The groups I played with had two very different styles.
One was more of a hang out session. We had the rules lawyers and the ST’s and then we had the rest of us who just stood around chatting while the rules lawyers argued with the ST’s. Drove me nuts, it was so boring for me since I was only friends with a couple of people.
One has a LOT more people. Last I checked, they were still going (though they just finished a Victorian chronicle and are taking a short break before the next one… the one I played was Dark Ages and before this was Elizabethan…) but it runs so much more smoothly and there’s a lot going on. The ST’s also make a point of including everyone and are quite good with the details for each person as well as the overall storyline.
Sorry. Storyteller. I LARPed, I didn’t play tabletop, and I mostly played Vampire (with some Werewolf thrown in for good measure).
No one I knew played D&D, though many in the good group were also members of the LARP association and SCA. ST comes from the short time I played Changeling online at the WhiteWolf site.
Role playing games are fun - or at least, can be. Totally depends on the people you play with, as your OP suggest. I for one was a professional dirt down stuntman when I played AD&D, so there you go. All kinds, great fun.
My group started in 1979.
Four of the original players are still going (one took time off to marry and have 6 kids :eek: ).
It currently consists of:
53 year old chess, computer game and roleplaying teacher (c’est moi)
57 year old computer assembler
53 year old contracts manager (formerly computer shift leader)
53 year old office manager
52 year old senior programmer
30 year old contracts manager (formerly programmer)
3 of us play club chess; 4 of us play club bridge; 5 of us play computer games (Civ + Heroes) and all of us are white male nerds.
None of us smoke (tobacco or marijuana), all of us own our own houses; we would listen to The Who, The Beatles or the Beach Boys; none of us have heard of Aqua Teen ; we would get Indian or Chinese takeaway.
I don’t play but one of my best friends has a pretty decent group.
He himself is the assistant to the Dean of Medicine at a very large university. Another member of the group works at an atom smasher and yet another guy does post-doc psychology work.
They’re pretty cool guys, actually, and half the time they’re getting drunk, smoking clove cigarettes and buying designer shoes.
The other day we went go-cart racing and hopped across the border to the US to shoot some guns in Bellingham.
I guess I’m just mentioning this because they initially didn’t strike me as regular D&D players…
I used to be heavily into AD&D 2nd Edition, and later moved onto ShadowRun.
Unfortunately, it seems there’s no-one in Queensland who fits the category of “relatively normal” who plays pen-and-paper RPGs.
I’ve always wanted to run a Space:1889 campaign, but from what I can tell I’m the only person in the southern hemisphere who’s ever even heard of it, much less owns any of the rulebooks or what have you.
Still, maybe we could organise an SDMB PBEM (Play By E-Mail) adventure? After I moved to Australia, I played several games via E-mail and it was very enjoyable- in many ways moreso than a traditional sit-down game, IMHO. You certainly feel a lot less like Steve and Barry from American Dad, at any rate.
Let’s see - our DM is a hot blonde Actuary-type, there’s the hot redhead university lecturer, the hot brunette SysAnalyst/bookshop owner, the clean-cut white guy…
And there’s me, the affable brown guy.
We drink red wine or Gin&Tonic and take it in turns to cook fabulous meals before playing.
The hell with Melf’s Acid Arrow, I’m casting a fireball down that dark corridor, or maybe a lightning bolt. Point and shoot, as it were. Of course, those are higher level spells.
Lately I’ve been playing Living Greyhawk, which is a little more rulebound and inflexible than your normal game at some dude’s house, but it’s also fairly easy to find groups, and the sessions (except at special events) are only 4 hours. You get all sorts of people; one guy I know is a professional illustrator, another works for Kaiser Permanente. The guy who organizes my local group is a cop.
I played it once years ago at a proffessional operation called Labrynth,I believe, which was in a lot of underground tunnels at a disused quarry.
My mates were into it and the people we met at the site obviously took it very seriously as they all had incredibly authentic looking plastic weapons and armour .
Being a newbie I was instructed to stay “in role” at all times which I did ,my role being that of a Berserker.
The staff however ganged up on me to kill me off early as apparently I was scaring them plus the other players which as a berserker I thought was the whole point.
I mean for chrissakes how the hell can mindless Zombies organise an ambush?and one that ignored the rest of my party to concentrate on me .
Zombies dont do tactics so when I became one working for the staff I stayed true to the games ethos and restricted myself only to half speed mindless violence.
Bloody good day out mind you.
Thought that the regular players didnt really put their heart and soul in to their characterisation,good blokes but a little wimpy.
I had considered going down the path of the paper-and-dice games. I almost did. I never had anyone around to play with.
If I were to start up, I think I’d have a decent way to do so. There’s a building in nearby Garden City that hosts large tabletop games. The building is specifically designed for that purpose. I think it’s a cool idea and fills a nice niche rather nicely.
No, the coincidence was that I had never even heard of “Herbert West - Reanimator” until it was mentioned in SP, and then it’s mentioned here a few days later.
I played D&D with a group of non-loser people (all masters students or working full time), and I’d kind of like to get back into something similar, but I hate hate hate dicerolling with a passion. It slows the game down so much. (And it didn’t help that we suspected the DM was trying to kill us all with the kinds of encounters we got. But, then again, in the first session I ever attended, my lovely teammates decided to full frontal assault an orc fortress. :smack: )
Looks like a similar shop I’ve been to (only we played outside, and in the very large back room which was set up to LARP in… they also had tables to play in the main store).
One thing I always loved about Purgatory was if there was a fight for plot (there was a tournament or something similar going on) the ST would take aside the opponents and they’d do rock paper scissors in the side room, before they went into the main room and would enact out the results of the fight.
That way things didn’t stop dead while fighting was plotted out.
I also game, both White Wolf LARPs (and tabletop, in the distant past) and D&D.
A lot of the people I game with fulfill some of the stereotypes about gamers. Underachievers (although none live in their parents’ basement), often gothy-with-long-hair guys… but as long as they’re cool, that stuff doesn’t matter. You can have crappy gamers who live in their parents’ basement and smoke pot, or who are investment bankers with lots of money and a family.
Much more important than appearance and social status is how people treat the game. An opportunity to hang out with friends and have some interesting stuff happen? Great. A way to be awesomely powerful and get back at the real world by being a pretend person who’s everything you’re not, and you MUST have your way? Less so.
; we would get Indian or Chinese takeaway.