D&D General Woo-Hoo! Heading back to playing D&D in person soon! (for the first time since February 2020)!

[jayoungr]

Sadly, not all of us have made it through the pandemic. So whenever we do reconvene ... it won't be the whole group anymore.

Hope that's not too much of a downer for this thread.

 

[Mistwell]

Sadly, not all of us have made it through the pandemic. So whenever we do reconvene ... it won't be the whole group anymore.

Hope that's not too much of a downer for this thread.

I am sorry to hear that. You guys should have a game in honor of the fallen.

Can you tell us something about the gamer who you guys lost?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Sadly, not all of us have made it through the pandemic. So whenever we do reconvene ... it won't be the whole group anymore.

Hope that's not too much of a downer for this thread.

No, that's keeping it real. Pretending that everyone's experience of the pandemic had a happy ending is a lie and insulting to those who paid a heavier price.

 

[Burnside]

Sadly, not all of us have made it through the pandemic. So whenever we do reconvene ... it won't be the whole group anymore.

Hope that's not too much of a downer for this thread.

Very sorry to hear that. And it's good you’re talking about it.

 

[Retreater]

I doubt I will ever return to in-person gaming regularly. I have one group I could theoretically play with F2F, but it was already difficult to schedule time to play, and now two of them have new babies. The rest of my groups are made up of people in different states (or even countries). I'm not going to go back to begging players from my local community to join in a game just because they're warm bodies. Virtual gaming is the most consistent experience I have had since I started playing in the 1980s.

 

[jayoungr]

Can you tell us something about the gamer who you guys lost?

It's been three weeks today since we lost Doug. He was under 50 and had no existing health conditions that we knew of.

I don't know when he first started gaming, but he had played with some of our group since they all went to college together. He was always up for any sort of game--board games and CCGs in addition to RPGs. He had by far the biggest gaming library of the group, and he was always happy to lend materials to anyone who needed them. He was also our resident "cat-herder"/schedule coordinator and organized the holiday "secret Santa" gift exchange every year.

Our group is blessed with multiple GMs, but he was one of them. He really loved Sentinels of the Multiverse and was planning to run a game for us when the RPG Kickstarter fulfilled. He was also running two D&D campaigns sporadically, although both had been on hiatus for a while. One was about a group mopping up lingering pockets of evil ten years after the overthrow of the dark lord. The other was loosely based on Wreck-It Ralph, where all the PCs were video game characters traveling to different game worlds.

Doug almost always played female characters and was never creepy about it (our group is about 50/50, and none of the female players ever had a problem with any of his characters). He often played steady, serious, slightly-put-upon types in both D&D and other games. Here are a few of his recent characters:

• Lilac, the half-orc warrior overshadowed by her prettier half-elf half-sister.
• Tarako, the Rokugan shugenja, who loved books and would brave any monsters to get her hands on a rare one. Doug was a big fan of L5R, and he homebrewed the class himself for D&D. I think this was the last character he played before he went to the hospital.
• Lilith, the drow evangelist of Lolth who settled in an alternate-universe version of Victorian London--she chose that for her home base because she approved of a nation ruled by a queen.
• Rima, the human noble from a shipbuilding family in our Star Wars game. She bankrolled the group and could just stare a Trandoshan into backing down. She was the only human in the party, and the alien characters would refer to her as "one of those freaks with hair."
• Angela, the Leverage mastermind, a former community organizer who fell afoul of shady political dealings and joined the criminal underworld. Mind like a steel trap, personality like a mack truck, completely hopeless at computers.

Personality-wise, Doug was very easygoing. I don't think I ever saw him actually lose his temper. Some of the rest of us are more volatile, so I hope there aren't any clashes without his calming presence. He was a good cook, too. I'm sort of dreading the first time we get together face-to-face and he's not there. We'll all miss him a lot.

 

[el-remmen]

Sadly, not all of us have made it through the pandemic. So whenever we do reconvene ... it won't be the whole group anymore.

Hope that's not too much of a downer for this thread.

May his memory be a blessing.

 

[Burnside]

I doubt I will ever return to in-person gaming regularly. I have one group I could theoretically play with F2F, but it was already difficult to schedule time to play, and now two of them have new babies. The rest of my groups are made up of people in different states (or even countries). I'm not going to go back to begging players from my local community to join in a game just because they're warm bodies. Virtual gaming is the most consistent experience I have had since I started playing in the 1980s.

I know I will do some in-person gaming professionally, but like you the past year has profoundly shifted me towards online gaming and I suspect that will be where a majority of my games happen from now on. I have never as an adult had an in-person group that could manage to play every week. Online I can do that with literally more groups than I could manage.

 

[MNblockhead]

My state just bumped up the time period where I will be eligible for getting the vaccination to next week...but I just left the US to for work for the next two months. I'll get the vaccination when I return. If the rest of my group gets vaccinated, it would be nice to schedule an in-person game again, but it is looking like that won't happen until July at the earliest.

 

[JEB]

We've started talking about resuming games in our group, as a decent chunk of us should be fully vaccinated by the end of May. But I can't see doing more than one-shots until fall at best, because I want to be really sure that Covid is under control before I'll commit to an ongoing campaign again.