It’s not exactly niche or anything, but I have been reading Order of the Stick regularly for, you know, twenty years or so. It hasn’t had a consistent update schedule for at least the last ten, but it’s still got the goods. If you’ve never heard of it (although odds are you have, at least in passing), it’s a stick figure D&D webcomic. https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots.html
The forum is also a huge center for D&D play by post games, and is where I first found the game. I started out in a kinda unique way, because my first game was one with no story at all, it was just 8 man PvP tournaments with level 1 characters (although if they won enough they would eventually get to level 2 or even level 3. Let me tell you, the things people could create were insane. I saw characters whose effective HP at level 1 was in the 40s and 50s. Who had 15 foot reach and an attack mod of 7 or 8.
I ended up having an uncanny knack for it, and my lifetime record was 26-3. Won every tournament I entered aside from being runner-up one time. My own contribution to the crazy character contingent was making an Evocation domain spellgifted Wizard who cast Magic Missile at level 3 (later level 5 after buying Arcanists’ Gloves with some winnings), and at level 1 2d4+2 or 3d4+3 unblockable damage is quite handy. Helped that almost all my characters had Deflect Arrows as a feat, allowing them to thumb their nose at archers.
From there I went on to ply real campaigns. Never finished any; play by post campaigns eventually have the DM and/or too many layers drop off and things get left in the lurch. But some of them went on for years and were tons of fun. Created a lot of characters I still remember fondly today (one of which I revived for my first campaign in several years), and was great practice for my eventual small-time writing career. And all that happened just because I found one stick figure comic back when I was a webcomic critic.
