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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 3573274" data-attributes="member: 18832">I would start by asking them what sort of fiction and games they were interested in. Someone whose primary idea of fantasy is Harry Potter is quite different from someone whose mind turns to Ninja Scroll. Generally, I'd probably only use a game like D&D to introduce a new roleplayer to the hobby if they were fond of its derivatives - Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft, Neverwinter Nights, or even novels like R. A. Salvatore's Forgotten Realms books or the Dragonlance novels.Absent that introduction to D&D's version of the fantasy genre, I'd probably start with something else, and exactly what that would be depends on what they're already interested in. Vampire: The Masquerade brought a lot of new gamers into the hobby back in the 1990s, so I'd be happy to use the modern version, Vampire: The Requiem, especially since it happens to be one of my favourite games, to introduce someone who seemed like they would be interested in a game of "personal horror".I think one of the biggest stumbling blocks for a lot of experienced gamers is realising that not everyone who's interested in roleplaying is necessarily ever going to be interested in the games you play.I mean, I think Dungeons & Dragons is a fantastic game, but not everyone is going to buy into its premises - plus there's the secondary issue of whether someone who will like D&D is going to like the worlds I prefer to play in.That's why I think being in touch with your local community can be useful, because knowing where to palm off new players who won't be interested in the games you're playing is good for the growth of the hobby. I find my association with SUTEKH really valuable for this sort of thing.I would say that I'm a moderately experienced, very involved and enthusiastic gamer. However, while roleplaying games are my primary hobby, my involvement in the "gamer community" is coloured by my preferences.I strongly prefer to play with friends whose gaming style and preferences I know are compatible with my own. I don't enjoy gaming with strangers very much, and so I don't have the slightest bit of interest in gaming conventions (especially since conventions in Australia almost entirely lack the "dealer market" aspect of North American conventions).I'm an active member of SUTEKH, the University of Sydney geek culture and gaming society, but I don't get involved in many roleplaying games right off the bat - I prefer to use the club to make friends, learn about their gaming preferences, and then put together or join the right group for a game once I'm familiar with everyone who will be at the table.I am a very regular reader of online roleplaying game forums like this one, RPG.Net, and the official Wizards of the Coast D&D and Eberron forums, too.The main reason I play roleplaying games is because I enjoy being involved in the creation of stories which allow me to reflect on issues and phenomena I find interesting - hard moral and ethical choices, for instance, religious faith, war, the flaws and virtues of human beings, all sorts of stuff.All the cool heroic adventure, crazy magical powers, and fantastical worlds I enjoy playing in are just the canvas for these things, because I find that taking "mundane" things like a flaw in one's character and placing it in the context of a "weird tale in an unreal world" makes the issue itself larger and more clear.It's a bit like Buffy, I suppose - turning the problems of a teenager in high school into metaphorical monsters lets you explore those problems in a fashion which makes for an enjoyable story and a very fun game, and even when everyone else around the table is just focused on kicking butt or living out wish-fulfillment fantasies, I can (ideally) still get what I want out of the game.In SUTEKH and in my other contacts with the gaming community, it's definitely been the case that women are a minority, but I would say they're a visible minority. I've played in games with no women, but I've also played in games where women made up one-quarter of the players and games where they were one-half of the players. Right now, I'm running a game where my wife is the only woman out of six players, plus me as the DM.My wife actually got involved in roleplaying because of me - though I'll note she was already involved in systemless collaborative fiction, which is also sometimes considered roleplaying by its participants (though it wasn't by her or her friends in this particular instance), when we first met. That kind of "RP" probably outnumbers the number of traditional roleplayers around the world, when you consider the number of people (especially adolescent and twentysomething women) who are doing it online today.One of the reasons I consider the playerbase of a game like World of Warcraft fertile enough ground for recruiting "tabletop" roleplayers is that my wife and I convinced one of our guildmasters from that game to get involved in D&D, although she was in a better situation for conversion than most considering the other guildmaster was her boyfriend and my wife's former DM.I would say that Australian gamers around my age - I was born in 1980 - are probably among the last to be aware of the Eighties "D&D = Satanism!" hysteria in North America. I doubt if any of the 18- and 19-year-old first-year students who joined SUTEKH this year would remember the last gasp of that stuff from the early Nineties. Everyone's heard the stories, though.Personally, I have never met anyone who had a problem with anything at the gaming table because of their religious beliefs, and I've known quite a few religious gamers. My wife is a lapsed Jehovah's Witness, and would never have played when she was a believer, but that's at least as much because she would have been discouraged from any kind of fantasy fiction and close association with people outside the organisation as because of any sense that D&D, specifically, was a problem.One of the best ways I can think of to get an idea of the hobby without actually joining a group is to find a gaming club - university campuses are an excellent place to find them. I know that at least three of the universities in New South Wales have them - Sydney (SUTEKH), the University of New South Wales (UNSW Gamers) and Macquarie University (MURPS, Macquarie University Role-Playing Society).There may also be independent gaming clubs in your area. When my family first moved to New South Wales, there was a private club in Hornsby which advertised through the local hobby stores and met in space they hired from the local shopping center and, later, the Police & Citizens' Youth Club.I'm not really that interested in board or card games. I've played them from time to time - European-style board games are very popular in SUTEKH - but apart from roleplaying games I'm definitely a computer gamer.Right now I play World of Warcraft and Half-Life 2, but in the past I've been very into computer roleplaying games (Planescape: Torment, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights), first-person shooters (Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Battlefield: 1942), and way back in the dawn of time (well, the early Nineties) adventure games (Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Day of the Tentacle).In my life I've owned an Atari 2600, a Sega MegaDrive (Genesis), a Sony PlayStation and a PlayStation 2, a Nintendo DS Lite and a Wii. I've never been as big a fan of console games as of PC games - each of these I have shared with my brother or my wife - but there have been many times when the games available for my console have been better than the ones I could run on my PC.</blockquote>

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