1985: I’m in 6th grade and the phone rings at home. My mom picks up and another stay-at-home mom says that she heard her son talk about this new D&D game I’m playing. She warns my mother that kids who play that game have committed suicide.
My mother answers that she trusts my judgment and will talk to me about it. Upon my return my mother tells me the story and requests that I keep up my excellent mark to be allowed to keep playing the game. I complied and she typed my 1st adventure Module I wrote!.
1988: my first girlfriend, without ever telling me, sends a letter to an teen magazine about her D&D playing boyfriend. She shares her reservations/worries about such a dorky hobby.
I learn about it from other D&D dorks reading that magazine.
1990: We’re playing AD&D over at Math’s place. Her godmother comes in and sees the dice, paper and pencils all over our table and says:
“You boys are doing homework on a Saturday? You are such keeners”
We agree with her, since we had already learned that explaining RPGs to adults is just not worth it.
1999: we’re gearing up for our game and my friend JeeEff’s girlfriend drops him off and she says, a bit sarcastically “Have fun playing with your toy cars and soldiers”. Gamer-friendly, she was not.
Early 2000s: My wife throws her Magic: the Gathering cards in disgust and complains (quite accurately) that the new 6th edition rules are just about screwing with the turn structure to do dirty tricks. She quits tabletop gaming (except for an occasional game of Munchkin or Settler of Catan) but remains a gamer friendly wife (bless her!)
2008: My colleagues discover that I’m a successful blogger and can’t suppress a small teenager-like snicker when I tell them I play and write about Dungeons and Dragons. They are still impressed that I got to meet the game’s designers and play with them.
What about you? How was your RPG hobby accepted in your household? How do people in your family, friends and coworkers react when they get a glimpse of that part of your life? How gamer-friendly are they?
I’m curious, please share!
When I first got into RPGs in 1984, my parents were quite supportive. My dad even went so far as to make trips with me to gaming store in the UK when we visited form our home in West Germany.
Most of my British, Canadian and German friends liked the idea of RPGs. I remember in around 1985 when me and my German neighbours kitbashed the AD&D rules to do some Captain Future rping.
It wasn’t until we moved back to the States (around 1990) that I started noticing true anti-gaming attitudes. Sure, back in Europe there were Americans who freaked over it– but they were religious nuts, so we ignored them.
I did have an idea of what the attitude would be like thanks to articles and letters in Dragon magazine.
It wasn’t until around 1992 did I get my first taste of Gamer Hate. I was trying to get the AD&D books into my high school library (as I was wanting to donate them) and though the librarian was all for it, the school board / officials shot it down a few times. Eventually I got to meet with them. They said I did a good job of presenting my case, but they couldn’t condone it as “good Christians” (half of them were Mormons, btw). Eventually, some of the books were in the library by the time I graduated.
Then they were promptly stolen. Just like how it worked at the County Library! 😛
Anyhow, my first serious girlfriend was a gamer, and I’d game with her and her parents. In fact, this is where I discovered just how weird they were, and let’s just say I made my way to other female companions.
My first live-in girlfriend got angry with me once before I traveled abroad. I came back 2 weeks later and found out she had sold/ given-away all of my miniatures and game-books. This was around 1996. She told me that “this shit doesn’t matter in real life”.
We broke up.
I spent the next few years or so in a new city, making new friends, and working the the club and music industries. I’ve always worn my nerddom on my sleeve, so when I would meet women I would always talk about Space Marines, or how they felt about anti-paladins. Or if Kult was the greatest game ever or what.
This was a good screening method.
When I met the woman who would become my wife in 2003, she asked me how Warhammer was different than Dungeons & Dragons. And that, my friends, was probably one of the greatest moments of my life.
I still get some negative reactions to the gaming thing, but it’s usually “Really? I didn’t think you were such a big dork. You don’t look it.”
The best reaction recently was one of my son’s therapists (he autistic) asking what starting rpg books I could recommend for her son. That was pretty awesome. RPGs have come a long way!
I suppose there’s a bunch more I could say, but this is what comes to mind first.
Oh, and my 4 year-old and 2 year-old LOVE playing dice games we make up. The d20 and d12 seem to be the preferred weapons of choice. And how do their friends react?
They want to play, too.
Cheers,
Steve
@Steve: Welcome on the blog. Great testimonial! Thanks for sharing.
My parents were never into gaming much, though my dad did like video games back when he had what they call “free time.” Ironic, then, that my first RPG I acquired by digging around in our attic and finding a copy of Moldvay D&D.
That was when I was around 12 or so. I didn’t actually get to play an RPG until I got to 9th grade, and that game was Rifts. I had a small group of relatively dorky guys I gamed with, but none of us were outcasts or ostracized. Once, the other guy that occasionally GMed was attacked by a (huge) middle schooler outside the high school. The attacking kid promptly got on his bike and bolted away as literally dozens of high schoolers – more than a few of them on the football team – ran after him.
Solidarity despite gaming. Good times.
My sister thinks role-playing’s dorky, but not bad. My parents think it’s amazing that I co-own an RPG company. My friends and fiancée are all big into gaming – in fact, my fiancée GMs the most popular and longest-running D&D campaign in town.
