I; ;was born and raised in colonial New Zealand where, at about age 12, I played role playing games for the first time. These early games included Middle-Earth Role-Playing, AD&D, James Bond and many others.

To begin with adventure games with high bodycounts held the most interest but, as time marched on, plot driven games over an extended campaign became the most enjoyable.

In about 1996 to 1999 I played in a series of campaigns set in a fantasy world where we took turns running the game. In many cases we developed the world together and had core characters propping up the story. We also converted between game rules systems. I recall it ended up using D&D basic edition, as one of the simplest but quickly moving systems. This required some rule tweaks but, when story telling is the main aim, the absence of cumbersome game mechanics worked to our advantage.

I took this idea to the UK where I started a short-lived group in 2002. This was resurrected with [Profiles/Matt]] (from LoST) in 2004. Again, the world was D&D based, but with a number of house rules and compromises to try and make battles run quickly.

Story is king.

After seeing the TV series Firefly and hearing there was a corresponding RPG for Serenity I decided to run a science fiction game. This is the only such game run in the group so far (i.e. far future role-playing). The game seemed to go down quite well, which I think is somewhat due to the attachment many of the players had to the TV series. As a GM that gave me an advantage and while none of the characters are based on the TV series cast, the feel of the game is somewhat intact. In fact the setting of Serenity as based on the series/movie is a great one to explore, because it was not especially detailed. There is a lot of room for plot development based on where Serenity left off.

Unfortunately it is unlikely that the franchise will ever be resurrected, so anything can happen in the game. Also, I take the view that the Whedon 'Verse is more a backdrop rather than an all-or-nothing fight of good vs. evil (like Star Wars for instance). There is undoubtedly political intrigue and shadow government subplots etc, but there is a perfectly reasonable argument that the Alliance's unification of the system is a good thing for the people. Whedon's use of the setting was simply having his main characters be from the losing side, i.e. with a chip on their shoulder.