Aug 19 2008
Getting Into the Game Late in the Game
Requested by my wonderful colleague crsenter. (As a side note, I highly recommend her blog for people who want to work on their writing; she has an excellent approach to creativity and inspiration.)
Her question was how to get into the game late in the game, namely around the age of 40. Now, aside from the fact that it’s hard to fit into a group a couple decades your junior (doable, though), I’m not sure there’s that much difference between finding a game at that age and finding it at mine. I’ll cover the topics as best I can.
For playing live, the best way to find a group is your friendly local gaming store. They’re hubs of gamer activity, and most players looking for groups, or groups looking for players, will leave some sort of note there. Failing that, you can try your local university; it’s a more set age group, of course, but that’s not too big a difficulty.
If you’re more interested in finding an online game, the options become a lot more varied. Of course, it makes a difference what kind of game you’re looking for. A good first stop, particularly for the writer-turning-player, is Escaping Reality/Capturing Fantasy, a play by post community and accompanying blog using a modified version of the World of Darkness setting/system and run by the minds behind Men With Pens. I haven’t personally tried the game—that would require free time, a commodity I’ve been lacking for a while now—but I hear nothing but good things from those who have, and I’ve enjoyed the posts.
For those who are looking for a different system or setting, a message board community may be the way to go. There are quite a few out there, but the three I am most familiar with are Giant in the Playground, plothook.net, and rpg.net (more by reputation for the last, though). GitP is the most stubbornly family-friendly of the lot of them, and is very much a D&D-centric forum; whether this is an advantage or not depends on who’s asking. Plothook.net is more specialized for game-running, and features a vast collection of systems; rpg.net has less actual gaming than GitP, but a wider variety of regularly used systems. Once you’re there, it’s mainly a matter of finding a recruiting thread and expressing interest. These places tend to expect that you have the materials, though; while some GMs will walk you through the process, and it won’t matter as much in a freeform, expect to need books unless stated otherwise, and make sure they know you’re a beginner.
And of course, you’re going to want to learn more about the gaming world than you can figure out just from here. The message boards above will help with this, of course, but you might want something a bit more static. Fortunately, you’re just in time to find a new resource: the RPG Blog Network, a hub of RSS feeds from a wide variety of gaming blogs, including this one. Mechanics? Dramatics? Industry news? The occasional convention appraisal or movie review? They’ve got it all. Now, granted, they’re not exactly a representative sample: since the minds behind this were D&D bloggers, and it’s their community that got involved first, most of the sites featured are D&D-primary. Give them a few months to get the word out, though. Speaking of which, one of the bloggers I met through this hub, Storyteller, has an impressive series on three of the four major forms of roleplaying, including how to get into them, and I filled in the one he was missing not long ago.
For those of you who already knew this stuff and still had the patience to read through, it’s your turn! Suggestions? Ideas? Opinions? Recommendations for the newcomers?
