Ostracism in RPGs...

[spinwardpirate]

I've also witnessed some uncomfortable moments when a gamer is telling a 'my character then did' sceanario to an uninitiated, non-gaming audience.

Hey, even I cringe sometimes when people tell me stories of their character's antics. The guy who sits across from me plays in a really munchkin-like game of 3.5. Sometimes he wants to come over and tell me about the kewl stuff that happens, which character backstabbed the other, which one nuked the village, etc, and I shake my head and thank the gods my group is nothing like that.

I guess I'm lucky. My line of work attracts lots of adventurous types, I suppose, and/or weirdos, techies, the computer savvy, so many of my co-workers know of rpgs. I can think of four off the top of my head who play, and two of them aren't even in my group.

 

[Sturn]

I think your current social situation greatly determines whether you want to "out" your RPG self.

When I was in college and military, I didn't mind mentioning that I was a RPG gamer. Lots of them about.

I've been a police officer now for 15 years. No one at works knows I'm an RPGer. I hold some rank at my deparment and am a SRT (Swat) team leader. The alpha personalities I lead might look at me differently if they knew I sometimes played at being a Wookie bounty hunter or Dwarven warrior.

I game with family members and would game with personal friends if any of them were interested. I've got the double whammy of having to be careful of joining someone else's game group due to my profession. "John you invited a cop to our group! Now we have to hide our stash!" Exaggerating of course, but it is a factor.

 

[aramis]

Sturn, I know groups that would run in terror if a cop showed up... and that's why I don't game with them anymore, either... many groups in Alaska have players who smoke pot during game.

Me, if I fail a UA, I lose my job. I can't take the risk of playing in those groups. Likewise, I need to be careful about whom I play with; anyone under 21 even claims I made a pass at them, in the current socio-political climate, and I go to jail. I might not get convicted, but I'd not be able to get bail.

But that doesn't keep me from being out about gaming.

Police and Fire Departments seem to universally despise the "thinking fun" crowd; both tend to be familial, machismo-driven, and not too fond of having to think off duty (or between calls for FD's). Both have extensive stressful appreticeship periods (rookie/probie time), and strong conform or else policies on duty. RPG's are both counter to machismo, and thinking required, and tend to appeal to non-conformists.

That said, I know of a few APD officers who want to game... but they are not on the same shifts.

 

[fiat_knox]

I actually couched adventures in writing terms, describing them as short stories I had written up.

Case in point, an old Hunter: the Reckoning game I played in over the course of three frantic weeks during the Summer of 2001.

My character Libra was abducted by a top secret governmental organisation and transported to a base situated beneath an abandoned farm beside a lake in North Wales. There, he bumped into other imbued hunters (the other player characters) and encountered a thoroughly unpleasant Wayward called Inmate Five - he'd lost his name and memory courtesy of his uniquely ultraviolent imbuing.

Briefly, the Imbuing was a weird imposition of special powers upon selected, or "chosen," hunters along with a moral imperative to hunt down supernatural monsters - which they could clearly see, thanks to The Sight which was granted to all imbued. With most hunters, The Sight was only a temporary thing, its activation controlled with an act of will. But with Waywards, the Sight was on all the time, 24/7, and the imperative to hunt was perverted into an imperative to kill and maim, often on a disproportionate scale (such as burning down a ten storey office block just to murder one lowly monster who has taken to living in the basement).

With this adventure, unlike most of the previous ones, I actually found myself chronicling Libra's exploits in this base underneath The Farm. When people at work saw me writing away in my spare time, they assumed that I was writing a short story, rather than a "first person" in character log of the event.

Eventually, I did turn the chronicle into a short story; but that's not the point. They just never associated my gaming with the writing. And I simply never rectified their erroneous perceptions.

 

[sabredog]

I started playing RPG's in '76 when I first saw the three D&D books in the case at the hobby shop in my hometown where my friends and I had already been playing wargames on Saturdays for a couple years. The guy had models (which gradually vanished as more wargames and RPG materials took over), miniatures, paints, and dice. And three big tables in back where we all played Napoleonic and WW2 armor battles alongside Avalon Hill and SPI wargames. It was called "The Warclub" and the sign had one of those Iroquois spiken' ball wooden warclubs on it.

Man, we were a diverse bunch! My friends and I were in our mid-teens and we were playing Waterloo, Jutland, and El Alamein in minatures with guys as old as I am now. I learned a heck of a lot from those guys about a whole lot of things in life while rolling the dice and adding little tufts of red/black cotton under a tiny tank turret. More than one had fought in wars for real and it was surreal to think that sometimes I'd actually beat them. Or play Air War against some guy who had flown in Vietnam in a SPAD and would give me pointers with vivid descriptions on how to set up a ground attack run properly.

When we all started playing D&D none of us knew what we were in for but even the older guys joined in. It first freaked me out that I would run a game as DM and be telling guys as old or older than my Dad and say things like, "OK, the orc just got a critical hit on your Paladin and killed him. You're out of game for now." Or, "No, you can't do that in my dungeon."