Life is, as they say, good.
Ben Overmyers last blog post..Site updates
Back in ’76 a convergence left me standing in our small town’s hobby store (think macrame and batiking) and there was the blue-box Dungeons & Dragons I had lusted over since reading its review in ’75 Gaming Magazine 100 best. I took it home and read it about a billion times.
I introduced my home town to RPGs by picking on one of my geek peers until he wanted to duel me to the death. We met Sunday, rolled up characters and he did. We played Module B1: In Search of the Unknown more than forty times before crafting our own death-trap mazes.
I continued to recruit until in high school we regularly played in a Knights of Pythias ‘church’. (Oh the stories I could tell.) When I went to college, I lost touch.
When I moved to the University of Minnesota, the first college group I looked up was for gaming (I found RPSG, FRPGA and UMGS). Many of the members of RPSG had played with Gygax before he moved to Wisconsin.
My parents thought it was a highly creative waste of time, but permitted it through extreme neglect (talk about a damaged childhood!). We played at the Methodist Church, the library, all of the school buildings as well as many member’s homes. Even the most devout christian trusted us enough to not do anything immoral…and we didn’t.
When Mazes and Monsters came out (with Tom Hanks), no one in town batted an eye. Everyone I knew felt that it was vaguely based on an urban myth (not that we called them that back then).
Meeting and playing with EGG’s earliest players was quite an experience!
These days, I freeform role-play with my wife most days. We also add a role-playing game element to playing World of Warcraft. I taught my kids (9 and 12; girl and boy) how to game out of my beaten up 1st edition, 1st printing AD&D books; now, nearly every night they freeform role-playing in the dark until they fall asleep. (My wife likes RPG fantasy, magical cyberpunk and pokemon games; my kids play games based on Sonic the Hedgehog and every other video game we have all cludged together.)
My wife had had gaming groups since junior high school, one even run by a member’s lawyer-father. The only prejudice the met was one father who felt that AD&D was a ‘boys game’ and made them play Palladium games. lol
We used to watch Pat Robertson’s yearly D&D tirade on Halloween for laughs, until he stopped. That’s probably why I suffer no backlash for being so ‘into’ RPGs.
Fang Langford
I’m even writing one!
Fang Langfords last blog post..The Illusion of Control not Control of the Illusion part II
I like the comments, so far. I think there are tons of us just *aching* to share our hobby-angst. 🙂
I keep it pretty quiet, but when asked, I’m pretty forthright about it. What’s odd is that at 35, I come off as a tried-and-true “adult” to most people in their mid-20’s or younger. When they learn that I game (both tabletop and video), they are, at first, incredulous.
Since I grew up in a fundamentalist-christian household, you can guess how welcome the hobby was. After they calmed down, looked at the books, and ignored their church, my parents came to view the game as “mostly harmless”. There were far worse time-wasters out there. Given all the religious pressures in our household, this was a very forward-thinking response. The mid-80’s weren’t exactly kind to our hobby.
Recently, when I expressed interest in taking up the game again after all these years (with 4e as the catalyst) my wife was cautiously intrigued. However, after our first game, she was enamored of it.
She noted that the game was much “harder” than people thought. We had to tell stories, crunch mechanics, do math, pay attention, and balance ourselves socially, as a group. Rather than snicker at me (as I thought she *might* do), she was sold on it. Now she gets as tense as any hardened player when a PC is in danger and looks forward to our games.
I basically run a campaign for my *family*. As odd as that seems to me right now is as normal as it seems to a rising childhood who has grown up with geek-fathers that have happily passed along their interest.
Like I say – I keep it quiet at my job. I have *just enough* of a traditional job that I don’t need it creating any stereotypical-problems. But the attitude toward the game is very “meh” these days. I never encounter anyone who gets exorcised about it, but I live in geekland:Seattle.
I never ran into an aggressive hater of the game, though I’ve seen a lot of dismissive attitudes towards it.
My favorite reaction was a plumber who had come to fix something at the house of a friend we were gaming at. He took one look at the set up, with my DM screen, and told the other players, “You’d best make sure he rolls his dice out in the middle of the table, where y’all can see it. I’m just sayin’ is all…”
Brians last blog post..Playing with Primordials
One of my colleagues found out the other day. She was drunk. She had a gleam in her eye. She said “Could I play a conjoined fairy twin?”
She was serious. It rendered me speechless.
flashhearts last blog post..AD&D 4e first impressions
I love these stories, more more!
@Brian: Priceless…
@Flashheart: Scary!
My stepmother kinda wonders if all the gaming I do is healthy, but she doesn’t really complain all that much. My stepbrother gamed before I did, so no worries there. Mom finds it interesting; she tends to ask me how my plotting’s going or why I’m laughing so loudly this time, and draw parallels between it and the real world or make useful suggestions. Dad always laughed, but then again, he laughed at just about all of my geeky hobbies, and it didn’t keep him from listening.
