D20 Questions: WobbleRocket

That’s a tricky one. I’m in the process right now of chasing a lot of personal goals. It’s not so much that I have a whole lot of things I’m super proud of in the past. I am proud of myself for pursuing the things I am pursuing right now. Which is getting my YouTube channel off the ground. Getting my blog going. The thing I’m super proud of that has only started in the last week is Wobblefit.   I started at the beginning of this year at 407.6 pounds. I have committed to doing daily exercise and trying to change my diet. So that I can get a lot healthier. That’s not something new for me. I have tried year after year, for several years, to lose that weight and see it increase; going in the opposite direction of where it needs to.   Some of that is depression, some of that is medication changes, and some of that is laziness. So I decided to do something different this time. I started posting very publicly about that process. I’m doing a daily shot of everything I do on my walk. I’ve been posting about it on my Bluesky. I’ve been talking about it on my streams.   My viewers recently donated enough to get an entire year at a gym. That is fantastic. It still blows me away. It still feels like a dream even though I’ve already got the gym membership. I went and signed up yesterday. That is probably the thing I am most proud of just this second. That is drowning out any other pride of past achievements at all.

I love how many people are jumping on the Wobblefit.

We’re proud of Wobblefit and the spread of it. The effect it had on the community. You’ve already posted your first video from the gym, which is excellent.

I don’t know if you follow Rich the First-Time DM on Youtube?

We do.

I was watching his most recent video before you logged on.

He had commented on one of my shorts about how he was a big guy and he needed to get back to the gym. I could kinda tell from how he phrased his comment. I was like, “I don’t know if this guy is really gonna do it.”   One of those things, everybody does it. I’ve done it myself so many times. You say, “yeah, I need to do that too.”   So look I’m gonna call you out on Bluesky. I challenged him to seven days of daily exercise and I’d donate to his Ko-Fi if he successfully completes the challenge.   He’s already on day two and he is killing it. I’m doing a short, like a minute and a half long, or two minutes. This guy is out here talking about games for the entire fifteen minute walk. He is just doing a fantastic job. I am so incredibly proud of him. It is fantastic to see that.

Rich is an absolute beast. For a first time GM his knowledge is an ocean.

Yeah. At a certain point, like, ya have to wonder when is the man going to change his name to Rich the Incredibly Experienced and Super Knowledgeable DM? He has fantastic advice and everyone should follow him. I like the quote “When did we as nerds become the great unwashed?”

I think it speaks a little bit to your charisma and character that you can put yourself forward like that and have people rise up in response.

I suck at taking compliments for myself. People tell me that it speaks to charisma or whatever and I’m like eehhhh, ya know? But it is incredibly exciting to see that my journey is inspiring other people. Seeing people use the Wobblefit hashtag and the things that they are doing makes me proud. It motivates me too.   If he is out here doing this, I need to get my tail up off the couch and get my steps in today. I’ve been using it to pursue that a little bit better. One of the things I’m working on right now is increasing my average daily steps. I’ve been using that. Every time someone uses the Wobblefit hashtag I hop up and get a few more steps in.   DrewMakesGames asked me what the Wobblefit schedule was. I put on there: complain about it a lot. It was number three on the schedule. I was complaining before I took my walk the other day, he popped up and reminded me that complaining was number three. So I had to get up and do the walk first.

That has gotta be my cat Freya. She is a beautiful black American shorthair. She is such a sweet cat. She interestingly has a lot of intuition when it comes to my epilepsy.   If I am feeling bad, a lot of times she will come and lay on my chest and refuse to move if I start to stand up or something like that. So it’s an interesting indication, sometimes she can detect before even I do that I am having some symptoms.   She is a really sweet animal. Probably the best pet I have ever had. She is definitely my joy in the mornings and night. When it comes time to go to bed we usually hang out in the office on the other side of the house from the bedroom. She will herd me by walking a few steps ahead and turning to look back to make sure I’m still coming. (chuckle)

How long have you had Freya?

About five years now? No, maybe close to seven?

Any nicknames that you call her?

She gets called Frey Frey a lot. Occasionally Miss Freya. Frey Frey is the most common one.

The picture you posted earlier was beyond adorable.

When she was a kitten she would sit on my shoulder and fall asleep there. I actually got pretty good at being able to move around perched up there. Unfortunately, she tried doing that again after being fully grown and scratched the crap out of my arm.

