the intarwebs: where all women are men, all men are men, all young girls are men and all young boys are FBI-Agents

*LOL* Sounds like one of my old groups, except we were just swingers, not into B&D/S&M and the crazies were former Air Force and present National Guard and the really weird guy was the "young foggy" Libertarian political candidate.


Isshia

Seriously though age differences and different sorts of people can really make games fun.

I also recal when we had a group with an old gay guy and a high school guy who seemed to be the only one who couldn't tell.

I remember one day the kid came to the session "Hey guys look at the art <name protected> put together for my barbarian!" *shows picture of Conan esq character in tiny thong* "Pretty cool huh!"

I think the rest of us just stood there for a solid half minute.

Actually that group also got it thorugh my head that it's OK to have kids and still game.

The more diverse the group, the more diverse the role-playing. If somebody has lived more, they usually have more experience to bring forth and draw upon for gaming.

Well, lets see now - I'm mid 30's moving onto Darn...

As for RPG experience started out with my uncle showing me the joys of gobbo-bashing with D&D Red Box/AD&D in the early-mid 80's. Then I discovered a local art/craft store that sold a few games and miniatures which led into my mid-teen Games Workshop addiction (but then they did do several RPG lines: WFRP, Judge Dredd, reprints of Paranoia, Runequest, etc.). It was also around then that I joined a local gaming club and that really opened my eyes to a variety of roleplaying styes. Then in 1989 one of our club's buy-the-latest-shiney-book fetishists plonked the Big Blue Book of Shadowrun 1st Edition on the table one evening. And after one quick glance at the pre-generated archetypes we had eight newbie runners meeting up in a bar and galavanting off on motorcycles to kill a dragon. That began my the obcession with the Sixth World.

Over the next few years I attended a few colleges and bacame the de-facto Shadowrun GM amidst the other GMs clinging to AD&D Dragonlance and soon after the hot new chick on the RPG block: Vampire the Masquerade. I was also playing in in several hometown groups of friends as well as the college gaming society. That sort of led to the discovery of pubs, girls and LARPing (which to be honest involved beer and girls as well as roleplying and swinging rubber weapons about!). Through the social networking offered by these groups I soon had contacts up and down the country and even managed to attend a couple of smaller single day gaming events (not quite full-blown conventions). Oh good times indeed.

Then in the mid-90's I got a full-time job which eventually got me free access to the new-fangled internet thingy and thus I discovered the FASA website and forums / Discussion boards. Yeah, Terms - I'm that BIG BAD BEESTE! (BTW A big heads-up to all of you old timers & FASA-era runners out there.) At this point, I@d moved more into the Earthdawn line and was running at least three groups per week and LARPing most weekends because I now had an income to do it. There was still beer involved and occasionally girls too. Pizza became important too. Towards the end of the 90's I attended my first full-on conventions and boy, I did I wonder why I handn't gone to them before. I even ad-libbed an entire SR scenario at one of the UK GenCons in 3rd Ed and the high praise of my players brought me back into the new 3rd Edition with a vengenance.

Come the new millenium, and I got fed up with the job and dumped it to go travelling around the world. Well, as many of you now know, the world's a small place these days and nowhere's really to far for the BEESTE to pop up on your doorsteps. A huge shout out to you guys & gals in northwestern Gemrany's Rhine-Rhur region and the Scandinavian folks who are all decent, diamond geezers. (I'll be seeing you again sometime soon I hope). Oh, and lets not forget the erstwhile antipodean gamers of UNSW whose regular friday sessions I blatantly gatecrashed for 4 months or so. I think it was the second time in my life that I actually got to be a SR player!

Since my return to Blighty though, I've once more been re-addicted to GW minatures, terrorised several players with Earthdawns Horrors, made many an Old Worlder go insane and burnt them as a witch, oh yeah, I've and even done a spot of writing for the most awesome game ever. Wotcha there Synner - hope you didn't need too much therapy afterwards.

So, in conclusion: get out there and flaunt your hobby. Have no shame. Enjoy the variety of other gamer's ages, genders, styles, and beverages. And don't forget to conserve your dice, shoot things up, and let the Dragon deal.

Two of us in the 50s! Yayyyyy!

I've had the experience of starting D&D with the first boxed set, and playing it until version 3 came out. I quit playing AD&D in part because I didn't want to buy a new set of books, but mostly because our group just finished a campaign run by my ex-wife, the novelist, that was so full of adventure and scariness, so well written, plotted and charactered that there really was no point to D&D after that.

I also started Shadowrun when it first came out, and slowly over the years interested many of that group in trying it out. Many of the players were friends of our daughter, and we played things like Big Eyes, Small Mouth and Changeling as well.

I used to run Virtual Seattle in my town, and there were two groups who played, the above bunch of ex-AD&D, teen/20ish players, mixed male and female, and a typical bunch of late 20s, early 30s guys. The kids were bright, energetic, creative and out of this world fun. The men played professionals, and fancied themselves as professionals as well. They "new how everything had to be done", and "they were right". And yet, problems that would baffle and paralyze those "pros" would be overcome with careful, intelligent planning and elan by the "kids".

They taught me a lot about stereotypes.

Peter

PS. OF course, there also was the 12 year old boy at Gencon some years back, when the RPGA was putting out several all-female character adventures for a while, who demonstrated the most appalling disdain and prejudice for women and female PCs I have ever seen. To my continuing shame, and I 'reveal' here as part of my self-imposed penance, I didn't call him on it for fear of losing his vote at the end of the session. Part of growing old is experience, sometimes gained unpleasantly.