I’ve actually recruited a lot of my writer-friends. Some deliberately–but then there were some who saw me helping a friend through chargen in the library one day and asked if they could join in. (Made the group too big, but eh.) My personal best was my friend from college, who… well, despite the fact that most of her other hobbies painted her as perfect gamer-material, had apparently grown up with some of the more annoying misconceptions about RPGs; fortunately, she was also open-minded, and the fact that I approached it as “collaborative fiction with dice” helped.
Heck, then there’s the almost unnerving number of non-geeks on the RPG network I write for that come in for a quick look because everyone looks at everyone else’s work, go “Oh, this sounds interesting”, and stick around. The writers I was expecting. Some of the others came as a bit more of a surprise.
Though I still wonder why it was that my pastor never mentioned that her husband used to play when I told her about the blogging I was doing….
Ravyns last blog post..Ecology for World-Builders: Animals Get Metaphysical
Gah. “On the blog network I write for.” I swear, I’m thinking.
@Chatty– Thank you, sir! There are some fine stories being shared.
It’s about time I commented here. You’ve kindly linked to my webcomic (Orcusville) before. I also do a column called Total Party Kill (currently bi-weekly, but sure to be weekly-ish or something soon). It should be my website link… I’d love to hear your thoughts on it should you have the time to read!
Keep up the awesome blogging. 😀
Hearty Cheers,
Steve
These are all great stories, people!
I have two sets of friends: the ones I game with and the ones I don’t. Those that I don’t game with give me a fair amount of good natured ribbing over it. One friend never misses a chance to wave his fingers in the air in a spooky way and yell, “Don’t forget your magical wizard’s cloak!” every time I leave the coffee shop for my Monday night game. Then again, my gaming friends can’t understand why I’d spend a Saturday night with my wife and our other friends playing Rock Band or having a cookout. They think that’s a waist of time.
But my wife is the sweetest. She doesn’t understand a lick of it, but when I’m opening a new pack of D&D miniatures, she’ll always try and go, “Ooohhh! That’s a scary one, honey! Is he hard to fight?” Bless her heart. 😉
So I can’t complain. Of course, I don’t look like the “typical gamer”. I look more like I should be in a hard core band with the shaved head and the tattoos. But most people never notice the d20 tat on my right forearm!
I’m in geek country too, DocBradwrench! Seattle represent!
Reis O’Briens last blog post..Raiders of the Lost Ark Trading Cards!
For Dave and I, it was actually the case that we had friends who would go out of their way to hide from “normal people” if they showed up during a game. This was back in highschool, but it did serve to inspire my very first webcomic (and probably still one of the best written ones) the art is terrible I’m sorry:
https://critical-hits.com//2006/05/17/the-blackest-stigma/
Bartoneuss last blog post..The Top 10 Songs that Should Never be in Rock Band
My older brother played quite a few games–D&D and Car Wars, certainly, and unfortunately he got majorly spooked out by them. He burned his copy of D&D after telling my parents that he had to vocally recite necrotic spells in some arcane language (a bad DM, I assume). Not long after, he died in a car crash.
So no D&D in our house, though roleplaying was fine. My parents are awesome; they were just seriously spooked about the whole D&D situation.
Meanwhile, I was a bookish lad with few friends, and none of them were interested in roleplaying. I was fascinated by it, which mostly revealed itself in my interest in choose-your-own-adventure books.
I went to college, and hit the working world, and was lucky enough to meet a few very geeky programmers. They invited me to their game of Nobilis, which unfortunately only lasted a few weeks. Another drought followed, then a few younger friends expressed an interest in role-playing. I GMed a few quick adventures using the SHERPA system (extremely lightweight), and have been GM’ing off and on ever since.
I’ve since gotten into D&D, and explained everything to my parents. They have no problems with it now. So, happy ending!
@Reis– I lived in Seattle for years (that’s the city I moved to that I mention) and it is indeed Geekland. Luckily, Victoria BC (where I recently relocated to) is very Geeklandish as well. Oh, and I love your blog. Just thought you should know that. 🙂
I started playing in my freshman year of high school when a childhood friend of mine that I hadn’t seen since the third grade asking me if I wanted to play…
Apparently I gave him Stratego for his birthday one year when I couldn’t come to the party and he’d always remembered that…
Me mum was never a fan of D&D…she was a product of all the bad press the game got thanks to a handful of crazies back when she was in college…my youngest brother has always expressed interest in the game (even going as far as playing his own made up version with my dice while I was away last year), but me mum refuses to let him play…
One day I’ll get him…
My favorite reaction to the game comes from back when I first started at said Stratego-buddy’s place…in the middle of a game one day, the Jehovah’s Witnesses rang the doorbell…the DM answered the door and they asked if we would like to hear the word of Jesus Christ (or something like that)…DM responded “Uh…we’re kinda busy right now…we’re playing Satan’s Game.”…we all burst out laughing as their face turned to uncomfortable fright…they handed him a pamphlet and left rather quickly…
I made an exaggerated short film about it…it’s sitting on a DVD someplace now…
Reverend Mikes last blog post..The Only Thing Better Than Hitler On Ice
Early on in my gaming life, I had a tube of dice with me when we stopped by a hotel room to visit some relatives who were in town. Bored, I took them out and just started absently rolling them on the table. Being from the Midwest, I wasn’t aware that some people would react adversely to D&D, but I quickly learned: the relatives were from the bible belt, and they recognized my dice and were quick to denounce my hobby and insist that I put the dice away.