It’s pretty clear your epilepsy has had a pretty heavy impact. It’s commendable you haven’t really let it get you down.

I was diagnosed when I was 31, although I recognize that I probably had seizures before then. Looking back I can see certain episodes that I had where I didn’t know what was going on, now realizing that was probably a seizure.   My mother has epilepsy. It is a hereditary condition in my case. So I grew up around someone with epilepsy and saw what she experienced. Ours manifests a little differently, although we have similar symptoms.   What has hit me in the last several years was COVID. I had it three times and every time I had an infection, I saw an increase in the frequency and severity of my seizures. The jury is kinda out on exactly why that is. There’s a lot of evidence that it might be related to inflammation in the brain. It’s taken a long time over the years, since the start of the pandemic, to get that under control.   This last year I’ve had probably five or six different med changes to get that sorted out. 2024 was the year of med changes. Knock on wood, at this point I am on a combination of medication that seems like it's working well. I have a lot more energy than I had three or four months ago. Things are going very well right now.

I primarily play Dungeons and Dragons. It has been my main game for the majority of my time. I have played other games, like GURPS and Deadlands and different things like that.   I think I have a soft spot for the lowly kobold.   They are such an interesting creature and you can do so much with them. In fact, in my own setting, my Warpwalkers setting, kobolds are one of the core races of the world. They are playable and kind of take the place of gnomes from the Player’s Handbook. I just really like them. They have a lot of personality. There is a lot you can do with them. That’s probably my pick right there.

Tell us a little more about Warpwalkers!

Warpwalkers is a setting I’ve been working on for the last fifteen years or so. It was something I would do when I wasn’t able to play. I would world-build.   It originated as a mash-up of Midgard from Kobold Press and Faerun (Forgotten Realms), taking the parts that I enjoyed the most. Over the years it has evolved into its own creation at this point.   The premise is that the prime reality of the world exists as a bubble and outside of that bubble is something called the Warp. It is this hungry, almost semi-sentient, plane of existence that is a place of horror and chaos. The Warp is full of aberrations and situations where reality doesn’t play by any sort of rules.   So magic exists in the setting as Warp that is leaking into the prime reality. It's literally people tapping into the Warp to make something happen that should not be happening. That which should not be. The term “Warpwalkers” refers to the player characters who I kind of view as the people for whom strange things happen. The Warp for whatever reason takes a particular interest in them.   I use a custom mechanic to replace Inspiration, where players receive a white token or stone called a White Warp. It can be used, redeemed at any point, for collaborative storytelling. They can drop one on the table and say, “This guard, who has been really grumpy and blocking everything that we need to get done, all of a sudden he is friendly and personable.”   Then I come up with this description of how reality shifts in a way, and there’s this bizarre change where this guy suddenly becomes personable and friendly and treats one of the player characters as if they’re cousins or something.   But every time the players use one of those White Warps, I also get a Black Warp. Which I use as a way to transform a yes, into a yes but. So you’re trying to, cast a fireball. Yes, it works, but this time the magic goes weird and transforms into this child-like shape of energy that starts screaming. As the energy rips itself apart there’s this huge explosion and everyone who sees it feels unsettled and all of a sudden there’s a status effect to anyone who viewed it, in addition to the effects of the fireball.   It’s a way to bring some dynamic action into the game. It’s a way for the players to manipulate the setting. It’s a way for the aesthetic of the setting, the feel of this aberrant horror, into the setting in different ways.

Live and die by the Warps. I like it. It’s like a player's invitation to change the world or add flavor to every spell and every action. It’s just really cool.

In general? Players who do a lot of roleplaying but are not going to be bogged down by having long conversational scenes that get away from the adventure itself. I think there is a good balance to strike between combat, exploration, and roleplaying. Those have a tendency at various tables to get completely out of wack.   One table, all we ever do is combat. At a certain point that bores me to tears. Or we are sitting here roleplaying and we are having a 45-minute conversation with a shopkeeper. And that can be fun, but at a certain point, it's like okay, what are we doing? We’re not doing anything, we're not achieving anything. Our characters are standing in a blacksmith’s shop just talking. And that at a certain point gets to me as well.   So I like to keep things moving in my games. If players get to the point where they are just sitting around chatting with themselves or with NPCs, I’ll throw in something weird just to liven things up. Oh, a giant boar just smashes through the door. Okay, now what are we gonna do? (chuckle)

You don’t like your D&D games to degenerate into Seinfeld episodes?

