Are your gaming friends exclusivley "gaming friends"?

[PaulGreystoke]

Put me down as another one who will only game with friends. My present group of players are all people with whom I spend time doing other things. 3 are in a fantasy football league with me, so we are friendly competitors during football season & keep in touch about football matters during the offseason too. Discussing the ramifications of Terrell Owens signing with the Philadelphia Eagles is as likely a topic of conversation as anything about gaming. 2 of my players like to get together to shoot pool. Tonight we will be going bowling along with a bunch of our other friends. 1 of my players is an old drinking buddy of mine from the Army where we were Russian linguists together. We still get together occasionally to hoist a few & govorit' po-russkiy, although not as often as we used to since his Irish band has become such a success. So none of my players is simply a gaming buddy, although some of them only see one another when we game, so they may think of each other that way.

It was different when I was younger. Being more-or-less a "gaming junky" I was willing to play with anyone if it meant a fix. But bad game experience after bad game experience taught me that playing with people that you don't really like or have anything in common with is unrewarding. It is disturbing to realize that the only thing holding you together is your mutual addiction to the game. To get around this I recall trying to do things outside gaming with my gaming buddies with ofttimes painful and/or comic results. Splitting a tab with these guys (many of whom had apparently never heard of tax and tip) was a nightmare. :\

So nowadays, if I can't imagine spending time with someone outside of the game, it would never occur to me to invite that person into the game. Those of my friends who are interested in playing D&D play in the game & those that aren't interested don't play. This seems to make everyone happy.

 

[Painfully]

I don't really make any extra effort to mingle people between my gaming friends and non-gaming friends.

It's not exclusive. But each group has their own interests, and I just happen to be interested in all of those different things. I wouldn't expect a gamer friend to watch a lacrosse game with me on the weekend, or expect a carpenter friend to join me at the gaming table for a night of D&D. If they show any interest, of course they're welcome to come along and learn more.

 

[Psion]

I share activities other than gaming with my gaming friends, but they aer pretty much the only people I do anything with other than my family.

My family takes up a lot of my time. I don't have time for enough activities to generate additional social circles. It might be different if I still lived in my home town, but out here, its the only social scene I have time to meet new people through.

 

[jeffh]

I think you should, in general, not game with people you wouldn't spend an evening doing something else with.

I do not currently entirely live up to that, as there is one player in my group who I've decided I don't like very much, though never to the point of kicking her out, and another who I think I'm just sort of growing apart from. We used to all do a lot of non-gaming things together, but lineup changes and increasingly busy lives have led to a much less tightly-knit group.

There are very few people I spend any time at all with outside of school who don't game (and I have a tendency to get most of those into the hobby sooner or later), but plenty that I don't currently game with. Which those are has, historically, been very fluid, though at the moment it's been a rather long time since there've been any major changes in the lineup of my gaming group. (Maybe there need to be, come to that. It's feeling moribund, or at least stagnant, to me, though my players mostly insist everything is fine.)

 

[frankthedm]

I think you should, in general, not game with people you wouldn't spend an evening doing something else with.

I think THAT is snobbish.

People are not socially equal, there are many that can play good, but fail misrably in one way or another in social events. Whether they lack social graces, attitude, health or hygene its not your fault. It is common sence not to take the pizzafaced Ubergoob to parties. Unlike most of those, I KNOW i am one of those types.

 

[DrZombie]

I think THAT is snobbish.

People are not socially equal, there are many that can play good, but fail misrably in one way or another in social events. Whether they lack social graces, attitude, health or hygene its not your fault. It is common sence not to take the pizzafaced Ubergoob to parties. Unlike most of those, I KNOW i am one of those types.

I don't think snobbism has anything to do with it. Time is a major factor. When you have a more then fulltime job, wife, kid, and so do your friends, gaming with people you don't really like is not an option. The time you have left is better spend with good friends. And face it, people with the social grace of a flatulant skunk, the personal hygiene of drunk sewer-rat and the narrow-mindedness of a lobotomised amoeba don't make the best of friends, although they could be,if you get to know 'em better. Usually by then they stop to be people with the social grace of a flatulant skunk, the personal hygiene of drunk sewer-rat and the narrow-mindedness of a lobotomised amoeba .

Or to quote the Smiths : "why do I waste valuable time with people who don't care if I live or die?"

 

[orchid blossom]

My gaming friends have always been friends outside of game as well. But I did tend to keep the 2 groups I played with separate. Both groups offered good gaming and good friendships, but in different ways. I didn't keep them separate on purpose, but I did find it nice to have friends who didn't all know each other, it kept me from feeling completely dependent on one group or the other.

 

[francisca]

it just dawned on me that I screwed this poll up when i posted it. Option #4 should have been "...between 1 and 3." not ".... between 1 and 2."

Sheeesh.

 

[randomling]

Well, I have gaming friends, who mostly, I just game with. I have non-gaming friends, that I don't game with. ('Cause, they don't game.) I have gaming friends that I don't game with because of scheduling problems. And I have friends that I game with, go clubbing with, and generally hang out with at non-gaming times too.

So... yeah.

 

[Corinth]

My gaming crew are friends away from the table as well, and we do make time to do things other than game together.