When I woke up this morning, I came to the realization that I have to make my very own 4th ed. D&D character for the first time. I have to explain this with a little bit of a story:
Most gamers know that the best time to game in your life is really when you have no schedule to maintain. For a lot of people, that time was high school and college. You don't have much to do beyond study and since there is a large collection of people who have joined gaming groups on campus, it is easy to form your own group. I always hate to say it, but I had to drop out of college. It was due to a number of factors that I don't know if I want to talk about. But, the guys I met up at my university were the ones I played with on a regular basis. We continued to play occasionally after I wasn't going there any longer, but a lot of us have since parted ways with the school. This leads to my current problem.
I no longer have a regular gaming group. I have really been trying to form up a new one with little or no luck. I have a weird schedule with my job, making it so I have no actual weekend off. Instead, I usually get two days off that will randomly switch themselves to a different day of the week. With the most recent schedules, I have been lucky enough to get a Sunday off. Throughout my searches to find another group to play with, I stumbled across the website Meetup. I joined a few gaming groups that were interested in both RPGs and different board games. The only problem is most of the people who want to play have an actual weekend off. For a while now, I have just been keeping up with community and posting about my nerdiness occasionally on Facebook.
I had a discussion with a friend after bringing up some etiquette rules Alexis of The Tao of D&D had created from his own experience with chess tournament play from his youth. This lead to consequent discussion of what he might do with his own PCs in their game and about when he played. He brought up a gaming store in town, Milwaukee Magic Cards and Games, that had started a dungeon crawl on Wednesdays. A dungeon crawl in 4e that would be taking place on the one day of the week that I have been lucky enough to always get off.
My next major task is to make up my own character and story for their history. I'm excited to at least play something. I may not be the DM, but I could always use the player experience.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Beginning of Our Hero's Journey
This story is not common among gamers. I didn't get a start into gaming when I was pubescent teenager. Not even in high school. It was after being in college for a year. As I write this blog, I want to give a whole picture of how I came into being a DM. So, this is part of the background. The setting, if you will.
Three years ago, I was just another schmuck in college. At the start of the spring semester in 2007, I began my regular visitations of a student org coffee shop on campus. I went there to just catch a glimpse of a girl in the hopes of getting her attention. Since I didn't want to be at home after failing to live on my own my first year of college, I got to campus pretty early in the day. I went to the coffee shop every morning for about three days after first going in there. I put in an application to volunteer there. It didn't take long to get noticed. The guy in charge was told by the coffee shop manager that she saw me in the morning every day for the past few days even before she came in. I was hired almost immeadiately.
Being a
volunteer was work. Let me amend that. It was hard work for the new guy. The space it held on campus was originally designed as a set of conference rooms. There was no running water in the space. Just three 5 gallon jugs for water to heat up for coffee/tea and a bucket for slop. Any time we needed water, I had to get it. All of that came from the kitchens in the Union. The Slop Bucket was full of every drink we made that didn't get finished. I had to do what most of the other volunteers didn't want to do.
Even with the bitch work, it was work that was fun. I made a few mistakes. The worst one was the only time I ever spilled the water. When I was getting the water buckets back into their positions, one of them tipped over. Thankfully, no electronics were hurt, the other two didn't go with it, and the university let us borrow one of their blower fans to dry out the carpet. in spite of the few cock ups, I was deemed a worthy addition by the older volunteers.
Most of the time, it was just a bunch of people who got together and shot the shit. We talked about everything. Stuff that pissed us off, stuff we liked, courses we had taken, professors we had, etc. It was here that the idea to run a game of D&D first occurred between the collection of guys who talked about any varieties of things came up. One of the guys who had been playing for years first suggested it. I was eventually tapped to play because I couldn't think of a reason not to hang out with my friends. This was going to be the first time I had played as an "adult"- or whatever I should be called.
---
I am putting this blog together to find out more about the RPG community as much as I can. I figure with a little help from the helpful folks that exist out there that I can do this with not too much effort.
Three years ago, I was just another schmuck in college. At the start of the spring semester in 2007, I began my regular visitations of a student org coffee shop on campus. I went there to just catch a glimpse of a girl in the hopes of getting her attention. Since I didn't want to be at home after failing to live on my own my first year of college, I got to campus pretty early in the day. I went to the coffee shop every morning for about three days after first going in there. I put in an application to volunteer there. It didn't take long to get noticed. The guy in charge was told by the coffee shop manager that she saw me in the morning every day for the past few days even before she came in. I was hired almost immeadiately.
Being a
volunteer was work. Let me amend that. It was hard work for the new guy. The space it held on campus was originally designed as a set of conference rooms. There was no running water in the space. Just three 5 gallon jugs for water to heat up for coffee/tea and a bucket for slop. Any time we needed water, I had to get it. All of that came from the kitchens in the Union. The Slop Bucket was full of every drink we made that didn't get finished. I had to do what most of the other volunteers didn't want to do.Even with the bitch work, it was work that was fun. I made a few mistakes. The worst one was the only time I ever spilled the water. When I was getting the water buckets back into their positions, one of them tipped over. Thankfully, no electronics were hurt, the other two didn't go with it, and the university let us borrow one of their blower fans to dry out the carpet. in spite of the few cock ups, I was deemed a worthy addition by the older volunteers.
Most of the time, it was just a bunch of people who got together and shot the shit. We talked about everything. Stuff that pissed us off, stuff we liked, courses we had taken, professors we had, etc. It was here that the idea to run a game of D&D first occurred between the collection of guys who talked about any varieties of things came up. One of the guys who had been playing for years first suggested it. I was eventually tapped to play because I couldn't think of a reason not to hang out with my friends. This was going to be the first time I had played as an "adult"- or whatever I should be called.
---
I am putting this blog together to find out more about the RPG community as much as I can. I figure with a little help from the helpful folks that exist out there that I can do this with not too much effort.
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