About Me

Basics

Hello, My name is Paul Gestl Aka Arc The Fetcher, and I have been playing different sorts of Tabletop RPGs for quite a while now, so much so that it has influenced my career direction and made me go down the route of communications in order to be able to relate to people by telling stories.

I've only been playing Tabletops since college in 2013, but once I experienced it I started being a game master practically right after and met some of my best friends because of playing. Many of them have always told me that my characters are quite memorable when I'm playing them and they have told me that when I dungeon master that I always manage to weave an incredible story and world.

My View on RPGs

My personally favorite System to play RPGs with is Pathfinder by Pazio. This is because Pathfinder, among all of the games I have played, provides the most options to build a character with an interesting skill set and with limitless customization.

many people might complain that pathfinder is overly complicated with so many rules and numbers being involved, and I will agree that even I, Someone who has played it for year, only know a fraction of what it has to offer.

That said I'm not unaware of other different systems, other games I'm experienced with are ones like the 3.5th , 4th, and 5th editions of D&D, call of Cthulhu, Fiasco, Dread, Shadowrun, Dead Lands, Star Wars Sagas, and a few others.

When it comes down to it though, the thing that I enjoy about RPGs comes down to the role play and the stories. Because of that I design my characters in a slightly different way when it comes to character creation.

First of all I never like to play the same character twice, with a few rare exceptions, and if I can I like to be a class and race of character that I have never tried before. That however is not the important part to me, the important part is having a quirk in the character that has not been tried before going from trying to make a necromancer into a good character and making an oracle of life into an evil character, both of which I have accomplished before.

It is these interesting natures of my characters, the ridiculous nature of tabletop RPGs, and my own itch to tell my stories so time wont erase them that are the reasons that I decided to make Critical Tales.

Critical Tales

Critical Tales was the name of a short magazine I wrote for a class in college. I had always tried to weave my hobbies into my assignments in order to make the experience more enjoyable. The magazine was a article style split up retelling of my very first tabletop RPG experience, and I had so much fun writing it that I want to try and do it a bit more regularly.

The problem was that I had an entire semester to make the magazine of grueling work double checking with the players from that old game which was especially tough cause we all lived in different states, so I decided for this blog I am going to do something different.

I am going to do retelling of  the individual stories of my characters and what they do from my perspective rather than overall looks at the campaigns I've been in. I don't know how many Characters I will put on here, but I know that I have dozens of them, each with a unique thing that makes them interesting.

Besides that, if you are a tabletop RPG player then more than likely you've had a group end up stopping before the game is finished. I also want to write these tales to reach closure for the characters and the stories they are in. I will make sure to denote when the groups stopped in the Stories section of this blog.