Starting a Game

You know, what with the internet and all this making the world smaller and crossing cultural divides people are doing these days, it oughta be easy to get a gaming group together, right? Just put up a couple of posts on various websites and you'll be gaming in no time.

Not so dang fast.

I started putting up posts at various forums...Giant in the Playground, Enworld, Nearbygamer...in early March. Finally, today, on April 21st, I was able to get a game together, with three players. Two of them, I already knew. One is my fiance and lives with me, so that was an easy sell. The second is a classmate. The third is the one person that my internet efforts managed to turn up. Now, thankfully, he has proven to be an extremely fun, cool, intelligent and with-it dude. But why only one person? How did this happen?

My suspicion is that it has something to do with where we are, which is Washington DC and its suburbs. Full of yuppies with a little too much money, not enough time, many desperate to seem cool and relevant and uninterested in D&D games. Now, bear in mind, I got lots of emails from fairly hard-core gamers, but they didn't seem too interested in what I presented as the style played at my table, with an emphasis on roleplay, character development, and fun over rules-faithfulness. These hardcore sorts wanted elaborate miniature setups. One wasn't particularly interested in that "early-level, beginning of the campaign stuff, it's boring."

To which I say, you aren't hardcore at all- you want badassery handed to you on a silver platter. Go away. Or, you don't want to flex your imagination, you just want to roll dice and get high numbers and feel like you have some power in your otherwise pathetic life. Either way, I don't need you at the table.

Regardless of the small numbers, though, I'm looking forward to the campaign. I have three intelligent, well-read, creative people. None of them have played 3.5 D&D at all, and so I don't have to worry about extensive rules quibbling getting in the way. Often I find people complaining that D&D has too many rules that get in the way of the fun. Well, to them I say, if the rules are inhibiting fun, ditch/modify/ignore the rules. Skip Williams isn't going to audit you and decide to take your books away.

Anyway, so, the campaign has launched; Eberron, 3.5, rules lite. Which means I ignore any rules I feel are getting in the way of people having fun and being heroes.