Meet Our Players! pt. 1 (The Matthews Family)

Brandon Matthews

Hi there!

My name is Brandon, one of the "would be heroes" in our lovely podcast. I play Thom, the Warlock.

I've been playing D&D since my 4th year of college, in 2004. I was introduced to it by a friend named Magness. He was starting up a new campaign which ended up having 8 players and he wanted some new folks involved. Being the sort who always loved a good Role Playing game, I started reading the Players Handbook and was instantly hooked.

I ended up making a weird character that was a Silver Dragon Sorcerer trapped in humanoid form. Magness and his then-girlfriend/now-wife were really good at homebrewing things, so they came up with a weird set of rules as to what of my Dragon abilities and Sorcerer spells I would get when. Not exactly the best way to start out a new campaign, but we had fun with it. Eventually that group imploded due to sheer size and scheduling difficulties, but over the summer we ran an ongoing weird "Everyone gets a turn at the wheel" campaign for high level characters.  The idea there was that we would have no real ongoing story, just whoever wanted to come up with a brief one-shot adventure would run it for whoever was around that could play. The players would ruthlessly optimize and twink their characters as best they could, but whoever was DMing would equally do their best to make the fights as vicious as possible in an attempt to kill off the characters. As you can imagine, we went through a lot of character creations. Good times.

I would later take part with a much smaller number of folks from that group in an acquatic campaign that lasted a semester, where I played one of my favorite characters, a Mystic Theurge who was Half-Wizard, half-Cleric, had a Pseudodragon companion, and somehow owned a sentient greatsword named Steve. Yeah.

That was my major introduction to tabletop gaming, and while I haven't played much outside of 3.5th and 4th edition D&D, I do enjoy it, especially the creative flexibility you have in telling your story. I hope you enjoy our madcap adventures!

You can follow Brandon on Twitter: @thebmatt

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Karen Matthews

Hi!

I'm Karen, and ?I first got introduced to D&D in the fall of 2007 when a guy that my friends hung out with brought my friends and I into a game. My character that I made then is the sister of the character I play now. Over Thanksgiving break the group had a session and threw my character in the dungeon. Afterward, due to group tension everything sort of imploded. We'd probably rp'd maybe a sessions worth but it was enough to get hooked. I spent a lot of time creating my half moon elf character and was sad to see her go. I'd invested a lot into her back story and it was rough to feel like that work was going down the drain. However my best friend and I decided to keep a journal of her story. In November of 2007 was the last time I played until I started dating my husband. One weekend he invited my to play on Skype with some friends and were were able to make our way through a one shot. I completely admit to being a n00b, but I enjoy playing and facepalming.

You can follow Karen on Twitter: @tanzenmitgott