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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7770662" data-attributes="member: 6873517">I think that's a common reaction, certainly.  Perhaps, though I dispute that someone prepping a D&D game isn't "doing something". I'm a statistician by trade and you'd be surprised how many people my rough age group (fortysomething...) first got interested in the subject because of the enigmatic bell curve that appeared in the 1E DMG. Statistics is a hot field now, but that wasn't always so. A lot of us had a pretty major leg up on the SAT because of Gygax's fairly challenging (arguably, too challenging) writing, too. Right, which is IMO no different than what many RPG players are doing. Right, many people's taste gets formed in their teen and young adult years.  I get where the skeptics are coming from, too, I just don't think there's some kind of major dividing line between this and any other hobby. There's often a whole lot of judgment and generational hostility, though. Wait... the country club bar isn't fantasy land? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> I know people who got married through an RPG, got jobs through those contacts, and learned new skills. I've maintained friendships over decades through gaming. My "Silent Generation" dad doesn't understand how that's happened, nor does he really "get" games, but he's more than once asked how I managed to have some friends I've known since I was in the tail end of college. I don't think he has any from his days in the military and right after. Most of his friends are from religious association, but, quite frankly, that's not fundamentally different than my D&D or music hobbies. Some of my old gaming buddies and I get together every six months. We rent an Airbnb house and play D&D or other games. Last time I got back my dad asked me about that. He said he knew nobody else who did that. I said, "well, actually a lot of people I know do something like that, it's probably more of a thing for people my age." The game is, above all else, a medium to maintain friendships. We've gone to each other's weddings, sometimes wondered about people's choice in partners, cheered the births of children, lamented and/or celebrated the divorces, been there when someone ended up with a life threatening condition, urged each other to get help when it was pretty clear "something had changed", helped each other make investment or career decisions, and so on. Gaming gives us a reason to get together regularly. Could it have been something else? Sure. For us it was crazy old Gary Gygax's creations. Maher is an :eggplant emoji:, definitely.</blockquote>

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