RPG.SE is 10 years old today! Let's tell some stories!

Question

RPG.SE entered beta on August 19, 2010. The site has been around for a long time and seen a lot of people - some just passing through, others deciding to stay.

As we are a site inherently based around different types of story-telling, I thought this would be an appropriate activity to celebrate and reminisce on this site and community.

Tell us a story of something positive, fun, and/or meaningful that happened to you or that you saw on this site in the last 10 years (doesn't matter whether it's 1 sentence or one page, or whether it happened on day 1 or yesterday).

Answer 1

A certain user made some comments on my very first answer that have stuck with me. Their comments helped shape my perspective of this stack. They're probably the reason I feel so strongly about what we're trying to do here.

I made my first answer, and this user started making comments about how my answer could be improved, how the language and argument could be made more clear.

And not once did it feel like my answer was being criticized.

There was a certain gentleness and "let's build this thing together" attitude about their comments that made me want to engage here and learn how we do things here. I realized very quickly that rpg.se isn't about slinging knowledge and getting internet points - it's about making others feel the way I was made to feel through building this enormous database of knowledge about the games we all love.

Those comments are long gone from the post, but they're still in my heart.

Thanks Medix2 for being who you are.

Answer 2

I can't really remember why I joined. I think it was to find an answer to an odd D&D question since I got back in to D&D, after a long lay off, in 2014.

As a result of this site, I got to play D&D 5e with a group of Chatizens (people who were discussing various stuff in chat) where we had one player in Guam (trogdor) two on the east coast (NautArch, nitsua60), me in Central time zone, and I can't recall where Shalvenay and MikeQ were (thinking Central time zone, but maybe West Coast maybe?) V2 joined us for a few sessions as well before RL lowered the boom on that campaign (as happens to many campaigns).

From that group, I then got to play, also:

Honey Heist
Golden Sky Stories
Great Ork Gods
Fellowship (A Dungeon World variant)
And, a one-off D&D adventure with Shalvenay (it is somewhere in the archives of the Backroom chat room) as DM where my paladin tried to (and eventually did) recover a lost religious figurine and return it to the shaman of an orc tribe. Someday Malik Mabir will go adventuring again...

All without having to leave home.

A few of us are about to get a 13th Age game started with a chatizen friend in Finland(the notorious bird / eagle watcher kviiri 😎).
We were remote gaming before COVID-19 made it more necessary.

Ooh, and I just forgot: because I got to know those same folks and game with them, I ended up in a play test for an adventure that got published, and that I hope to run my group through later in the current campaign.

Answer 3

I haven't been active on the site for the past... 5 years, or so? I've been reading the Main but haven't been coming into Meta or Chat anymore. But still, 10 years is a very impressive feat for one of the nicest, most consistently thoughtful sites I've had the pleasure of seeing, where moderator and community action consistently felt like an exercise in how to make things better.

Part of that was RPG.SE Chat, which was a great place to hang out and talk with friendly and helpful regulars, where I learned a lot and helped shape my understanding of my own preferences and motives as a roleplayer. And, no less importantly, where me and @BESW spent hours trying to create normal, decent, borderline-playable characters for deadEarth, one of the most mind-numbingly bad RPG systems ever devised, where it's quite possible to have all your allotment of character die during character generation, leaving you plain out of luck.

Happily, our attempts at deadEarth Chargenning are immortalized, at least as long as SE keeps old chat room transcripts, at the deadEarth: the Chargenning room, for all to read and weep.

Answer 4

Shoutout to everyone that makes the community here great

And I generally mean everyone and anyone. I spent countless hours when I should've been working just helping and being helped on RPG questions or hanging out in chat and listening to funny stories and live experiences of those in RPG.SE chat exposing me to a wide range of players and GMs. There is a friendliness, even in some of the more argumentative times I experienced on RPG.SE that make it worlds better than any other SE I've interacted with.

If I had to specifically pick one memory, it would be helping plan and partake in the huge D&D 5e questions drive contest we got going pre-release to make sure RPG.SE was the 5e help resource at launch. It was really cool to see everyone pull together and work together on a new version despite all of our disagreements and preferences on D&D diaspora.

Specifically I want to thank BESW, Wax Eagle, SevenSidedDie, & doppelgreener (and more) for being good website friends and mentors on my RPG.SE journey to being a power user for a few years. I want to thank users like Mxyzplk and others I argued with and disagreed with strongly yet were themselves generally acting in the best interest of the site. Its been great to see things change and develop on Meta RPG.SE overtime whenever I check in and to everyone currently leading the community, keep doing what you're doing.

Answer 5

I have a lot of good memories from this site, none of them terribly exciting but it has definitely been the most meaningful online community I've ever been involved with.

Coming to this site as someone who only played PF/D&D I'm happy to say that people here have exposed me to so many different things, from small one page (or even 1 word!) RPGs to Safety Tools.

I've seen people designing characters, campaigns, and even entire RPG systems on the site and even seen some get published.

I've even had the pleasure of playing at a virtual table with some of the people I've met here and it has always been a delight. (And I'd like to do more of this in the future!)

I'm happy that this place exists as a location that can bring such wonderful people together and keep them coming back.

Here's hoping for 10 more years.

Answer 6

I put this in chat a while ago, and never got around to posting it here.

I’ve been around for about 2 months officially, but I lurked for a long time as an IP during what I called the “I’m not allowed to sign up for any social media at all until I turn about 3 million” stage of life (so up until a couple of months ago) (note: I am not actually 3 million yet).

In those two months, I have learned more about gaming than I had in 5 or 6 years of being a GM (I think), especially about dealing with problem players.

Thanks all of the people here for being wonderful and patient and not totally laughing at me every time I show up with a “long story but now I need a ruling on this” question or a question with a weird, complicated answer. I think this site has gotten me through a bunch of stuff both personal and (semi-)professional, and you guys make it such a nice little corner of the internet.

A new thing I want to add to this is that I have never had someone put me down for being/doing anything, even when it wasn’t the most optimal idea (rhino stampede shenanigans and FOOF shenanigans being the most recent). I’ve gotten plenty of “this is a bad idea” or “maybe change this” advice, but never has it been rude or mean-spirited. This is an amazing community.

Answer 7

More chat memories than the main site:

worked with a group of people to make a mostly broken flying half-elf in 4e

starting a game in chat with some other members for a medieval knight chivalry game that didn't get to have session one