Travelling the Milwaukee Gaming Scene

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.