Since that time, I’ve generally kept quiet about D&D when in the company of people who I’m not sure are into it. At a gaming store or a bookstore’s gaming section, no problem… but at work, I don’t mention my hobby. If someone asks what I do for fun, I just say “reading”… it’s easier than having to deal with unexpected reactions.
When I first bought Vampire The Masquerade, my parents told me they weren’t happy but at least I wasn’t doing anything more dangerous, like drugs.
After a year, I explained to them what the game is about and they were impressed by the amount of information I need to gather just to play it.
Most of the people I knew at the time just called me a satanist. That changed after I went to university, where some people actually got interested but not necessarily keen on playing.
When I read some of the stories here I had to notice that I live in a very gamer-friendly enviroment here. I can’t remember a single incident where a friend or relative made fun or objected to my interest in roleplaying games. I can even talk at work about my hobby.
When I first heard about D&D in the early 80’s, I wanted to play badly. Unfortunately, that was also the time of all the BS floating around about it’s involvement in the occult, etc. (I’m still looking for that ritual that’s supposed to be in the PHB for summoning demons), and Mom said “no way.” High school didn’t fair any better. I went to a small private school and my freshman year there was exactly one gaming group in school…and they were all seniors and said they were full (it was either that, or they all wanted to keep freshmen out ;)).
When I went into the Navy, I finally got a chance to play. It was great, and I was hooked.
However, I guess I’m like Stargazer. I’ve never really encountered the negative. Of course, I tend to date geek girls since I started playing. I may get ragged as being a geek, but role playing itself is usually safe 🙂
Tomcat1066s last blog post..Four Things I’d Like To See In 4e
Well you’re not alone in the gaming friendly environment. My dad (1922-2003) was a gamer at hearth. We would get the family together and play cards all evening. So when I start RPGing with some friends for him all he saw was a bunch of teenager having fun around a table with a game.
Now, if he was still around I would ask him to try it even though he would have been 86 year old… 😉
1993: As a 13 year old boy scout, I found that new troop I joined was in to D&D.. Well, the scouts were at least. The adults saw it as “bad for us” without going in to any explanation and banned dice on any camp outs/activities. We played diceless and had a blast doing so. Magic: The Gathering was the latest thing and the scout leaders didn’t seem concerned with us playing that.
2006: Reintroduced to D&D by a comrade. I had forgotten all about it over the years and was upset that I didn’t think of playing while living on campus in college a few years ago.
When I was able to play face-to-face, I had the opportunity to sign out the meeting/conference room here at work for my gaming pleasure free of charge. People would see my name on the schedule and ask “Hey, What’cha doing Saturday? Having a party?” and I’d reply, “Nah, playing some Dungeons and Dragons.” Odd looks would crawl on their faces as they slowly nod and walk away.
My wife is not a gamer by any means but she’s supportive of my hobby(s) regardless of her participation level in them. Muhahaha. Little does she know our 19 month old will roll dice as soon as he’s ready!
I started gaming in 1978. Initially my Mother didn’t seem to care nor notice. Eventually my grades started to dip. Not because of gaming mind you, because I was bored silly with school. But she decided that gaming was the cause of the poor grades. I came home one day to find all of my gaming books had been confiscated. Some thirty years later and it still feels like an invasion of my privacy. My grades did not improve, though I did graduate High School.
I continued to game of course. Most of my girlfriends thought it was silly. I married the one that was a gamer. We were better players then spouses.
My second wife fully supports my hobby. I get to spend $50 a month on gaming books. My “mad money” if you will. She did play once or twice to give it a go. Not her thing. But the phrase “fiendish octopus” will throw her into fits of laughter to this day.
Now if I could just find a game that suited my schedule…
My wife is very supportive of my gaming hobby, and she’s starting to get into it too. We just recently went and got her first set of dice – up till now, she’s been using mine, but she wanted to have her own 🙂
I went through all the same dorks stuff that a lot of others faced. I started with the basic edition (Red Box) oh so many years ago.
My father in-law didn’t find out that I played Dungeons and Dragons and Magic The Gathering until after I got married. He really went off about how they were Satanic and that I was going to hell.
Now, a couple of years later he doesn’t talk to me (a bonus I guess).
Personally I am glad of the efforts that have been made to really get the game as mainstream as possible and to break down the fears that the public has.
I know my mother used to say “Hey its safer than the games I used to play. At least my kids aren’t tying each other up and trying to burn them at the stake!” Yeah, I have some pretty screwed up uncles.
I don’t think my parents know what RPGs are in a real sense. They certainly never minded me playing, though I never played before roughly my sophmore year of college. They know it’s dorky, but they basically don’t care.
I did, however, have a girlfriend that equated D&D with LARP. I don’t mind LARP as a whole, but I’ve never done it. She just assumed that when I went to play D&D on Sunday nights, I was “out running around in the woods with sticks”. Her parents assumed the same thing. It wasn’t important to me.
