Weird, unasked for personal thoughtdump here, but man, I have always felt the weirdest, completely unjustified aversion to third party D&D content.
I think it’s something like, “I want to approach the game on its own merits and play it as the designers intended,” or something in that thematic ballpark, except:
A) D&D was written from the beginning to be tweaked and adjusted and modified,
B) No one actually plays RAW, anyway,
C) The actual designers obviously have no idea what to do with their own ruleset, anyway, hence the constant parade of errata over the years, so why would a third party designer’s ideas be any less valid?
and, most importantly,
D) I don’t like completely played-straight D&D that much, anyway, so why would I want to make myself play it that way???
Reflecting on this recently, I came to the kind of funny-but-sad conclusion that I think my “try real hard to play D&D RAW” quasi-ethos was basically a subconscious self-sabotage to reinforce the fact that D&D “wasn’t really for me.”
Well, it’s that, or maybe flashbacks to the parade of hilariously overpowered, horribly written third party supplements my players were always trying to drag into the old Pathfinder 1E campaign I ran for a few years.
In any case, that book looks super neat; thanks for sharing it here :)
Online play sucks and blows and I hate it with the fury of a thousand suns. I endured it for a year and a half, because RPGs are a primary social connection mechanism with a bunch of close friends here in Raleigh (and was one of the few shared activities we enjoyed that could move online at all), but the second enough of us were vaccinated to feel safe gathering, I moved everything back in person as much as possible. The public games I run for our local Meetup group are still online for now, and every session I do for that serves as reinforcement of my thoughts on online play.
My whole GMing style is all about energetic improvisation and riffing off what other people are saying and doing and feasting on their energy like the fucked up extrovert vampire that I am, bopping from person to person and dragging them in with hand gestures and eye contact and wild voices, encouraging intra-party conversation and gags, and sticking everyone into tiny webinar boxes just completely saps the energy out of what I do in games.
Some RPG Youtuber recently had a video about how “the Matt Mercer effect is a lie!” and I can’t help but think that dude must not actually, like, interact with real human people in the wider gaming community or something, because what you experienced there is absolutely real and happens a weird amount. That said, hey, it was also a game problem that someone actually solved with conversation, which never seems to happen. “I have this expectation for the fun I want to have.” “I have a completely different expectation, cool, have a good life.” 98% of the threads on /r/rpg could be solved if people could just do that, hah.
Sounds like you need to go dive into the vibrant OSR community to me, man. That style of gaming is, like, 5000% not-for-me, but there’s a TON of people out there fiending for that kinda content. And, IIRC, you live in a big enough metro area that you wouldn’t be stuck looking online for players who’d love that shit.
Mind, it’d mean playing with relative strangers at first, but likeminded strangers, at least.
Hope you can find your way back to the kind of gaming you enjoy, dude!