Movies and TV flicks gave me another impression. Curse them, curse them! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

I am white but I'm not a nerd. I suck at math unless I use a calculator. I work out every day so I'm not pudgy either. My girlfriend and I are both artists and geeks (in the Battlestar Galactica-watching, comic book collecting sense) and we play SR together with the group that I GM. We both have D&D experience. Our group is made up of four men and four women. One of my players met his wife playing D&D and they're both good looking people. I don't particularly like hanging out with sexless, tactless, dandruffy weirdos who nitpick rules rather than go with the flow or insist that Wolverine could totally beat up Lobo so they're not allowed to play with me. SO THERE! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

What are talking about.... Wolverine could NOT beat up Lobo.

No! Of course I wasn't a MM or Boiler Tech. No way! I was an Electrician's Mate, thank you very much. On the ship I was on, there was only one other engineering type into RPG's,(and he was way out there. All the others were Boatswain's Mates and Sonar Tech's. I never hung out with the engineering crowd much. None of us engineers even killed each other either. The closest we ever got was when me and my buddy would play "I could take over the ship with X number of guys".

So true. It always amazes me how people could game or hang out with such jerks.

BM's and ST's together at last? That's a combo I never saw coming (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) What did you guys play? Just Shadowrun?

I KNOW! Lobo would pull his head off! But tell that to the people who voted in the Marvel vs. DC/Amalgam comics polls back in 1995-1996. Yargh!

Sometimes you take who you can get when you're trying to get a Shadowrun group going. Geek hobbies aren't as popular as, say, watching football so we can't always be as particular as we like about who we play or hang out with. But after years of searching I've finally amassed a (mostly) cool group who I can get along with.

I don't see how people who enjoy the minutiae of rule systems or fictional backgrounds are 'jerks'. Alright, maybe your gaming style isn't so focused on the detailed mechanics, but it occurs to me calling people who happen not to share your tastes jerks is... well, a little jerky.

My gaming group is totally made up of jerks. I can definitely see why other people don't hang out with us. We've been doing it so long that we don't know when to stop. Honest to god, the other week, I let a date devolve into an argument about Star Trek. I mean, I get that other people have their own opinions, but I still feel that they should all have MY opinions. And yes, being an attractive woman is supposed to get you a lot more leeway than most people in my eyes, being that I'm so desperate and all, but if you're a jerk 999 days in a row, on day 1000, you're likely to forget how to talk to pretty people.

Fair enough with sexless, tactless, dandruffy, and so on. But nitpicking rules is the heart of the game. It's a "game" because there are rules and depending on how good your strategies and tactics are you either succeed or fail (your character dies or is defeated). As a GM nothing has caused more problems for me than rules ambiguity.

Back when I started I often let rules slide precisely because I was thinking about the flow of the game. But years later it created a situation where people flipped out whenever their character died. If the rules could slide at one point, why couldn't it slide then, they asked. More to the point, it created an ambiguous understanding of the rules by many people at the table so that when they clearly should have died under the rules as written they weren't totally clear on that mathematical fact and instead launched into long and pointless arguments to the contrary.

If I ever GM again, I think that I'm going to go very strictly rules as written as much as is possible and to do things exactly consistiently as much as is possible. I feel this would actually remove the chance people have to suspect favortism, GM ire, and so forth, because everyone would be on the same page about how the rules work and that the dice fall as they may.

I was more focusing on that points: . Add a complete lack of social skills and you get the kind of people that I personally don't want to hang around with.

Okay, I get your point guys. And you know what? You're right. Rules should be followed or chaos ensues. Absolutely agree there. (Side note: I LOVE sticking to fictional backgrounds...)