I don’t like games that get stagnant. I like to keep things moving at a pretty fast pace. So the players I enjoy are the ones that are there for that balance. Who embrace all sides of the game instead of just one component.

Do you primarily GM or do you get to play?

I prefer GMing. I do like to play, but often if I play more than a one-shot or limited-run campaign I start chaffing and want to run my own. I just prefer it. I enjoy it. I’ve been a GM pretty much since the very beginning since I started playing. It is where I am most comfortable.

So as a GM how do you feel about people who bring in over long backstories?

I am not a fan of them. I have joked that I only accept backstories in limerick form. Generally speaking, I prefer a backstory that is one or two sentences.   I feel that the character story should be what we are experiencing at the game table. I generally start my games at a very early power level. Whatever system I’m playing, you’re starting at the very beginning, whether a first-level adventurer, or you have the lowest point total the game allows. So that you have that arc of progress where you get to see the character grow from one end to the other.   Typically I prefer when characters begin not having a whole lot of history to them. You might have a couple of basic ideas. Like before I was an adventurer I was a pirate. Or a dragon destroyed my village and I’m out for revenge. That is enough backstory for me. We don’t need a four or five-page novel of everything that has happened to your character before they hit the table.   I think there are a lot of players who are interested in creative writing who might be better served by acknowledging to themselves that it is a thing they want to do. Working up the courage to sit down and write a short story. Sit down and engage in that creative writing process and tell the story you want to tell. You might find that you are happier doing that than trying to convey this story at a table with five other people who have their own goals and agendas.   I had a guy come to my table one time and he had a long backstory about how his character was the disgraced cop/general of the kingdom. I’m like bro, you're first level? How are we making this work? Did you just lie your way to the top? Cause I’ve got a guard in the first town you’re going in that’s 3rd level and would wipe the floor with you in a fight. How are we going to process this idea that you are the top general of the land?   Yeah, you’ve got this story you’re disgraced or whatever, but you're still a 1st level character. We need to work within those bounds. We can work toward the character becoming the general if that is what you want them to do. That can be the arc we explore at the table.

I do. Obviously, I use the Warp system.   I also do an abstraction of encumbrance using a sort of slot-based system. I don’t have any specific rules on that. I’ve tried several systems and I’m still kinda tinkering with it to see what I like the most.   I tend to write items on cards and hand them out to players. What I’ve found fascinating with that is you will see a character that is holding a card with a health potion on it and they will physically hand the card to another player to represent the transfer of items between things. It gives you a great idea of who is holding what.   Because of using encumbrance, if you’re going into a dungeon to pull out a whole bunch of treasure you have to bring porters or hirelings with you. So we’ve even experimented with stacks of cards. Now you know what Nigel the porter is carrying. That way if a dragon comes through and strafes the whole area with fire breath, who is going to get caught in that, and what items might be potentially damaged in that combat? It’s something that I enjoy.   I found that with encumbrance, a lot of players throw it out. A lot of tables do. I just find that Dungeons and Dragons works better when you keep it. I don’t like keeping it in terms of tracking every individual pound and carry capacity or things like that. But if you track encumbrance, you put the players in a situation where they have to interact with NPCs.   There is only so much stuff they can carry. They are going to have to hire some people to assist them whether it be to guard the ten thousand gold pieces they pulled out of the dragon's lair so it doesn’t get stolen by bandits or to build a relationship with the wizard who is going to craft them a bag of holding so they can carry more. If you don’t track encumbrance, so many items that are in the game, that should be cool magic items, become nothing.   The Bag of Holding should be a rare magic item that is a game-changer for a party. I’ve played at tables where you get a free Bag of Holding. That’s nice, but then nobody ever thinks about it again for the rest of the game. It should be cool and interesting. “This is a major change for our party. Now we can try to get to that next dungeon that is so much further away that was logistically out of our reach before.”

Another common workaround for encumbrance is the wagon, but even that lends you the gimmick and all the problems that come from it. How are you going to keep the horses alive?

Exactly! Bill the Pony from The Lord of the Rings was a key figure up to a certain point because he was carrying all of their stuff.

You recently talked about this in your blog.

