Hello and Welcome New Members! Part 14

[Daisho]

To quote a podcast that it's pretty likely most folk here have never heard of on account of it being about cricket (the sport, not the insect), and which is actually a pretty silly thing to quote because it's so utterly generic if one isn't familiar with said podcast, "Hello-o-o-o!"

Long-time reader (goodness knows how far back, but I'm pretty sure it was before the Great Kazoo art upgrade), first time poster, here.

I can promise my sentence syntax won't be this abstruse for every future post, but unfortunately I might slip into multiple sub-clauses from time to time, though I'm sure it will be a relief to most that I do at least try to avoid nested parentheses, or brackets as we call them in the UK—and for those wondering, we call these things: [] "square brackets" which is super imaginative, I know.

Anyway, as you might have gathered from my ramblings above, I enjoy language and its use, which is handy as I write and talk for a living. I've previously worked in nearly all the sectors that people tend to dislike (sales, parking enforcement, law, journalism, public relations—really, I just need real estate and politics for the set) but at least my current employer is still pretty well-loved by most fellow Brits.

I've been interested in role-playing games since I was a kid, but unfortunately the gaming club at school was affected by the "Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons" nonsense at the time so I didn't get to try hobby until I was 14. My oldest friend had acquired a series of books being marketed by their publisher as the "British D&D"—something the authors never claimed, as the tone was rather more Sapkowski than Gygax—and after a couple of games I was hooked.

About a decade later, I was very lucky to be invited by another friend to join a campaign also featuring those authors, whom he'd got to know after interviewing one of them for his college magazine. It transpires that, sometimes, meeting your heroes is actually OK, and I'm still gaming with most of the group today. As is my wife.

In any event, at one point a fellow player made a reference to the celebrated "Up a Level, Down a Level" strip and, after I'd found it online, there was some proper bingeing of what at that point was the entire archive, plus the incentives and other bonus content.

I've joined the forums today to make an observation inspired by the latest page, so I'll hop over to its thread in a moment, but as this one exists specifically for newbies to say hello, I thought it only polite to do that first!