The point I (unsuccessfully) tried to make was that when rules-picking completely destroys the flow of a game... that's jerky. Admittedly, I'm a newbie GM. I completely screwed up combat in my first Shadowrun adventure. But I've played enough pen and paper RPGs that I've figured out my own style of GMing. I will severely penalize players for life-threatening errors (like with a very large hospital bill) or even just a run of bad dice rolling. But being an irritant at the table or not listening to clues provided that could have saved a life... I take no pity if the rules say you're dead. Maybe you can call that favoritism but as the GM you're doing more work than anyone else at the table so you SHOULD have some God-like perks. But on the flip side, if I make a judgment and a player politely argues against it and the rulebook is in his corner I will definitely concede to him or her. I play with close friends so it's not like we're going to flip the table over and get into a slap fight over a poor rule judgment (another stereotypical geek trait I dislike). It's not me as GM vs. them The Players. It's all of us together.

If I wanted to argue rules all day long I'd be a lawyer. I'm a professional artist and an amateur writer so my games have that feel. Well, hopefully the writing doesn't feel amateur. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Like you said, that's your preferred method of gaming. I don't like rules discussions that extend beyond 30 seconds myself. But I know people who authentically enjoy debating rules. Simulationists as a general rule would prefer to spend the time to do it RIGHT rather than do it expediently or make a good story. That's fine (and that's why I'm not into warhammer!) I've run games for rule hawks, I've run games for people who don't even like books being involved. I've run games for loons (alright, those are mostly just the games I run for myself), who like the rules to make things funny happen. As long as everyone knows the type of game, it's all cool.

Now if you're the only person who enjoys that sort of gaming in a group of people who don't enjoy it, and have made it clear they don't enjoy it, that's a bit nasty because you're having your fun at the expense of others. Just like if I were in a group of players like me, and there was one player or the GM who kept ignoring the rules 'to keep the story going', I'd consider him a jerk.

Group fun is paramount in my mind, if anything a individual player does disrupts the flow and fun of the game than I need to sit down with that player and have a chat. In my experience rules lawyer is a major source of unfun but railroading and fetishism follow closely behind. Like Nezumi says, if everyone is on the same page than a group can usually power through a weak spot and get on with their lives.

I also have a good gaming buddy who is a complete RULES WHORE and I wanted to physically attack him when he started using calculus+magic in a D&D game.

You get no argument from me and I think you made my point for me. Anyone who disrupts the flow of a game that everyone else is enjoying needs a good talking to. And those are the kinds of geeks I don't like to hang with, be they rules-lawyers or the total opposite.

Guys, Hocus Pocus is an adult, married and has two children.

For myself, looking at his original post;
I'm not white.
I'm not male.
I do not have a locker, I have a house.
I'm not a virgin (I have a child.).
and since I was a cheerleader in high school and college I use to date the football players. Maybe I am the exception that proves the rule?

You're probably not really a gamer. It's a fact of chemistry that when gamers come in contact with football players they burst into flames.

They don't burst into flames. They burst into bruises and scar tissue.

I don't think Daddy's Little Ninja exists, though. Females aren't real; I'm pretty sure they're just a lie the jackasses I hang out with tell me in order to trick me into being lonely when I actually have tons of friends.

I met Snow Fox and the man whom I eventually married working out at a judo dojo. They were a part of a gaming group and I started playing to spend time with him.

Hey now, some of us on here are lawyers. I don't try to argue rules all day long for sake that time is money and you gotta keep the game running than having it screech to a halt. The argument is for between game sessions.



I have friends who are gamers and also played football. Hmmm... no spontaneous combustions since they're still alive and unburnt.

I don't think that gamers can play judo. They might play wing chun or wushu or taekwondo or something but not judo. Why? Because judo has too much randori and shiai and not enough LARP factor.

The studied judo. They also played SR.

Snow Fox regularly wiped up the mat with me.

My husband, well it's a different type of randori now.

I'd have to agree, "Daddys little ninja" is, at best, some overweight, middle-aged guy with a great back story. At worst, she's actually some sort of mystical agent, a semi-intelligent data sprite locked in the internet whose sole joy is from interacting with humans masquerading as one of their own.

Crap, I didn't even think of that. Ok, we'd better shut up. He/It probably can't get any joy from it if we're calling him/it out on it like this.