Two years ago (give or take a month), I finally managed to get a game together for three of my friends. The first game ultimately fell apart, but the three of us convinced a mutual friend to start DMing a game. As well, other mutual friends joined in, including my best friend, who lives on the other side of a city and a sizeable lake.
By the end of summer '03, one of the original three sort of went off to be an emo kid, and the campaign we had all been playing collapsed at the high levels, like FR campaigns without a plot usually do.
Around that time (fall '03) I convinced the group (six of us at that point) to try a LOTR game. So, we played for a session, everybody enjoyed themselves, and word of the LOTR game spread. For the second session, I had the first female group member join, and she seemed to act quite well to keep the rowdier players in check (until she became the girlfriend of the rowdiest one...)
So, about 9 months ago, one of the players DMed a couple of standard D&D games, and increased the group to 9 with mutual friends I didn't know were into gaming. Late last spring, I had my homebrew ready for 'full time use,' so we left off on the LOTR and started on a new campaign; not everybody wanted to join in, so that resulted in one of the original three partially leaving the group.
We've been playing the no-longer-new game since then, and we've got another girl in the group now. Oh yeah, and only one of the original three friends is still part of the group, but he's made it to more sessions than anybody else...and he's the particularly rowdy one with another player as a girlfriend.
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