The really surreal part was that for a long time none of us had enough of the right kind of figures to game out a full on assault by 50 orcs against a party of 20 players so we'd break out the good ol' Napoleonics and have the players fighting orcs dressed like Dragoons and Ligne infantry!

I never stopped really till I was in my 30's and raising a family, and by that time, yeah...people at work would look at me funny if I mentioned that I once played RPG's and wargames. Now I'm close to 50 and have been a cop for 11 years, and the funny thing is that when I finally "came out" about starting to run games again to some of my friends at work they not only admitted they played before, too, but that they wanted to get in on some of my games.

So now I'm running games of Traveller and Runequest in the summer with guys my age, some of whom have their kids play with us too and they are in their mid-teens, and while I don't have to break out the French Dragoons to stand in for orcs or aliens anymore it is kinda surreal to realise how full-circle the whole thing has become for me.

Besides, if any of the guys I play with from work made fun of me I guess nowadays I could just just take it out on them in the next ASP training session. The last of which I was in I couldn't help but refer to my ASP as my +5 Stick of A$$-Whupping. I was surprised how many got that joke.

 

[sabredog]

I just finished that article Aramis posted and can remember several of the same kinds of problem-gamers I ran into regularly.

I developed some House-Rules of my own to deal with the problems and to help make keep the game from being ruined by:

There always seemed to be a plyer who would pount and make snarky comments if he got himself killed in the game. He wouldn't just shut up and go watch TV, or at least sit back and wait till an opening would come where I could get him re-inserted (if possible) into the game that night with a new character. My rule was I would never run a game at that guy's house. That way after we ignored his crap for a while he'd just go home.

There was also the munchkin type who insisted on waving the rules in my face every time something didn't work the way he thought it should, and seemed to know every little article in the Dragon, whatever that pertained to the situation, treating it as Holy Writ. My rule for that guy was to have him get captured as soon as possible and leave it up to the rest of the party as to whether or not he'd get rescued. The rest of the party would never find out where he was held captive until he swore to shut up and play nice on pain of never, ever, ever playing again with us.

Since munchkins can't stand the idea of not being able to play and flaunt their munchkin-ness that would always work for at least that particular game night. Since munchkins also never seemed to be that bright we'd have to go through the same thing next game night but we all would secretly look forward to the munchkin's wails of "Not fair, how come I'm ALWAYS the one captured?!"

 

[Whipsnade]

Gents,

Like many of you, I keep my interest in RPGs very much to myself. My interest in wargames is also a private thing, just not quite as private as with RPGs.

My immediate family knows I play wargames and have known it since the early 70s. They see the RPG books on my shelves too, but I never talk about them.

I've never received any cutting remarks or ostracism over my hobbies, but I don't exactly talk about my hobbies either.


Regards,
Bill

 

[spinwardpirate]

I completely forgot to mention this one. A few years ago I was doing my best to get a promotion into our quality assurance group. When a vacancy was announced, one of the things I put on my application was the 7 or 8 GURPS books in which I had playtest credit. I actually took those books with me to my interview... and they gave me the promotion.

 

[JAFARR]

Well I not only play games of all kinds except video console based ones (I spend my money on computer games instead), I am a duplicate bridge player again after a 19 year layoff. I am trying to get some of the youth at church interested via the youth outreach ministry there, but mostly they want to play the vidio games. Some of the best gaming fun I have had was Sunday afternoons at home playing Aquire. We could get in 3 or 4 games in an afternoon when the weather was adverse for outdoor sports. They never wanted to do RPGs, but I did those later in life.

A fellow bridge player summed generational intertainment habits this way: Before the 1960s & 70s people played cards (and "monotony" like board games) for intertainment. Then they started watching TV (out of which grew the video games) and card playing began to die off except maybe for poker and the gambling genre of card and dice games. This is also about the time frame of role playing and war gaming as well so we "gamers" are in a niche of our own.

As to problem players: we had one in our group who was moody. In the right mood, you couldn't ask for a better player. As a 1 HP illusionist, he charged into active combat and survived. On another ocasion he decided to test his high tech Traveller gear and see what it was capable of aginst a "safe" low tech TL 6 world only to run into an Imperial anti drug unit equiped with TL 15 gear (Ref had a spectator witness his D100 role, then had "John" role D100. Both roles were identical! Then the Ref sent in the anti drug unit). 2 of us were smart enough not to get involved. After the feasco was over and "John" went home in a foul mood, I asked the ref if we could just stick his PC in a low berth and forget the past hour of playing time ever existed and he agreed.

 

[saundby]

I completely forgot to mention this one. A few years ago I was doing my best to get a promotion into our quality assurance group. When a vacancy was announced, one of the things I put on my application was the 7 or 8 GURPS books in which I had playtest credit. I actually took those books with me to my interview... and they gave me the promotion.

