Majoru Oakheart
Adventurer
Having finally read the entire thread, I figured I'd chime in.
I'm not as strict as Bumbles, but I don't drink either. I'm not all that comfortable around people who do drink. I get frustrated when I encounter an attitude of "If we aren't drinking, we aren't having a good time", which I encounter on an all too regular basis.
Almost all my experiences with drinking and gaming have been negative. I had never played a game with anyone in Canada who drank while gaming. I moved to Australia for a year only to encounter a group of people who seemed positively STUNNED when I told them I didn't drink and that no one in my gaming group back home drank. I was actually told by someone that we must have really boring gaming sessions if no one drinks.
While I was there, I joined a regular group where a couple of the members drank while playing. They insisted they could hold their alcohol and that their behavior never changed at all while drinking. It was readily apparent to me, as well as the couple other sober people that the game would always get less and less fun the longer we played(and therefore, the more they drank).
Also, I used to play Living Greyhawk and whenever we'd play at a location where drinking was allowed, certain people would drink. When we played at a gaming store or the like, no one did because it wasn't allowed.
So far my experience as been that people who are drinking greatly misjudge how drunk they are and how much they can drink before it affects them. It normally goes something like this:
Beginning of the Night: "I think we need to negotiate with the goblins, there are too many of them and we don't want to risk the villagers. But we need to be very careful, they are easily provoked."
1 hour: "We tell the goblins that we are powerful adventurers and they need to negotiate with us because otherwise we will destroy them." (The rest of us look at the player and wonder why they were level headed an hour ago and now blatantly threatening the goblins.)
2 hours: "I'm tired of all this negotiation. We're better than them. I pull out my axe and attack the nearest one."
3 hours: "Now that we've slaughtered all of the goblins, we take their heads and carry them back with us through town and throw them on to the desk of the mayor and say, 'This is what we did to the goblins, now give us the city before I do this to you!' Then he gets angry at the DM when the mayor doesn't immediately surrender because he should OBVIOUSLY be so intimidated by us that it would be impossible for him to say no."
4 hours: "The argument between the player and the DM has now been ongoing for an hour. It has migrated into a discussion on alignment and what it means in D&D, the motivations of NPCs, and what is reasonable and unreasonable. All the other players, sober or not seem to have been sucked into the argument."
And you know it's the alcohol because this same player roleplays his character as level headed and reasonable ALL the time he's not drinking. And it didn't happen with just one player, there were about 4 or 5 of them. About 90% of all the players who drank at the table, even small amounts became fairly different while drinking. Of course, the more they drank, the worse they became. But there was noticeable differences after 1 or 2 beers.
As for other stuff, I ran into one group who felt that gaming wasn't possible without weed. I was the only member of the group who didn't use it. I was the DM, they asked me to run the game. They'd take a break partway through the night to go outside and smoke up. DMing became a whole lot less fun after the break than before hand. I had no idea they were into that sort of thing when I agreed to DM, and I might not have agreed if I had known. Still, I tolerated it for a while before the group fell apart due to no one showing up for the games and generally flaking out.
If I was invited to a game where everyone else drank, I'd probably go, but I think it would make me heavily consider whether I fit in. It would depend if they were the sort of group that gathered together to play or gathered together to drink with playing as the official excuse. The latter group I doubt I'd fit in with.
I'm not as strict as Bumbles, but I don't drink either. I'm not all that comfortable around people who do drink. I get frustrated when I encounter an attitude of "If we aren't drinking, we aren't having a good time", which I encounter on an all too regular basis.
Almost all my experiences with drinking and gaming have been negative. I had never played a game with anyone in Canada who drank while gaming. I moved to Australia for a year only to encounter a group of people who seemed positively STUNNED when I told them I didn't drink and that no one in my gaming group back home drank. I was actually told by someone that we must have really boring gaming sessions if no one drinks.
While I was there, I joined a regular group where a couple of the members drank while playing. They insisted they could hold their alcohol and that their behavior never changed at all while drinking. It was readily apparent to me, as well as the couple other sober people that the game would always get less and less fun the longer we played(and therefore, the more they drank).
Also, I used to play Living Greyhawk and whenever we'd play at a location where drinking was allowed, certain people would drink. When we played at a gaming store or the like, no one did because it wasn't allowed.
So far my experience as been that people who are drinking greatly misjudge how drunk they are and how much they can drink before it affects them. It normally goes something like this:
Beginning of the Night: "I think we need to negotiate with the goblins, there are too many of them and we don't want to risk the villagers. But we need to be very careful, they are easily provoked."
1 hour: "We tell the goblins that we are powerful adventurers and they need to negotiate with us because otherwise we will destroy them." (The rest of us look at the player and wonder why they were level headed an hour ago and now blatantly threatening the goblins.)
2 hours: "I'm tired of all this negotiation. We're better than them. I pull out my axe and attack the nearest one."
3 hours: "Now that we've slaughtered all of the goblins, we take their heads and carry them back with us through town and throw them on to the desk of the mayor and say, 'This is what we did to the goblins, now give us the city before I do this to you!' Then he gets angry at the DM when the mayor doesn't immediately surrender because he should OBVIOUSLY be so intimidated by us that it would be impossible for him to say no."
4 hours: "The argument between the player and the DM has now been ongoing for an hour. It has migrated into a discussion on alignment and what it means in D&D, the motivations of NPCs, and what is reasonable and unreasonable. All the other players, sober or not seem to have been sucked into the argument."
And you know it's the alcohol because this same player roleplays his character as level headed and reasonable ALL the time he's not drinking. And it didn't happen with just one player, there were about 4 or 5 of them. About 90% of all the players who drank at the table, even small amounts became fairly different while drinking. Of course, the more they drank, the worse they became. But there was noticeable differences after 1 or 2 beers.
As for other stuff, I ran into one group who felt that gaming wasn't possible without weed. I was the only member of the group who didn't use it. I was the DM, they asked me to run the game. They'd take a break partway through the night to go outside and smoke up. DMing became a whole lot less fun after the break than before hand. I had no idea they were into that sort of thing when I agreed to DM, and I might not have agreed if I had known. Still, I tolerated it for a while before the group fell apart due to no one showing up for the games and generally flaking out.
If I was invited to a game where everyone else drank, I'd probably go, but I think it would make me heavily consider whether I fit in. It would depend if they were the sort of group that gathered together to play or gathered together to drink with playing as the official excuse. The latter group I doubt I'd fit in with.
S: If anyone decides to run WWRPG... I would like to roll up a Ziegler...::