My current girlfriend plays D&D, Fudge, and World of Darkness on the side. Not with my group, as it would create a weird dynamic, but with her own friends. She doesn’t have a problem with it overall.
I think I got into the hobby too late in life and in time, really, to have to deal with the nutcases. I’ve only been a gamer for something like five years, so it’s not been a big deal.
Davids last blog post..Prejudice in Fantasy Worlds
I remember when my best friend and I were 13. His Mom went through his backpack and threw out everything she suspected was D&D related. What made it worse was that he was the DM. Then she called my mother, who was much more game friendly, and told her about it. Luckly my mother talked some sense into her. After that, once a month, they both made sure they asked us “You know the game is not for real, right?” and we would reply “Yes Mom, we know”. My father was a diffrent story, he thought it was funny to ask us if we were going to murder him in his sleep. He still laughs about it.
B.G.s last blog post..The Man Who Made Me Rethink the Survival Skill
Arrr…. ye stories are touching me shriveled heart.
I wish to bid a warm welcome to all the landlubbers who stepped out of lurking to share their tales of woe and wonderment at the hands of non-geeks.
Tis brings a salty tear to my eye.
An yea, no offense meant but many American families be scary with their well-meaning but misplaced beliefs about our game.
This has been one of the best posts/comments that I have read in a long time. I grew up in central (rural) Indiana, which can be very Bible Belty, so I have encountered my fair share of misguided religious freaks.
1985: I fell in love with the illustrations of Frank Frazetta due to the painting of a viking ship hanging in my grandfather’s home office. This love affair with fantasy illustration and art led me to Clyde Caldwell and Larry Elmore who did a ton of work for TSR.
1987: The art led me to the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, I still have about twenty of them.
1988: I played a session of AD&D 1st Edition (12th printing) and was hooked.
1991: I bought my very first RPG book: D&D Rules Cyclopedia. My great grandmother, who was super religous (though never attended a church because she said she never heard a preacher get it right) actually gave me the money, and continued buying me books throughout high school.
1993: My first year of high school, I would bring the books (2nd Edition by this time) with me every day. My true first encounter with the Jesus Zealots began this year as we were playing at a friend’s house and his mom saw it and began screaming… And since I was the mastermind, began to sermonize me. When she asked if I understood, I simply replied, “No, because I never read the commandment ‘Thou shalt never play D&D’ but I have heard the one ‘Thou shall not commit adultery,’ and I wonder if you understand your own beliefs.” To which she responded, “GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!!!” It was well known her husband had caught her cheating with a co-worker and had divorced her ass. Needless to say, I couldn’t hang out with poor Jimmy ever again, so we played during lunch at school.
This also marked the first year I played Vampire: the Masquerade and somewhere after I started LARPing… which got waayyyyy more negative looks than rolling dice.
I was never pestered, much, at school because I was in the accelerated classes with the rest of the nerds and geeks but I also was pretty massive in size (which has all seemed to gravitate to my midsection these days). Those that did pester me usually got a thumping.
1997: I entered the Marine Corps where I was a mortarman in the infantry and most of my platoon was into Magic: the Gathering to pass time away in the field and on ship. A bunch of us began Warhammer 40k (Space/Chaos Marines of course!).
2000: I was re-introduced to D&D by a fellow marksmanship coach when he got the new 3rd edition stuff. Almost had the whole barracks wanting to play. I once had a luientenant ask some stupid questions about my stuff during room inspections, but I was a short timer by then and told her to piss off and mind her own business…
Present Day: I am still a gamer. I am married to a non-RPG gaming wife, who is supportive of my hobby. My dad and grandfather probably think its a bit childish and that I should have grown out of it by now. But then again, my dad is amazed that I have secured a pretty good job out “playing around on computers.” My grandmother is a FPS gamer, yeah she still has my copy of Blood from way back! So she is very supportive and actually likes to ask legitimate questions about mechanics. I just bought my two year old daughter her first set of dice (and she loves them!). My in-laws are for the most part Mormon, but my brother-in-law plays D&D so no confrontation there. All my friends are gamers of some sort, so if there is any ribbing it is because I prefer one type of game over another.
At work where I am a .NET developer, I usually wear some kind of gaming/geek t-shirt on fridays, so everyone knows and no one has rolled any eyes at me yet. In fact, my boss is a gamer and asked me to go to PAX next year with him!
Overall I am pretty satisfied with the reactions/opinions that my family, friends, and co-workers have about my hobby.
MadBrewLabss last blog post..Blogger BloodBath Combatant
*ahem*
TETSUBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!…
Reverend Mikes last blog post..Flash Friday: HYA…CR…AH…CRAB BATTLE!
Back when I was a kid, I was a Nintendo fanboy, and I loved games like Zelda, Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy (the first one for the NES), etc.
Then I met a guy a couple of years my senior who, out of the blue, came to me and loaned me a copy of The Hobbit. Apparently he had heard me say that my current favorite Nintendo game was Shadowgate, and decided to “test” me (the guy was weird, I’ll grant you that).
I finished the book in two nights and gave it back, gushing about the story and the characters. He just smiled and invited me over for a game.
…the rest is history, as they say.