There are two answers to that question. There’s my first with tabletop gaming and my first GMing a tabletop game.   I received my first tabletop roleplaying book, when I was probably eight years old. My brother gave me a copy of the Robotech RPG. I think it was just a sourcebook. I don’t even think it was the core rulebook.   I didn’t have a clue what this thing was about. I just knew it had cool robot pictures in it and it was talking about these things called d6s. That was my first introduction to anything involving roleplaying games. I was totally there for the robot pictures and that was about it.   Later in high school, I had a friend who was playing Dungeons & Dragons. He was running a campaign and had asked me if I wanted to join. He lived right around the corner from me and our dads worked together. So it was an easy thing to say, “Yeah, I want to join that.”   So I played in his campaign for a couple of sessions. Then I decided I wanted to be a Dungeon Master myself. I asked my party to give me three weeks to plan. I spent that time designing this fantasy world called Alagron. It was all kinds of cool stuff: the world was shattered, there were floating land masses, the moon was all fucked up. I spent hours on this thing over those three weeks.   When it came down to it, the day before we played, I realized I hadn’t actually designed anything for the players to do. So I slapped together a villain and some cronies. I didn’t have any idea what their motivations were or anything like that.   We hit the table and my players blew through my prepared content in about five minutes. I absolutely froze instead of being able to improv anything. I was just panicking that I had totally screwed up. Everyone at the table was looking super disappointed. One of my players asked if that was it? It was a soul-crushing question. It really was.   We ended up playing Soul Caliber 2 the rest of the night and had a pretty good time.

Fantastic game by the way.

The next day, my friend who had some experience being a GM and I sat down to understand what happened, and what went wrong. I ended up picking a published adventure, the Sunless Citadel. One of the first adventures released for Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition, and we gave it another shot.   I sat down and said, “Okay, I’m going to stick to this published adventure. I’m not going to get super wild with the world-building.”   Because at the time I didn’t really know the rules. I didn’t know what I was doing at all.   We had a great time. We ran that adventure to its conclusion and ended up running several sessions in another adventure. Over time as my experience grew, I started incorporating more homebrew elements into my games.   These days I don’t prep for sessions all that much. I kinda wing it based on the NPCs I know are in the area and what their motivations are.

Have you ever had any inclinations to return to your original world and revisit the shattered islands?

Not really? Some elements have been incorporated into the Warpwalkers setting. That is my baby at this point. There are some details here and there that I’m the only one who would know came from the original world. There’s not enough distinction. I think that first world was not thought out well enough for it to be something I want to revisit.   One of my goals this last year (2024) that I spent a lot of time on was my world-building. Taking my setting from a stereotypical medieval heroic fantasy Lord of the Rings rip-off and trying to inject more unique and creative elements into it. To really take the fantastical elements and turn them up to eleven.

I’d love to play a Warpwalkers game at some point.

I’ve been thinking about running a couple of games in it online. I’m not particularly comfortable with online GMing. I don’t like messing with the whole virtual tabletop thing. If I did it would be a Discord call. I have used Owlbear Rodeo.   It is a very basic map program with a web-based interface. I like it a lot. I’ve used it a couple of times when I run one-shots online. I would probably use a combination of Discord and Owlbear, or something similar.

This was several years ago in an old campaign. I had just given a Bag of Holding to my players as a reward for a substantial quest. At the time we were using some old-school rules and I had an NPC go through telling the players that you have to be careful with this item. It is a powerful magical item. If it is ever cut or torn it will tear a rift in the planes and everything nearby will be sucked into the astral plane.   I just gave them that warning, and in the very next combat they fought a bunch of manticores. A player decided that he wanted to collect all the quills. He then very clearly described himself roughly shoving these things into the Bag of Holding.   Everybody was like, “You’re gonna tear this thing open! we’re gonna be screwed!”   I was like, I’m not gonna do this. I’m not gonna say this doesn’t happen. I’m going to leave this up to the dice. So I said if this rolls a 1, it punctures the Bag of Holding. I rolled the dice and you guys know what came up.   I went to the rules to see what exactly happened. Everybody got sucked into this rift in the astral plane. Somehow everyone survived.   That is the story of how our campaign transitioned from Forgotten Realms into Planescape. We ended up continuing in a Planescape environment from then on. I was really fascinated by the setting and there was a lot I wanted to do with it.   It was an unexpected but very interesting segway from one setting to another. The campaign still went on for a pretty good time. That was a really interesting transition there.

Great job being creatively fluid with catastrophe.

