What Is This?

Rule Zero is a comic about friends, roleplaying games and surviving the world. It updates Monday/Wednesday/Friday and it’s humor based, which means you don’t usually have to worry about watching someone die in their best friend’s arms in a hospital only for the doctor to come in and tell the group that she was in fact pregnant. With triplets.

Who were also pregnant.

I Don’t Even Know What A Roleplaying Game Is.

No problem, we can fix that. Think of a roleplaying game as simply a board game. You and your friends are sitting around a table, laughing and having a good time. The only real difference is that instead of simply moving around the board, one of the players is telling a story. Instead of playing a colored piece or a dog or a car, you play as a character you make, and as you play your character gets stronger and stronger. Basically, it’s listening to a story where the storyteller lets you decide what the characters do. It’s a board game where you battle monsters, solve puzzles and explore whole new worlds.

It’s a way to hang out with your friends on a Saturday night, rolling dice, laughing and having a great time together. If you’ve played cards, passed Go and collected 200 dollars, or won diagonally, you’re more familiar with these games than you think you are.

Who Did This?

Pedro Galicia is the creator of Rule Zero. He’s been doing comics since his friends forced him to make fun of them via comics in high school. If you’re curious regarding his credentials, look no further than his honorable mention in a middle school scary story contest that he lost the certificate for. To be fair, he was told by one old librarian that he should have won, but she is probably dead now so you only have his word on that.

All joking aside, I’ve been a cartoonist since my friend and I started reading Knights of the Dinner Table and he looked at me and said “you should do a comic about our group. We’re WAY dumber than these people.” His logic was flawless and despite the fact that I couldn’t draw at all, I started chronicling our game in comic form. Eventually I did a comic for my high school newspaper called School Daze, so called because I had no familiarity with Spike Lee’s film catalog. It featured real people from around the school and eventually helped me make enemies of the security guards, the janitorial staff (I’m sorry, custodial staff), the football team, the baseball team… hmm. I think I made a lot of people mad. I’m sure they’re over it. I am.

Once I found out that I could upload comics online, I renamed my comic to Memoirs of a Bored Student (MOBS) and signed up with an old service called Keenspace, which, if you’ve heard of, means that we’re both old. My condolences. It continued to be a journal comic, but as my friends moved away it became harder and harder to write about them, both logistically and emotionally. I’m a sensitive soul, though I seem thick-skinned. I kept creating new comics and whatnot, but nothing really stuck until Rule Zero.

Do You Actually Play Roleplaying Games?

I’m so glad I asked!

Yup, I’ve been playing running games since 1996. Don’t do the math. My friend brought over what he knew about Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition and we played without the rules until we could afford a book. Everything was solved with three six-side dice, as we didn’t even have the right set yet. I ran AD&D until the Third Edition of Dungeons and Dragons was released, and I ran that until they released the 3.5 Edition. I’m not a 4E player, though I don’t get my dice bag in a knot over others who play. I moved on to Paizo’s Pathfinder game for a long time. We did eventually change over to 5th Edition, though sometimes I really miss the books and crunchiness of Pathfinder. We always play in my own homebrewed worlds, though I have on occasion ran other campaigns such as Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Forgotten Realms and Planescape.

I’ve ran a number of other games systems too. We had a two-year game in White Wolf’s Hunter: The Reckoning where the group played as themselves. We’re also suckers for the various iterations of Marvel’s RPG games. I personally loved the card-based Saga system and miss it greatly. Currently I’m in absolute love with the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game by Margaret Weis Productions. I’m starting up a game in the very near future for the “hack” of the game called Fantasy Heroic, which I’m crazy excited for.

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