The Real Housewives/husbands of your RPG Group

[scruffygrognard]

When I first started dating my wife, about 11 years ago, she played Pendragon with my Saturday group. After a year or so the game fizzled out, as did her interest in RPGs.
Since then she's been supportive of my nerdiness and helps her family (and mine) when they are looking for RPG-related gifts for me. I even have a gamer's den in my new house... which is cool. She has even helped me to catalog all of my RPG books on LibraryThing.
Last fall she started playing in a semi-monthly Castles & Crusades game that I am running and is digging the game so far.

 

[Rel]

As my status says, I have an amazing wife. She was not a gamer when we started dating (about a billion years ago). But not long afterward she began to show some interest. She has always been what I would term a "casual gamer" when it comes to actual play. But she is incredibly supportive of the hobby and how it fits into our family.

She's a bit choosy about which campaigns she'll participate in because she (rightly) views it as a commitment of time. But when she plays she's all in and totally awesome to have as a player. I've recently commented that when she isn't playing in a campaign I'm running, she's unquestionably my greatest resource as a sounding board and originator of ideas.

In addition to all of that, she ran her first game ever (a one-shot Dread game based on Snow White) last fall and did amazingly well at it. She also participates in a game I'm running for just her and our daughter and generally encourages my daughter's interest in gaming. And I shouldn't fail to mention that she is incredibly gracious about hosting the many NC Game Days that we have, which result in a big pile of gamers descending upon our house for a couple of days. She also doesn't complain about the various other regional Game Days that we attend, making up a lot of our vacation time and budget.

Anyway I'm smart enough to know that I'm crazy lucky to have her and that's to say nothing of her other amazing qualities.

All the other guys I game with are married and I'd say that their wives fall within the range that runs between "mildly supportive" and "tolerates".

 

[occam]

My wife is fine with me playing (as long as it doesn't take too much of my time), and with me bringing our kids into it, but she has no interest in it herself.

 

[Sebastianelgar]

My wife allows me to game, and when some of our friends used to run games she would play in them (the other female in that group guilted her into it a bit) but she does not care for the language used by a couple members of my current group so does not play. If our friends restarted the 7th Sea game or 5th Cycle games they used to run she would be back in a heart beat, but she doesn't care much for D&D.
In the games I play in or my friends play in there are 5 married couples, the wife plays in my current group and the husband shows no interest, 3 couples play together with one couple sharing DMing of shared campaigns on a regular basis(though there is a bit of sleeping with the DM benefit which can be annoying to the other players) and the final couple the husband games and the wife occasionally joins in but has no real interest.

 

[Stormonu]

My wife was into the SCA when I met her, and through previous run in with LARPers, had a skewed view of D&D. When I finally got her to play, she enjoyed it greatly, though she had no mind for the mechanics - she is definately into them for the story aspect. Since we've discovered Savage Worlds, I don't think I could ever get herto go back to playing D&D again.

 

[Rel]

My wife allows me to game...

That particular phrasing always makes me cringe a bit.

 

[oldgamergeek]

My last girlfriend hated gaming as in "Jack Chick is right and you will burn in smoking hell for all eternity." so she got the order of the boot real quick.
My current G.F has no problem with my gaming and even cooks for us, she has not played yet but sits in and listens. She is even helping me build my "geek cave." of course I show interest in and support her hobbies as well.

 

[Dykstrav]

My last girlfriend hated gaming as in "Jack Chick is right and you will burn in smoking hell for all eternity." so she got the order of the boot real quick.

There was actually someone on BBN a few weeks ago that did a radio show aimed at teaching kids and their parents the horrible dangers of fantasy role-playing games. I was amazed that someone in 2011 still wants to perpetuate the idea that you have to cut your hand and bleed into a magic circle in order to play the game or that it'd give you occult powers (this show had the gamer causing food to spoil, breaking glasses, and "oppressing" people's spirits, and the big climax was a demon-summoning ritual in the woods).

I couldn't tell if the producers of this show actually believed that what they presented was true or not. Reflecting on my own experiences with trying to explain gaming to people like that, I've reluctantly concluded that they probably do.

Sadly, walking away is probably the best thing that you can do in a situation like that. The vast majority of people who hold those beliefs about gaming have usually based that idea on what someone "warned" them about, so it's usually either impossible (or nearly so) to bring them around.

 

[Mercurius]

My wife doesn't have the nerd gene whatsoever; she is a massage therapist, training to be an esthetician, she's a serious runner, and the closest thing to a hobby is that she occasionally makes jewelry. She is overall indifferent of my gaming habit, although I think she might prefer if her 37-year old husband didn't play with the little metal fantasy figures that he likes to spend too much money on, assemble, and occasionally paint (I made the mistake of telling her that my unassembled Dragon Titan of Aarklash is going for $600 on Ebay; she occasionally prods me to sell it but I have a hard time letting go of that beauty).

Whenever I have hinted that it would be nice to play more than twice monthly she has protested, so we hold a peaceful truce: as long as my gaming interests don't takeover my life or family time, things are good. She understands and supports my need for a night of play time and being out of the house with friends.

As for the rest of my gaming group, all six of us are men in our mid-30s to mid-40s and five are married with at least two children each. One wife has shown interest in playing but circumstances haven't allowed for it (they have a baby, so it is one or the other of them unless we play at their house, which we almost never do - it is too far away).

 

[Southern Oracle]

My wife first started playing D&D back in high school just to spend time with me. She wasn't really into the game, but she faked it. That kind of dedication made me fall in love with her.

She's not "into" RPGs, and she won't play if someone else GMs, but she's still in my online 3.5 D&D Planescape game. She's a great hostess when we play at our house, and she made over half of our bedroom suite as a "gaming cave" for me.

Although she's not a diehard gamer, gaming turned into a career of sorts for her. She works online as an ORC for WotC and says playing 4E is too much like bringing her work home with her. Same reason she won't play Magic: The Gathering any more.