I’m 26, and some health issues have made my social anxiety much worse over the years. At this point, I struggle a lot with simply leaving my house. Being around people, feeling watched, having to interact with strangers… it can be exhausting.
But TTRPGs have always been different.
I’ve always loved writing and creating worlds, characters and stories. I discovered TTRPGs a little over ten years ago, watched tons of actual plays, and eventually started playing myself.
My first sessions were amazing. I’ve always been very quiet and pretty antisocial lol, but somehow, around a TTRPG table, I felt comfortable.
And becoming a GM for the first time? I absolutely loved it.
I still GM today, and now that my social anxiety is probably at its worst, those sessions have become a genuine little bubble of happiness for me. I don’t go out much anymore, but TTRPGs still give me a reason to talk to people and interact with others.
In a weird way, they help me work on that part of myself too.
As a GM, I’ve always been terrible at organizing my thoughts. Notes everywhere, characters in one place, lore somewhere else, encounters in another tool... I kept trying different software, but there was always something missing.
A little over two years ago, I got tired of looking for THE perfect GM tool (for me !). So I decided to build my own. I’d started learning how to code in high school and kept using it for personal projects over the years, so I felt like I was at least somewhat capable of pulling it off.
I couldn’t really work anymore because of my situation, and having such a huge project to focus on also helped me feel like I wasn’t completely useless.
At first, I wasn’t even planning to release it. But at some point, I realized I also needed a project that could maybe help me live a little more comfortably financially. So I started thinking beyond my own needs.
I added more (and more) options, more ways to customize game systems, and features I personally would probably never have needed for my own games, but that I knew could be useful to other GMs. That also meant the project took much longer than it probably needed to.
Eventually, it stopped feeling like just “my tool” and started feeling like something other people could genuinely use too.
So I decided to release it. With basically : zero audience, zero marketing experience, and absolutely no idea what I was doing.
(I’m not going to name it or link it because this isn’t supposed to be an advertisement.)
I had spent two years building it, but I also remembered being younger and constantly broke, and how much I would have loved having access to something like this for free.
So I made almost everything free. 🤣
There is a small optional subscription with some extra features, but I’ve always tried really hard not to make the free version intentionally frustrating. Even when I talk about Premium, I usually describe it more as a way to support the project.
The software has been public for about six months now. And somehow, despite me being hilariously bad at promoting it, people are actually using it. (Almost a thousand, that’s crazy.)
Not enough for me to live off it. But enough for something else to happen that I genuinely didn’t expect.
People send me feedback and ideas.
GMs tell me it makes their sessions easier or more fluid.
Some tell me they love being able to create and customize their own game system without needing to know how to code.
I’ve had students thank me because they can use almost everything without paying.
Some people actively follow the project and help me improve it.
And my own players love using it during our sessions. Some still use physical dice around the table, while others roll in the app because they don’t feel like doing the math. Some take notes on paper, others directly in the app. I really love seeing how differently everyone uses the software.
I never expected to become rich from this, and I know it sounds a little cliché, but in a way, I think I did. Not financially, obviously! But I genuinely never expected something I originally made just for myself to become useful to other people, or to mean something to them. And I’ve realized that means much more to me than I ever thought it would.
So yeah.
I spent more than two years building a piece of software that barely makes me any money. And I’m really happy I did.
It gave me something to work toward when I felt like I couldn’t do much else.
It made me talk to people I never would have met otherwise.
It gave me the courage to publicly share the biggest personal project I’ve ever made.
It taught me an absurd amount of things.
And most importantly, I actually finished it.
I didn’t give up because I thought nobody would care.
Turns out, some people do. And that feels pretty great.
I think I just needed to talk about all of this somewhere. I wasn’t really sure who to tell, or even how to put it into words.
But looking back at everything, I’m starting to realize how much TTRPGs have given me over the years. Playing, creating worlds, and eventually building this project brought people and conversations into my life at a time when I was slowly shutting myself away from both.
I don’t know how to explain it without sounding a little cheesy, but it genuinely feels like my love for TTRPGs is helping me heal, little by little.
And I think I just wanted to say that somewhere.
P.S : English isn’t my first language, so sorry if some parts sound a little weird. I’m actually posting this in English because, for some reason, it feels safer than posting it in a subreddit in my own language.
Yes, I’m apparently the kind of person who can feel stressed and embarrassed about sending messages even anonymously on the internet or in games lol.
So writing this post is already slightly outside my comfort zone. 🧍♀️
