After almost a year in the 'Shock, I've come to know many fellow gamers. Some I know better, some not. I've also seen some flame wars erupt when they could have been avoided, basically by knowing each other a little more.

So, to promote a better understanding between gamers (please, save the Nobel Prize for later ), I'm starting this thread to know about local gaming communities. Like, how many people play in your area, what do you play and where and (of course), any odd bit of information that is worth our collective laugh.

I'll lead by the example:

I'm GMing 2 groups, one for d20 and another for Shadowrun. The d20 groups fluctuates between 4-5 members, while the SR has 5. I tend to play at a friend's house (d20) or, in Shadowrun's case, at a local RPG pub called Botch!.

The pub is solely dedicated to the RPG & hobby community and is celebrating its firts anniversary tomorrow (a toast to them and their 60-hours long celebrations!). Every time I go there, I can find no less than 20-30 gamers role-playing D&D, SR or whatever (the pub has a sizable library, some gamers actually leave a few core books to help others). The Pub also has the virtue to attract female gamers into a female-friendly environment ("see?, you're not alone"), thus helping to reduce the gender disparity.

The RPG community here in Uruguay has grown over the years, I'd say it has certainly more than 1000 gamers, an estimation we did a few years ago. We've managed to get support from the Ministry of Education and Culture's National Youth Institute, so we've ran a few "Conventions" in their building since last year. Maybe 150 people isn't a GenCon, but hey, things are growing.

And as for the odd bit of freakdom: Back in 1996, I went with my highschool to Bariloche (a popular sky resort in southern Argentina). While everybody was thinking on snow/skying/discos/chocolates/booze/girls/boys (not necessarily in that exact order, mind you ), I walked down the main street until I found a small tattoo/comic shop . Alas, they had no RPGs (just a few packs from a "Magic card game"... no decks either), but they had a lone set of dice: d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 and a shiny red d20.

Yes, I traveled 30 hours across half the South American continent to buy my first set of dice.

Ok, your turn now.

I'm the official n00b of DS for the time being. I've been reading the old, archived site (not the forums) for years now, and I've been playing RPGs for ~7 years now.

Seeing as I'm in the Deecee area and living next to a college campus, there are tons of gaming shops and clubs around, theoretically including people of both genders. However, I'm a bum, so I don't know how they are.

I'm in my last semester at school, so I don't have time for IRL games (*gasp*) however, I'm currently involved in 3 play by web games (playbyweb.com) and I actually got to know my present wife largely through MUDding. I USED to be in an Alternity game and a diceless Cthulu game... unfortunately, the only time I'm in an SR game now is when I'm running it (sux to enjoy a largely out of print system...).

Everything's started over since I got to college, but anyway... An account of my roleplaying life, because I need a way to pass the time...

I've been roleplaying 4 years, 7 if you count playing Magic, and nobody does. I started out in an old privately owned gaming store called Ogre's Lair, later changed to Gamer's Hoard. Back then the group was Myself, Aaron (short jewish guy, likes martial arts and swords), Mandy (very definition of the "real roleplayer" stereotype), Berg (big redheaded guy with some very strange ideas about life), Jim (owned the store), Hess (ran the store when Jim was gone), Barth (huge goth guy, known for being a munchkin DM and screwing things up), and Josh (fat blond idiot, lived to piss off the rest of us, but was friends with Hess & Jim).

We played Champions, D&D, and Vampire. Jim, Hess, and Barth had a bunch of miniatures games they kept going. Eventually Jim ran out of money and closed the store. Aaron still says it's because Jim didn't run it as a business, he ran it as a place for his friends to hang out and play games. after that, we went a while without playing anything until Aaron and I started hosting D&D games at our houses. I think Ben (the robot with an ugly beard) and Andrew (hyperactive gay nymphomaniac) joined around then, since we lost Jim, Hess, and Josh.

So it was D&D and Magic for a year or so, then Ben started going out with Mandy's friend Liz, who also joined the group. This is important because Ben was two years older than the rest of us, and wouldn't have kept in touch after going to college. In college, Ben met Cole, who introduced him to Shadowrun. And then Ben brought the game to us, and was revealed to be a compulsive rules lawyer. After a while of Liz & Ben running games, we broke up for a while, until I met Kate & Alex.

I got tired of describing everyone.

Anyway, with Kate, Alex, and Cristin as new members, we started SR again, with Mandy and I taking turns GMing. Liz was still part of the group, but Ben was never around anymore. Andrew and Aaron still played, and Aaron GMed a couple of games. We had Abdallah and Marshall as occasional players, too.

And that was almost the entire roleplaying community of Charleston, WV.