It was totally unplanned. One of the things I try to focus on is that we’re going to play by what the player’s choices are, what the dice say happens, and in this case, it just so worked out.   If I hadn’t given them the whole spiel about the warning, I wouldn’t have done this. But this guy just spent a lot of time talking to you, and now you’re going to do this recklessly. We have to roll the dice. We have to see what happens here.

That is exactly what the dice are for.

I haven’t played this yet, but at one point I would have said a game set in the Alien franchise. Of course, there is now the Alien Roleplaying Game.   I am desperately hoping to find someone to run a game for me so I can experience that. For years and years, the Alien franchise has been one of my favorite things. It always seemed like it would make an interesting horror tabletop roleplaying game.   As far as something that doesn’t exist now? I mean there are so many systems out there.

We were thinking of video games, board games, or any other kind of other genre.

Well if you open it up to video games, my concept would be something that plays like Castlevania Symphony of the Night. One that receives regular updates, opens new areas, and adds new expansions to it.   There’s been a lot of Metroidvanias. Many have had DLCs and stuff, but we’ve not really seen a persistent game in that genre. I would be interested in something like that if it were well done.   A lot of the companies that are interested in doing those sorts of persistent games tend to have bad track records of dealing with their community. You’ve got Maple Story from Nexon, but Nexon is just a horrible company. They’ve done a lot of trashy stuff to their user base at some point.

Are you familiar with Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night? There’s a good deal of DLC for that.

I am, and it is one of my favorite games. I backed the Kickstarter on that one. They’ve done a fantastic job of following through on releasing all of their stretch goals. They’re starting to release a couple of paid DLCs. Some of that has added new areas and new content. I’m interested to see what happens with that. I’m really interested to see what happens when they release a sequel to that. I believe Bloodstained 2 is in development now.

Shoutout to After Image as well.

I feel like we need to discuss this one: Timespinner. I gave Stonehomie (Chuck) Timespinner as a Christmas gift and it’s one of my favorite games. Timespinner 2 is in development now and hopefully should be released in the next year or two. There’s a lot of really cool development on that. You can see the trailers and stuff. I’m looking forward to the sequel to that one.

I was surprised that the movement was so clean in that game.

Yeah. It’s really tight and feels a lot like the Castlevania games. I describe it as a mashup of Castlevania and Chrono Trigger. Timespinner might be one I end up streaming sometime in the future.

That would probably be beating the main quest in Skyrim. I have over a thousand hours in Skyrim, most in modded playthroughs, and just in the last three months beat the main quest. (laughter) That’s probably my white whale for video games.

You recently had a go at Catan, didn’t you?

I’m still in the middle of playing it and still don’t have a clue what I am doing. There is a website called Board Game Arena that lets you play online as a free account. You can join games, but to host them you have to have a premium account. It’s only like 3 bucks a month.   There is a board game group that meets at the local gaming shop a couple of times a month. The admins have the premium membership and they have started a couple of games for us. So, yeah, I am playing Catan.   All I’m doing is making happy little roads. I did do my first trade today. I traded my sheep for some logs. I feel like I’m doing really well in the game.

I don’t have a lot of commentary on them. They are something I don’t pay attention to.   I do occasionally like watching speed runners if it is a game I am particularly interested in. I think it was last year, or maybe 2023, when there was a 14-year-old kid who topped the high scores on Tetris. I thought that was really cool.   As far as competitive League of Legends or Call of Duty or anything like that it’s not something that interests me. I don’t consume that media or care about it.

Do you watch any Games Done Quick?

I haven’t watched a whole lot this time (2025) because I’ve been so busy. I usually watch it every year, particularly when they start hitting up the retro games that are my kinda thing.   If it is something that happened on the NES or SNES, I’m gonna spend some time with it. I like it whenever they allow glitches. It's interesting to see how people are pushing these old games to their limits.   I watched one, I don’t even remember what game it was, sometime last year, but he did something through a series of movements where it sets a particular bit in the memory. It causes an overflow and immediately launches you to the last boss. Its a level of knowledge about those games and those carts that’s well beyond anything I could hope to aspire to.

The crazy thing about the retro game is that they have been out for 30 years and they are still finding new things all the time. Different ways to break the game. Tetris is a perfect example.

That’s interesting in competitive gaming. You will see somebody break a record, and once it gets disseminated, how they did it, all of a sudden that record will get pushed. Sometimes just by several milliseconds, but sometimes a substantial amount of time.

