality disorder. He’s definitely
a bit of an outcast. He’s fiercely
protective of mutants, having experienced that alienation and prejudice. He died once and was brought back through
magic (thanks to Morra), his appearance very normal and without a connection to
the psionic plane, having only telekinetic abilities. He’s regained his mutant appearance and full
abilities. Now he’s a hero and respected
Psychologist, and has grown in the ranks of W.A.R.D. Lots of fun stuff. On a deeper level I think, he’s gone through
some of the things I personally have in life in regards to sexuality and
feeling like an outcast. Fortunately,
we’ve both made good on it.
What do you like about The Tribute Universe?
I think I like the size of it. Our characters are charges of a large city in
a world that feels much larger than we are, filled with other heroes and
villains. A world our actions have had
an impact on.
Do you have any villains that you particularly like to
hate? Why?
The Mustang/Magnum combo is
ALWAYS entertaining and challenging.
When you go through a tussle with those two, you really feel it. S.I.N. and H.A.D.E.S. is turning out to be a lot of
fun too. Their goals always seem equally
odd and “left-field” and just downright scary threatening. “Uh-oh, we failed to keep the tiny plastic “techno-whats-it”
out of their hands. What’s the worst
that can happen?”
Can you recall a favorite moment in a TU campaign?
Oh my.
One of the very first sessions (the first?) of The Watch campaign, the
interview/selection process of some NPC characters and staff members of the
team Base. We got to really see some of
the character personalities. “If you
could be any animal, what animal would you be?” became the go-to question for
any new player-character or NPC recruit.
Fun times. Also, the death of
Phaedra, a player character. The death
of NPC legacy hero Vanguard, mentor of my character Kid Vanguard is another. There are many, many others.
Do you find it hard or easy to think of characters?
I find it easy for the most part, given a bit
of time and thought. Generally, I’ll
start with a character name or power set, and expand from there.
What’s your favorite non-superhero RPG character? Why?
Alamaya Dune, Half-elf 9th Level
Desert Druid in our Pathfinder campaign.
She’s another character that I’ve been playing for several years, and
has seen quite a lot of story. She’s the
daughter of a chieftain of a nomadic, slave trading desert tribe. Over time she became instrumental in freeing
many of those slaves, was always at odds with a former-slave player-character,
and soon became an ambassador to other nations of the world. I really enjoy her personality and playing
her alignment (True Neutral) is always a fun challenge.
Do you have a favorite superhero comic storyline?
Being a (mostly) Marvel fan, I particularly
liked Marvel’s Age of Apocalypse and Phalanx Covenant storylines.
Besides RPGs, what other games do you like to play?
I
enjoy a lot of board games and video games.
I’m a big fan of Horror video games like Silent Hill and Resident
Evil. Sadly, I have a bad habit of not
finishing games that I’ve started. I
can’t sit in front of a game for hours on end like I used to, so I never seem
to get anywhere with a lot of them.
How many dice do you own? Which ones are your favorites?
I’m sure I have close to a hundred dice of
many different colors and styles. My
favorite color is purple and I tend to like the bi-colored ones with the
granite/marble look.
Thanks, James, for being a part of the interview. Stay tuned, folks, as another player will be featured soon.
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