After that, I started an online group that included Kate, Mandy (who eventually got mad at me and left), Charlie (who recently took over GMing), Alex (who nevers shows up for games), Ryan (who's goal is to drive Charlie insane somehow), and John (Foreigner here on DSF). After a bad series of games over summer, I quit GMing, and haven't had any roleplay until recently, when I met Gary and some of his friends in the Concord Anime Club.

Gary has been playing D&D for 27 years, and he has no life outside of that and lusting after the Olsen Twins. There are several AMgic players, a D&D group, and someone willing to run Werewolf (which I consider far better than Vampire).

Now, oddities of our group? Well, let's see... Andrew isn't allowed to GM anymore after he made a Shadowrun / DBZ crossover. We once took two months to complete a run. And... it's too early to rememebr any more.

For me it started back in High School, sitting at the corner lunch table near the exit...
I don't remember what we started with first, besides magic. (It's a gameway game, man. I swear!). Anyway we got into SR. Heavily. There was Keith (muchy type), Forrest (not real name. He's in the Air Force now. Comic-type), Andy (Mormon that role-played. This is in Boise mind you. Idiot-type), Tim (now in the Marines following a dream. Sammy/GM-type), and me (Now in Navy, Decker/GM-type). There were others that played Magic, AD&D 2nd, and WW but this was the core group that I stayed with. Though we did venture into Vampire for about a month.

After high school I quit gaming (because I moved and no longer had a car), but kept in contact with the Deep Resonance forums and kept making characters and runs.

Then the Navy came. (this was about the time of the first upgrade to Dumpshock).
Found the Green Dragon while in Charleston, SC. Picked up Legend of the Five Rings (RPG and TCG) and SR3. Fell in with a well versed group. We doubled between WW and SR (though I was lost till Hunter came out). Being stuck with a werewolf and mage roleplayer in a community that LARPs Vampire WITHOUT TELLING ANYONE AND INVOLVING OTHERS (I read Mind's-eye theather. That's a no-no) kinda sucks (no pun intended). Then I went back home to San Diego. Lot of good friends there and good roleplayers. Even had an audience at times (people that would actualy stay and listen to the story. Not play, just listen).

Now I'm back to being alone. Though the fixes are sporatic (thanks Grendal) it's not enough. As a couple of people mentioned elsewhere

I live in a college town in the Upper Paninsula of Michigan. Plenty of geeks to go around since it is Michgan Tech. I however am not a techie. The techies tend to stick together as if they are a herd of prey wondering through a desolate African plane. It is culture shock up here. Isle Royal is only 70 miles away. For those of you that don't know what Isle Royal is, pull out a map of the Great Lakes. It is that island in the west end of Lake Superior.

To give you a hint of how much of a culture shock it is, I live 1 block away from Finlandia University. The president of Finland visited this town last year. This is the Finland away from Finland. Finland is a great country btw. Most students don't expect this when they come from Detroit and Chicago, which is why I call it culture shock.

As for game shops, there really are none, although there is a sports card store, people play Magic there. The big RPG event up here is your typical university games con. It attracts roughly 800 to 1500 gamers each year, 99.99% of them of course are techies.

I know this is long... but I have been gaming for most of my life.

I started off on the playground of my school in third grade, doing make believe imitations of arcade games. I functioned as the GM then, keeping track of life and equipment. We called the game Golden Sword and the entire goal of the game was to find the Golden Sword before the bad guy. I was influenced by HE-MAN and when the Masters of the Universe movie came out, Blade became my #1 bad guy.

I still game with one of my friends that started with Golden Sword, Timothy Lal.

I was given a AD&D 2ed book in 5th grade and it all went down hill from there. I now had rules (admitted rules I could barely understand) to match my games. In searching for the DMG I found a comic book store in Fairfield, Comic Zone. Where I started to buy all my books. I had to hide my hobby from my parents unfortunately and was not able to get many. My gaming would consist of going over to Tim's house and making up stories, soon Tim began to draw out scenes (leading to him becoming an artist now 12 years later).

My cousin Nic got into Rifts and Cyberpunk and taught me about those systems. About the same time another friend of mine named Jay found shadowrun. It was the perfect postmodern game system for us. It had everything we wanted as young twinks, without the insanity of dealing with Rifts number crunching. In junior high Jay and I bought every shadowrun book we could, I ran a series of runs with him and a couple of other friends, lasting into high school. I would move off and get into other games occasionally and we stopped role-playing almost completely for a few years when magic came out.

In high school I got really into the darker settings of white wolf, starting off playing Vampire with my cousin Nic and then finding Mage as I was ending my sophomore year. I fell into a diverse gaming group of older gamers and wound up joining them 4 nights out of the week for various games. Mage, L5R, DND and Rifts were our staples. That group broke up as people moved off to higher education or better jobs. I moved back into Shadowrun just before 3ed came out, meeting at Pizza hut for runs involving whoever I could get to come play.