Nowadays, I play with my best friend (not the one in the story), her wife, my wife, my brother in law and a new guy we met a few months ago.
Amphimirs last blog post..Rusia, Georgia y la hegemonía de la OTAN
What Bartoneus leaves out is that I’d often approach him in the halls of our high school while he was talking to other people and say (in an exaggerated nerd voice) “Hey Danny! Are you ready for our game of Dungeons & Dragons this weekend?”
I’m lucky in the sense that I grew up among science fiction/fantasy fandom, where D&D and other such games were completely accepted, and even the norm. Through D&D, I was able to meet many close friends who I hang out with to this day. Of course, playing D&D didn’t really help me find acceptance in day to day school, but I’m such a nerd anyway I don’t think it mattered much 🙂
Dave T. Games last blog post..Changing hosts, expect weirdness
I’ve been into the hobby for well over fifteen years now, being introduced to ad&d and marvel superheroes rpg by my cousin but never really had anyone to play with until the last few years. Around here most people just do it, drink beer, and/or do drugs. Not many people knew what an RPG was.
My mom was the only one I could remember as being against rpgs, refusing to let me go over to my cousins to play devils games so I told her we were just gonna play with GI joes and legos hahaha! Still I couldnt find people to game with most the time, so I just stuck to what everyone else did haha!
I did manage to scrounge a group of friends together to play 3.5, which lasted a whole three hours before a total party kill! Good times, good times… The adventure is still fondly remembered by said group of friends.
Anyways recently I got married, had a kid got a good paying job involving hard labor… Also in the last few years, gamers started popping out of the woodworks, so now I actually get to play semi regularly. DnD is pretty much our family fun night!
I live in Spain, and in 1994 two young men killed a middle-aged man while “playing” in a homebrew live-action RPG written by one of the killers. They were found and arrested a month later and the case was soon known as “The RPG Murder” (“El Crimen del Rol”).
The RPG had been in Spain since the mid-80’s and by 1994 D&D, Vampire and Magic were the more successful and played games (if I remember correctly). Suddenly, the great public knew about this “killing games” and newspapers and TV programs alike were flooded by people speaking about these “evil games”.
I was then in the last year of High School and suddenly lots of people began to ask me about these RPG games I played. I’ve usually played as GM and had always encouraged other people outside my core group to join the party and had a taste for the game. There was some bad-taste jokes about “You party tonight? Who are you going to kill this time?” coming from classmates, but answering something like “Your fu***ng mother, of course” (while smiling) was usually enough to end the discussion in a good mood (typical Spanish exhibition of bravado… we are a very “never-lose-face” kind of people here).
What came as a surprise to me was my strongest advocate was my mother. Until then she has had the idea I spent too much time playing RPG games and not enough time studying (and she was right, of course; my mother is a very clever woman). But suddenly my hobby was seen as a bad influence by many people, and she began a campaign to explain what we did at house while playing and what RPG were about. An aunt of mine (my god-mother, indeed) was the most oppossed to RPGs and her son was away from my games for a while.
Time passed, other news came and go, and the “RPG Case” was partly forgotten. For a while RPGs had a bad name in Spain, but people still play. Right now, we young gamers of the 90’s had become not-so-young workers and fathers and some of us still play RPG games. Right now RPGs, tabletop and other “geek-related” games are seeing as a somewhat silly but mostly harmless hobby.
And to end with a happy note, yesterday a co-worker approached me saying – “Hi, Carlos. You play tabletop games, isn’t it?”
– “Yeah. Why?”
– “I’be bought the Starcraft tabletop game but I can’t understand the rules. Do you care if I brought the game next week and you try to explain it to me?”
Sometimes It’s a good thing to be the Official “RPG/Tabletop/Geek-Related-Stuff” Expert at the office 😉
Best regards,
Carlos
Carlos de la Cruzs last blog post..Frikismo en vacaciones
on the home front I’ve been hugely lucky – my brother got me into gaming and our mum was my first DM, most of my friends are gamers or have at least tried it, and I married a gamer 🙂
at work….it’s been up & down. Generally I’ve not mentioned it at school or work after seeing the reaction that reading science-fiction/fantasy got, but there’s a couple of gamers at my current job 🙂
My parents were very religious people. My father, however, was an avid reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy. I started my love affair with the genres when I started picking his books up and reading them around the age of seven. When I first heard about D&D, I couldn’t wait to try it. It seemed like a natural progression- to go from reading fantasy stories to actually participating in creating them. What could be more fun? My dad seemed open to it at first, but I soon learned that he saw a big difference between reading fantasy and “acting it out”.
My first games involved my Dad, two brothers, and cousin, with me as DM. It didn’t go well. My dad was, to put it mildly, a backseat DM. He made a list of creatures I couldn’t use- undead and demons at first but it finally got to be everything but mythical, non sentient beasts were banned. He decided how things should go and got very upset if I deviated. When the group slew a minotaur, he decided that he would sell the minotaur’s head to a barkeep who would hang it over the bar. But when he presented it to the barkeep, I instead had him lean skeptically on the bar and say, “Let me get this straight- you cut the head off of a bull and now you’re trying to sell it to me as the head of a minotaur?”. My dad got very angry. He blew up.
