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Message: <blockquote data-quote="edemaitre" data-source="post: 6128326" data-attributes="member: 3372">I started role-playing back in high school near New York City in the 1980s, when Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop RPGs were experiencing a wave of popularity. I helped co-found our gaming club, and in college, I briefly got everyone on my dorm floor to try playing. That's not to say there wasn't interpersonal conflict or varying levels of interest, but that's more because of late adolescence than gaming itself. Thanks to overlapping circles of acquaintances, I met the woman who eventually became my wife.I had no trouble finding fellow gamers through grad school, and as my peers got older, began careers, and started families, it did get harder to schedule social events. Still, through the 1990s in Virginia and the 2000s in Massachusetts, I was fortunate enough to run groups of about a dozen people at a time. I've also had the pleasure of having everything from infants to 80-somethings sit in at my tables. The D20 wave of popularity helped in the early 2000s, giving people a common frame of reference, if not quite eliminating rules debates.Now that most of my cohorts are middle-aged, we still manage to gather face to face regularly, and one of my groups meets via Skype. Are there challenges with finding good people and time? No more so than for any team activity, whether it be for work or sports. Video games and other media certainly compete for time and attention, but the Web also helps with meeting tabletop role-players, preparing for sessions, and finding appropriate systems and aids.I've always tried to encourage younger people to try our hobby and to give anyone a chance to try out the Game Master's seat. I've stayed in touch with alumni from my campaigns as they've moved around the world, but I've also tried to stay open to meeting new people. My personal development as a role-player has been to cherry-pick what I've enjoyed most in past games while treating each new group of players and characters as fairly as possible. Fun is still the name of the game!</blockquote>

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