Friends or Strangers...

[Thunderfoot]

I stated a mix of friends and strangers - but let me caveat that with, no one who games with me remains a stranger for long.

Role-playing should be a social activity (if not you're doing it wrong ) so after being around someone for a period of time, you can't help but become friends, maybe not lay down your life for them friends, but more than mere acquaintances.

In a lot of ways it's like these boards, after some time, you get to know people and then you go to a gameday or con and meet them, after you do this a few times, friendships evolve. I don;t expect anyone from ENworld to donate a kidney, but we could share a brew or two and talk, game or just hang.

 

[bolen]

I wish I had gaming friends/ enemies anyone. . . I know no one to play with

 

[chriton227]

That's pretty sad. I don't mean you're sad, but that's a pretty sad state of affairs. Has society really disintegrated to the point that your house has to be treated as a high-security installation, or has the internet skewed our perception of the percentage of weirdos in the population, or have we culturally just become inhospitable? Or are gamers just in the main a bunch of hopeless screwballs?

I hope you're just being paranoid. I hope that it's just a product of watching too many episodes of Law and Order. If not we're in big trouble as a society, let alone the fact that any essentially social hobby is thereby doomed.

Speaking for myself, though I have a gamer's appearance ("fatbeard" more or less, though I think that's a disparaging term; I have a sedentary profession and I like beer and sweets, OK?) I consider myself quite "presentable". I have a profession, belong to a benevolent society (both with codes of ethics), attend church regularly and associate with respectable people. I don't consider my background to be all that remarkable... is it assumed that most gamers are "seedy" types? I don't assume that. I'm not the gaming elite. Are most gamers any different?

The vast majority of gamers I know are great people, but there have been a few individual I've met locally that I had bad gut feelings about almost immediately. One of those people was later convicted on possession/distribution of child pornography. Others, I later learned more about them and the things I learned were things that I decided were adequate reasons for me to not want them around my children.

I have also know quite a few gamers who were not particularly stable, and with some of them I have concerns for their safety (and the safety of those around them) if they don't continue the treatments they have been prescribed. In those cases, my willingness to be around the individuals depends on their current behavior, and I would rather not chance my children's safety based on the assumption that the individual is taking their prescribed medication. Even back in high school, I knew someone who had difficulty separating fantasy from reality, and he was drawn to RPGs like a moth to a flame. This wasn't the fault of the games, rather it was that the games happened to resonate with his particular mental state more than something like tennis or painting did.

As a result of all of this, I feel that I need to be careful upon meeting people to get to know them before inviting them into my home or introducing them to my children. On top of that, the area of the state I live in is economically depressed, and due to my career I have a fair amount of computer equipment and such in the house, and I would rather not go around showing it off to anyone I happen to meet.

It might also have something to do with the fact that I live only a few minutes away from the site of the worst school shooting in US history, which also happens to have been where an escaped prisoner alledgely killed (the trial isn't over yet) a hospital security guard and a local police officer less than a year before, and in both cases my wife and children were less than a block from the college campus when the manhunts were taking place.

 

[pogre]

It's interesting that I make a distinction between my own campaign and game days/one shots. For my own campaign, I only want to play with people I really like (or who I think I'm really going to like.) We're all super-picky about who joins the group, choosing folks who we'd also want to socialize with away from the table as well. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

And I don't even consider that restriction when I meet new folks at a convention. There it's the luck of the draw, and that's half the fun. Sort of a weird dichotomy.

Now you're just lying - I happen to know Wulf was in your home game!

 

[RFisher]

They say at every RPG table there is one complete freak. But I've never seen him . . .

<shrug> It's the normal people who freak me out. (^_^)

 

[Piratecat]

Now you're just lying - I happen to know Wulf was in your home game!

I'll have you know I went to Wulf's wedding!

Well, went NEAR Wulf's wedding. Stupid court order.

 

[Li Shenron]

Friends always better... I think I always only invited friends when I've been DMing, but as a player I played in groups where the DM was also inviting strangers by using ads.