That’s pretty clear: roleplaying games. For the most part, I enjoy old retro turn-based roleplaying games. I also enjoy first-person experiences like Skyrim and creative-style games like Terraria and Minecraft where you get to build something.   Besides that? Pretty much anything.   I play a lot of platformers on Sunday night NES. I have a soft spot for the Ace Combat games where you are flying an airplane and shooting missiles at people. I like racing games although those can be a little bit tricky for my epilepsy. Depending on what the environments are like. If they have you go through a tunnel with a lot of flashing lights and stuff it can be a little tricky sometimes. I like fighting games but I am terrible at them.

Me too. But the soul still burns.

I know you’ve been talking about doing D&D Minecraft dungeons. Do you have a current dungeon you plan on starting with?

I’ve been trying to figure that out this week. I have not nailed down a specific dungeon. I am thinking I might start with a smaller one from Dyson Logos instead of trying to jump into doing the big classic dungeons. Just to kinda figure out my build styles and some of the techniques I’m gonna use. So I think I might start with a smaller one.   That stream should be launching next week (today, 1/15/2025) It looks like it’s gonna be on Wednesdays at 11 am Eastern. I will play Minecraft in Survival Mode and try to recreate classic Dungeons & Dragons dungeons. I also want to highlight some of the indie creators who are working in the tabletop roleplaying space. I think there is a lot that can be done with that as well.

My musical tastes are all over the place. Lately, I have been listening to a lot of Mozart.   There is a particular song, Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K. 448. For whatever reason, some studies show that people who listen to that song have lower epileptiform discharges. This doesn’t necessarily translate into fewer seizures, but it is an indication factor there is some activity going on. So my morning routine, with algorithms being what they are, spiraled into listening to a bunch of different classical music.   It’s something I put on when I’m working on my blog post or something like that. But my musical tastes go all over the place. I also have a lot of playlists of classic video game music. Megaman is a huge favorite, like Castlevania, and the Final Fantasy series. I find remixes and covers on YouTube for those series as well.   I don’t like to listen to a whole lot of lyrical music. I’m often doing something, and I find that the lyrics distract me. (chuckle) I can’t write and listen to something that has lyrics at the same time. A lot of the music I listen to is instrumental.

Probably Portland, Oregon. I had the opportunity several years ago to fly out to Oregon and visit with some friends for a couple of weeks. It was my first time seeing the Pacific Ocean.   I don’t remember the name of this place, but there is a big rock that showed up in the movie The Goonies that is off the Pacific coast, in the ocean, and got to go see that. We went to Multnomah Falls, that was really nice. I got to see some redwoods for the first time. So that was probably an experience that will always stick with me.   I would love to get back out to the Pacific Northwest at some point. I don’t really get the opportunity to travel as often as I’d like. So I pretty much stay in my neck of Alabama and that’s about it. But I would like to visit the Pacific Northwest again.

Everything is outside my comfort zone. I am at my core, and this is going to sound very weird, but at my core I am a reclusive introvert. I prefer to keep to myself and have my own little place at home.   I think at one point I would have said public speaking. But then I was forced to do that for work and got comfortable with it. There are a lot of things that I can do that I prefer not to. And then of course I am doing a YouTube channel where I’m streaming four hours a week and posting my face all over the place. So I guess I’m a little bit of a masochist.

As a YouTube personality of sorts, it’s important to have your face out there. It’s nice to know you have an actual human to interact with. A VR model it could be anybody. You could be talking to anybody and have no idea. I guess that’s also the appeal.

I understand. The first couple times I tried to record videos of myself playing games I was super self-conscious about what I looked like on camera. You get more comfortable with it the more you do it.   My prep for a video before was like an hour-and-a-half-long ritual of things I was making sure to do. And now it's like I just sit down and turn the camera on and get going. As long as I have my coffee, I’m ready to stream.   I wanted to do that. I wanted to make sure I had my face out there. When I have watched streamers in the past. I’ve always been drawn to the ones who use face cams. You really get to know that person through their facial expressions. Through things that they do while they are sitting at their desk or wherever they are gaming. I find that more personable than the graphical YouTubers.   Partially, it's easier for me to understand what someone is doing if I can read their lips. I don’t really have hearing loss, but I’ve always found it a lot easier to focus on conversations if I can see what someone is saying. It’s a lot harder to do that, especially if they have any kind of background noise or distortion in their mic. You really lose a lot of that.