He later apologized, but the next time we played, I decided to rebel and had them encounter- a skeleton. Big mistake. He blew up twice as bad as before. He stormed from the room, swearing to never play “that game” with me again. And he didn’t either. I will always regret that. I realize now that he was trying to consolidate his religious convictions with his desire to play a fantasy game with me. In spite of everything, we did have fun and i wish I had been more tolerant of his behavior.
After that, my parents soured on D&D big time. First I wasn’t allowed to play with my brothers anymore. Then they told me I had to get it out of the house. I balked. It became a huge fight. The next day, I came home from school to find all my gaming stuff gone from my room. I was told that it had been thrown away and that i should forget about it. I was extremely upset. My brother told me, when I’d calmed down and was outside sulking, that my stuff wasn’t gone, just in the basement. That night I got my stuff and ran away from home.
It’s funny when i look back on it now. I didn’t take any clothes or food or anything else. Just my gaming stuff. I spent the night in the woods behind my house, clutching my bag of books. The next day, around noon, I got so hungry I went home, but refused to let go of my stuff for fear they would take it from me again.
It must have really shook my parents up because they decided i could keep my stuff. I still wasn’t allowed to play with my brothers anymore, but they let me answer a newspaper ad and begin playing on Saturdays with a group of adult players, which really surprised me. I continued to game through high school and college until i was on my own. My parents continued to tolerate it and rarely talked about it.
My wife supports my gaming but doesn’t play. I’m currently playing a 4th edition D&D game with my youngest brother and two nephews. I’m not sure what my parents would say if they were still around. Probably just shake their heads.
I started playing wargames in 1974 and D&D in 1977, being among the first in Sweden to join the hobby. I was a teenager then and my parents, who did not bother trying to understand what their son what up to, grudgingly accepted the fact that a bunch of nerdy boys disappeared into the basement for hours. They were happy that we did not drink beer, smoke or misbehave in any other way. My mother thought it was unhealthy to stay indoors that much, though, and tried to make us play on the verandah in summers. (The constant winds in my home city made that unpractical, however. The character sheets had to be pinned down with lemonade glasses.) She was also concerned that I neglected my schoolwork, because she wanted me to have the marks required to enter a prestigious University of Technology.
In those years, we used to play wargames in the high school library, too. The fellow students just disregarded us as incomprehensible high-brows. (The librarian once looked at a game of SPI’s extremely complex Air War and walked away with a low grunt. She never bothered us again.)
Fortuntely I have married a woman who accepts the RPG hobby with no complaints. When we started dating I quickly introduced to the hobby, saying that it was important to me. She loved to play Space 1889 before we got our first child, but then she dropped out of the game group. But she has several times sent me off to play with my friends, claming that “a gaming session will put you in a better mood”. When the gang meets in our apartment, she supplies us with coffee, ginger cake fresh from the oven and a concluding evening meal when the dice have come to rest at the end of a scenario. I am a fortunate chap, am I not?
To be brutally honest with you all, I wrote that post partly to bait for comments (I needed my addictive fix, I too have my moments of weakness), but also to see how varied our RPG experiences were as I got hints of this in the past few posts…
However as thing often happen when you do take the bait, you absolutely floored me with high quality, heartfelt testimonials.
I have read each and everyone of these comments with rapt attention.
I agree with Mad Brew, this thread has been one of the best here in a long time. After talking about dice, food and this, I will definitively revisit other themes that are close to our gamer hearts.
You rule, one and all.
We used to play D&D in the house of a player whose parents were devout Christians, and they had no problem with the game. They let their son collect Magic: the Gathering cards, too. However, they drew the line at the videogame Soul Reaver.
It’s difficult to counter this anti-D&D idea. There are few Christian authorities who will openly defend the game, and few D&D authorities whose views are well-respected among fundamentalist Christians. It’s much more popular to panic when your children are involved.
Jonathan Drains last blog post..Ioun Stone Complete Guide
My first real introduction to proper RPG game playing began a few days ago.
I’ve been an avid RPG Computer Game player for almost twenty years now, from the first time I laid eyes on Bard’s Tale. Planescape, Baldur’s, Diablo, Wizardry, KOTOR .. the list goes on. But I’ve never played table-top RPG’s. Risk, Settlers of Catan, Monopoly (heh) sure, but nothing with a DM.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been getting back into the whole blog/social media fracas. Especially I’ve been reading some quality computer game blogs. I stumbled across ChattyDM along with a few more.
I then friended ChattyDM on Twitter.
One day, we got to talking.
A week later I’ve already used Chatty’s awesome “kid’s stories at nighttime” method for my kids, and he’s introduced me to the Basic Fantasy site. I’ve always been into telling stories and playing games in a big way, just never gone with the established ways .. But now I have no excuse 🙂 With my kids getting of an age, I’m excited.
Thanks Chatty!
We really didn’t get much anti-D&D reaction. Of course, among the four people who hosted D&D games regularly, 3 had older siblings who played D&D years earlier, and my mom is, well easy going. I occasionally was called a satanist, but that was more because of the openly avowed atheism of my youth than my past times, and at least one of our players was a very devout Catholic (who was one of the guys with an older brother who played before we did.)