I moved away from the Bay Area and down to Orange County I went for a while without gaming much at all, sub staining mostly on a wheel of time online storytelling board, I st'd a vampire game that fell through because of schedule complications. When I finally found a gaming store in the area I was living in, I went in and found a group play testing Mage Rev. I played with them and then joined their group of about 30 gamers who met at a Carls Jr. in Irvine every week and played whatever was going. Got into Trinity and Alternity, but came back to shadowrun eventually.

I left Orange County and joined the Air Force, while in Tech school I mail ordered DND3rd and ran a game with the Roomates in my bay. When I got assigned to Tucson I immediately found a Vampire LARP game that absolutely SUCKED, but I met some other good non-twink gamers there and started a DND3rd game that lasted at a pace of 4 games a week for over a year. My most successful game ever, went straight from level 1 to Epic with no one dropping out or loosing interest. When that game ended I found the Camarilla org and started doing some games with them. I poached some more players out of that group and did DND, White-wolf, Rifts, Trinity, Abberant and earthdawn but no shadowrun... for some reason people just had a bad taste about it. I couldn't get up enough interest.
I got deployed to Kuwait just before the war and found a DND group there. When I came back though I was dieing to just play shadowrun. I wanted to mellow out my gaming and just play 2 or three core games. I chose Mage, DND and of course shadowrun. I found an excellent shadowrun group and played in some great runs. But then I moved. Divorce, and she took all my books and sold them.

Now I am living in the Monterey area and I don't even know another gamer within 20 miles of me. I want to play shadowrun more than anything, that’s why I am here now. I thought I was just going to give up gaming, but I can't. It's a part of me and always will be. I have never gone this long without a regular game.

Dude, I feel your pain. Well, not the divorce and selling the books part. As I said earlier, I've been playing on playbyweb.com for a while. It's not a bad site, feel free to go and start or join some games (we need more SR games! Start one!) Its not as satisfying as the real thing, but it's not bad for a quick fix.

Let's see. I had a twisted into to RPGs.

Through basically my entire childhood, I *wanted* to be a roleplayer. I say *wanted* because I have a bit of a pycho for a mother and she decided role-playing games were some kind of evil. To this day I have no idea what she's trying to say when she attempts to explain her reasoning on taking away all my books as I smuggled them into the house.

I never had a book for more than a week. Ever. TSR and Wizards have made alot over me. I think I bought the core books at least 12 times growing up. For a kid who got $10 a week, that's not bad.

Finally, when I moved out (which I did at 16, for reasons unrelated to roleplaying) I bought *them all* I saved up every bit of cash that didn't go to rent or food for three or four monthes and bought basically every book I could get my hands on. By this point I'd been reading Deep Resonance and pbeming for a few years, so I knew that SR was the superior game. I've been providing several RPG writers with their paycheques since.

I'm alwayse having to rebuild my various groups, as we have a loose community of gamers, with the emphasis on the word loose. Everyone's drifting everywhere, including other cities at times. Being a GM among my subsection of Calgary's gamers is like trying to herd cats. Entertaining, but futile.

That sort of reasoning is exactly why I'm going to psychotically teach my children that eating one's brocolli is evil ; )

That so reminds me of a Simpsons episode...

Homer: "Take it! I don't want the map!"
Bird: (flies away with map)
Homer: D'oh!

Been a while since we've seen one of these threads...

When I was a pre-teen I would organize a sort of LARP (although it wasn't called that at the time). I wasn't permitted to have role playing books, so I adapted rules from RPG video games to run our little events. I was able to get most of the kids in my area into it and it was pretty fun for a while.

When I was about 14 I began role playing (AD&D) at a friends house. His adventures were straight hack&slash and monty haul. I think we all gotta get that out of our system in the beginning anyway. Shortly after, I began to read some of his books when I would spend the night... and I learned that the game actually intended for you to role play more than dungeons full of mismatched monsters.

I convinced my mother that the Marvel RPG (by TSR) was not connected to "D&D", and was nothing more than a harmless game. She allowed me to have the books and even run games at the house. Thus began my career as a game master.

Secretly I had purchased many AD&D books, and stashed them in a closet. I was running a Dark Sun campaign at a friend's house. My whole "role playing is more than just combat" revelation caught on and I was GMing for both the guy who taught me how to role play AND his older cousin who taught him!

Flip ahead to 18 years of age. My mother finds my books. After some amazing diplomacy, she agrees that it is my decision to make. I have to promise not to run games in her house, because she doesn't 'agree with what I'm doing'.

At 20 I met this guy, Ed, who introduced me to non fantasy settings. He gave me Shadowrun and White Wolf's WoD. He also gave me my first chance to play a character since I was about 15 years old. After a bad breakup with a girl gamer in his group (sadly that was my first and last gamer-gamer relationship) I was left without a place to game... so I organized some players I knew (but had never played with).

