D&D General How has gaming impacted your life?
- Thread starter Kodiak3D
- Start date
UngeheuerLich
Legend
I found my wife, asking her to play DnDnext with us during a tango milonga.
Drove my competitors away
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Drove my competitors away
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Bitbrain
Lost in Dark Sun
Thank you.
I am sure that D&D has done this for many people actually. Glad it helped you.
Besides the long-term friendships I've fostered with the members of my gaming groups over the years, gaming has turned me into a published author, starting with articles and adventures in Dragon and Dungeon magazines in the AD&D 2E and 3.X days and a couple of print products through Mongoose Publishing, besides having entries in various other compiled published works. It was all kinds of fun, and for a while there I actually had a hobby that resulted in more money coming in than going out. (Sadly, my other hobbies - comic books and reading novels - are all strictly in the "money going out" direction.) Those days are pretty much behind me as I made a conscious decision to stick with 3.5, but they were fun while they lasted.
Johnathan
Johnathan
David Howery
Hero
yeah, I can relate to that.
I started earlier than that, in 1E days, but I ended up getting 30 articles printed in Dragon, Dungeon, and The General during my writing days. If I had to sum up 'what gaming has done for me', I'd have to say it really gave me a chance to indulge my imagination to the max...
Ruin Explorer
Legend
I mean, kind of leaving aside the obvious social aspects of meeting people and helping to maintain friendships over decades, I think the biggest impact for me is that DMing made me a lot more confident generally, able to deal with attention from multiple and difficult conversations better (IRL anyway, maybe not online!), much more aware in social situations when someone is getting left out, or when a voice isn't being heard or the like. This really helped me in the last decade or two both at work and as a juror. At work, it means in meetings I can be very helpful in ensuring people get heard, and opinions get discussed and so on, and as a juror, it gave me the confidence to accept to act as the foreman on those cases, and to then use that to ensure every juror got their say, got to ask questions about things they didn't understand, and we didn't just have a situation where a few loudmouths or bullies dominated, or where people were afraid to ask questions.
As well as that, the heavy focus on rules in RPGs has made much more aware of systems, and particularly how systems can shape behaviour and render certain outcomes more desirable, or more likely, or both, which has been useful both in life and in my work. I can often see things wrong with systems that other people aren't getting, and people often come to me to look stuff over and give some insight into anything that might be missing or undesirable about it.
And as a minor bonus, RPGs also made me better at math, both the instant kind of addition/subtraction, and doing more complex math because of stuff like Traveller TNE's Fire, Fusion and Steel, or Guns Guns Guns. None of it is high level, but it happened at exactly the right time to keep in practice and interested in stuff and helped ensure I passed my maths GCSE with a good grade (A, I think).
It's interesting that some people lost time when they should be doing school/real work to RPGs. I don't think that's really been true for me. Other stuff has done that - video games, particularly MMORPGs, and forums and the like (I don't post on Twitter because I'm afraid I'd never stop), but when I am in a more TT RPG-oriented mode I tend to do better with that kind of thing, not worse.
As well as that, the heavy focus on rules in RPGs has made much more aware of systems, and particularly how systems can shape behaviour and render certain outcomes more desirable, or more likely, or both, which has been useful both in life and in my work. I can often see things wrong with systems that other people aren't getting, and people often come to me to look stuff over and give some insight into anything that might be missing or undesirable about it.
And as a minor bonus, RPGs also made me better at math, both the instant kind of addition/subtraction, and doing more complex math because of stuff like Traveller TNE's Fire, Fusion and Steel, or Guns Guns Guns. None of it is high level, but it happened at exactly the right time to keep in practice and interested in stuff and helped ensure I passed my maths GCSE with a good grade (A, I think).
It's interesting that some people lost time when they should be doing school/real work to RPGs. I don't think that's really been true for me. Other stuff has done that - video games, particularly MMORPGs, and forums and the like (I don't post on Twitter because I'm afraid I'd never stop), but when I am in a more TT RPG-oriented mode I tend to do better with that kind of thing, not worse.
How has gaming impacted my life? For me, gaming pretty much is life! For many, many years, if I wasn't actually gaming, I was either thinking about gaming, or at least hanging out with gaming friends. Driving to work was the time spent thinking about either the last session, or the next one. While my interests have broadened a bit (I've become more into movies and comics), I still spend a lot of time focusing on gaming.
Stormonu
Legend
I would certainly be a very different person as D&D has been a major factor in life since I was 10. Would have missed out on some great friendships, wouldn’t have learned programming (a lot of my early programs were Zork-likes), and I can’t even imagine what other hobby I would have taken up as D&D consumed a huge chunk of my time and a host of my other hobbies spring from my love of D&D.