We went to a Catholic school, but the only person there who had a problem with D&D was a protestant art teacher. (Who incidentally had one of the cool old TSR book racks in her room for years.)
Of course, our religion teacher used to play the D&D player who killed his parents movie each year, but then I think that was only our class, and her son played with us (and we played at his house frequently) and I suspect she was tweaking our noses.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..musings on the sandwich nature
I met my current boyfriend while he was the GM for a game my friend asked me to join. (Turns out my friend was mostly trying to get into my pants, and I fell for the GM instead.) I haven’t ever dated a non-gamer.
(There was one college relationship that went down the tubes fast when he said, “You get no XP this game. It’ll send a bad message to the other players if I’m nice on you.” I think we were playing Wraith, and the poor guy had never run a game with his girlfriend in the party before. I don’t know if he ever did again, actually.)
I accidentally let it slip at work that I game, and I take some crap over it. It’s died down, actually, but my current beau says, “I practice the masquer-fuckin’-rade at work.” My parents have never given me problems over it, even when I was a teen (I’m in my mid-20’s now). I didn’t play during high school, of course; we had one group of gamers and they didn’t allow girls.
Since I started in 1977, it’s always been a mix of friendly ribbing or interest. I have learned to embrace the ribbing and have no problem announcing i am a nerd and that I still play. I am often surprised by coworkers or new friends at how they connected with the game in their past, i.e. i played when i was a kid, my brother still plays, etc. i only really experienced outright negative responses from two people, both religious.
The first was my down the street neighbour. his son had joined our group (we were actually playing gamma world and boot hill at the time) and he asked my mom if he could drop off some anti-D&D literature. She was a typically, “well he IS a respected member of our church so let’s see what he has to say…” kind of mom and after reading some of the more concerning elements of the pamphlet, she asked him to sit on a game. He asked us questions about casting spells and weirdly enough, a recipe for a potion that had baby’s blood in it. he had misquotes from the DM’s Guide and tons of out and out fabrications in his literature. My mom saw this and with a frown , asked him to leave. His only response was to burn his son’s books and ban him from playing with our group. i admit to a bit of schadenfreud (sic) a few years later when i heard the son had been sent on a religious retreat in africa and was arrested trying to smuggle a kilo of cocaine back with him. my gaming group was still drug & arrest free 🙂
The second was my new GF’s aunt. She had a bit of the wiggy religious nut about her but i indulged her with a conversation of “this evil game i was introducing to her niece.” She had no backing material, just years of conjecture, and at the end of the conversation she was at least satisfied i wasn’t a nutjob trying to get her beloved niece into baby sacrificing.
I have always been good at describing the positive elements of the game. my math scores got better, my english scores increased as i wrote up adventures and fiction for character backgrounds. also, if not for having to describe scenes in games, i would have never been prepared for any public speaking i did in school. Post school, i am pretty dismissive of ANY person who sees the game with the satan worshipping nonsense. Remember, dancing and holding hands was once seen through the same hate coloured glasses.
But if I hear one more jock coworker shout “magic missile magic missile” at me with gales of laughter, I will kick them. i am NOT a LARPer. Those guys are FREAKS >;)
So being on a navy destroyer in the middle of the pacific leaves lots of spare time. I was a gamer (mostly AD&D in high school) but stopped after graduation. I started again while onboard the ship when some guy’s I worked with took an interest in 3.0, so I amazoned the books and DM’d my first game. Playing in the lounge on the ship was the only place we could get together, usually in the eavining after supper. My friends are eclectic to say the least, and we drew attention anyway.
One time we had a guy come up and start asking purposfully stupid questions to annoy my 1/2 Orc Barbarian (who loved to read slyvan poetry). Well the barbarian didn’t take kindly to our short and sporadic gaming sessions being interupted every 5 seconds. He jumped up and wrapped himself around the guy like a python (being 6’2″ and 135lbs & double jointed it was a good impression) and kindly asked him to leave from the room and stay away. No physical damage, just pride. A little squeeze and a few stern words were all it took to show that we weren’t back in junior high and scared of some ex-jock.
(He just played a 1/2 orc Barb. but a very convincing one)
Occasionally we would get heckled from the door to the lounge but he never came in while we were playing again. Almost everyone else just let us be, for them it was no different then the HALO tourny’s that were held all through the deployment.
I game in a weekly game now and we alternate between D&D, Deadlands, Mutants & Masterminds, L5R, and Scion. 3 different GM’s and I don’t talk about it at work now, just cause it simplifies the workday. But I do get odd looks now and again while I’m perusing the Gamer isle in the local book store, eye balled by the guy that has a stack of 20-30 comics in hand. I just shrug and smile and keep on reading.
I started playing D&D in 1992. I grew up in a Southern Baptist household, and my parents were pretty concerned about my hobby. (Their ‘little girl’ was suddenly hanging with weird-looking guys and talking about elves and sorcery. I guess I can see their point.)
Then I got into Vampire: the Masquerade. My dad found the rulebook and read the section about Tremere blood magic. After that, he was happy to see me playing D&D again. 😉