I've been GMing for that group for over 7 years now. I ran a WoD campaign for the first two and a half years, and a Shadowrun campaign for the next three. I'm currently running a D&D 3.5e game with three of the original players from this group.

That about does it...

I got introduced to RPGs in College. "Turn Undead? Ewww! Why would I want to turn into an undead?"

When I transferred to a bigger college, I found a big on-campus club to get involved in.
I met a nice girl there.

Now, 12 years later, after college, grad school, job, and back in grad school, I'm
still gaming, and have married the aforementioned nice girl, who games too.

My parents think it's a little wierd. But as one of them regularly pretends to be a
Miami indian woman in the 16th century for historical reenactments, they don't think
they have room to talk. Mostly, they trusted my good judgement not to get involved in
anything crazy or illegal.

Oh man, where to begin...

I can still very vaguely remember a group of gamers living in the same Apartment complex as my family when I was very, very, very young. And I ever so vaguely remember playing D&D with them when I was around 7 or so, albeit in a very limited form ("Did I kill him yet? Can I kill him now?").

Sometime in middle school, my friends and I tripped across Role-playing proper, and began, in fair earnest, a AD&D campaign of our own. Moreover, since none of us really took school that seriusly, we played at the very least every two to three days, even creating a "Futuristic" campaign setting that, in retrospect, explains a lot about my current preferences in RPGs.

High school came rolling around and, as I began to plunge more and more of my time into Video Games, the idea of Pen & Paper RPGs just seemed foreign to me. Not insomuch because it was "uncool" but more because I just didn't think of it as entertaining. But i'd still hear stories from my friends about games they were involved in, things their charachters had done, and I would always laugh.

Senior year, I finally forced myself to get back into the loop. I accompanied my friends to one of their games, and, in a rather short period of time ended up in a Vampire game.

What's funny to me is that it's from there, the more recent history that things get hazy. I remember leaving for College, wanting to do more gaming, but, sadly, White Plains was one of the most barren RPG wastelands i've ever tripped across. An entire year without any real chance to do and RPG games. And my interest had been rekindled. I wanted to play. I needed to play. I had to do something.

As soon as I returned home I got right back into the swing of things. Forgotten Realms, Vampire, and a myriad other games I learned my friends had created whilst I was gone. Moreover, thanks to my College of choice denying me housing, I got to spend the year at home, not neccessarily my first choice, but I got to get more into Gaming.

Earlier this year I finally went out and bought my first book, shelling out $30 for the Forgotten Realms campaign book. And, after pouring through it an obscene number of times, I finally opted to take on GMing for myself, as all I had been previous to that was a PC.

MY first game didn't go perfectly. Heck, it didn't go anywhere. Short-lived and stunted it did give me an idea of how much work, and how much fun it was to GM games. However, I put a proper end to it and returned to my place on the other side of the GM's screen, acting as a PC in a long-term Forgotten Realms game we were heavily invested in.

The town that I live in is a tiny little college town in Lower NY. With Marist no more than 30 minutes away and a Campus nearly within spitting distance of my front door, I began to really start looking for other RPG players. I also finally made my way, for the first time in a long time to the local Comic Books store, which had a moderate stash of Core Books and supplementals for the Gamer. There I found Shadowrun.

My only knowledge of the game previous was from the classic Video Game for the Sega Genesis, and, remembering how much fun I had had with that, I immediately snapped up the Core book. Soon after I wanted more and began to search the web for more supplementals, reading them over and over again.

Over the summer, I proposed to my friends the idea of a Shadowrun game, with me behind the GM's screen. They assented, and we went with it. It wasn't perfect, not by a longshot, mainly because our group of novices found the Core book a little complex and cryptic at times, and tried to incorporate too many supplementals too quickly, but, for a good few months it did go along. I didn't get to achieve everything I wanted to, but I basically learned at that point that I wanted to be a GM more than anything else.

At the beginning of the fall semester I found a small quadre of Gamers on the local campus, all of whom with a wide knowledge of games, but left bereft of a GM. I, having just picked up the books for d20 Modern and Urban Arcana offered to run a game, and they accepted. That game lasted until the end of the semester.

Now, with them gone and my friends no longer as interested in RPG's, i'm a little afloat. Currently i'm teasing the idea of running a game online, although my own personal preference has always been face-to-face gaming. I've started re-reading my Shadowrun books, in hopes i'll be able to aptly run a game at some point, once my grasp of the rules is better. For the time being however, i'm anticipating my return to College in the spring, in hopes that once there I can find three or four sympathetic souls and get to run again. It's just too much fun not to.