Dang! Why didn't I ever think of that? Good job!

One day I was sitting at lunch in the company canteen. I was working out mathematical models for testing out some changes I was proposing to our local gaming group for Stellar Conquest, to make sure they wouldn't break the game by, say, making a Crispy Critter or GM strategy unbeatable. Two of my coworkers were drawn by the sheets of closely-written figures. One of them had coded our local modifications to Spice for the unique component technologies our company used, the other had written our thermal modelling system and code to allow us to lay out boards in 3D to allow components to nest in multi-PCB systems with tight space allowances. These were done in Fortran on an HP9000/300, in the days when a C-64 really was a powerful engineering computer.

When they found out what I was up to, the reaction was "You do this for fun? Next time they ask for a volunteer for a hairy modelling/coding project don't be surprised when everyone but you in the line takes a huge step back!"

 

[Supplement Four]

I've been a police officer now for 15 years. No one at works knows I'm an RPGer. I hold some rank at my deparment and am a SRT (Swat) team leader. The alpha personalities I lead might look at me differently if they knew I sometimes played at being a Wookie bounty hunter or Dwarven warrior.

LOL! That cracks me up. I can just imagine the all-macho SWAT crew listening to you recount the adventures of last night's game...

 

[Blue Ghost]

I just finished that article Aramis posted and can remember several of the same kinds of problem-gamers I ran into regularly.

I developed some House-Rules of my own to deal with the problems and to help make keep the game from being ruined by:

There always seemed to be a plyer who would pount and make snarky comments if he got himself killed in the game. He wouldn't just shut up and go watch TV, or at least sit back and wait till an opening would come where I could get him re-inserted (if possible) into the game that night with a new character. My rule was I would never run a game at that guy's house. That way after we ignored his crap for a while he'd just go home.

There was also the munchkin type who insisted on waving the rules in my face every time something didn't work the way he thought it should, and seemed to know every little article in the Dragon, whatever that pertained to the situation, treating it as Holy Writ. My rule for that guy was to have him get captured as soon as possible and leave it up to the rest of the party as to whether or not he'd get rescued. The rest of the party would never find out where he was held captive until he swore to shut up and play nice on pain of never, ever, ever playing again with us.

Since munchkins can't stand the idea of not being able to play and flaunt their munchkin-ness that would always work for at least that particular game night. Since munchkins also never seemed to be that bright we'd have to go through the same thing next game night but we all would secretly look forward to the munchkin's wails of "Not fair, how come I'm ALWAYS the one captured?!"

To me it depended on the level of snarkiness. I never really experienced a lot of the obnoxious behavior posted on this thread. I saw a lot of people over react to some comments, but I never found any of the comments in and of themselves as offensive.

However, and there's always a "however", there was a player in our circle of friends who did tend towards rules-lawyering. And that wasn't so bad in and of itself except that he only did it when the situation, whatever it was, pertained to him.

We could be doing a game of Car Wars or SFB or whatever, and a situation would come up where we could have all invoked a rule of somekind, but, because no one else did it was therefore understood that whatever rule it was was being ignored for the time being. We even acknowledged this verbally on occasion, and would hand wave it.

But, when player-X (and we'll call him player-X for purposes of protecting the guil... "er... innocent" ) would run into said-same situation, then it became a whole different story. His usual spiel would start off in an innocent and gentle voice "You know, I think there's a rule for that...", at which point my blood would boil.

*TONGUE INSERTED IN CHEEK MODE ON*
If there was a targetting modifier that we hadn't used all evening, he would dredge it up. If there was a special rule addressing Tholian Webs not being able to be layer caked on Wednesday afternoons during a rainy day with a Godzilla film on, then he'd throw it in our face. If there was a rule describing how a baby zebra at a circus could save his character on a space station by doing back flips during a total eclipse, then he'd bring it up.
*TONGUE INSERTED IN CHEEK MODE OFF*

That kind of thing I found highly annoying. Fortunately I wasn't the only one. And I say that because I thought I might be overreacting to his antics, but, in retrospect, I wasn't as such, although I should've studied the rules more thuroughly and thrown them back in his face.

After a while we just stopped inviting him to game with us. Our gaming sessions turned out to be better for it. He went off to "date" and "make a man of himself", but wound up dating a girl who didn't like him for the behavior I listed, and another who cheated on him for the same reasons. Last I heard he was divorced. It's been his bane, so to speak. He became an engineer of all things, and not some ambulance chaser. I wonder what his coworkers think of him... :smirk:

 

[JAFARR]

Dang! Why didn't I ever think of that? Good job!

One day I was sitting at lunch in the company canteen. I was working out mathematical models for testing out some changes I was proposing to our local gaming group for Stellar Conquest, to make sure they wouldn't break the game by ..."

Stellar Conquest used to be a staple with my group, but it was a board game. In fact I have the origional Metagaming version sitting in my lap right now, copyright 1979. I know someone else (AH?) bought the rights to it later, but you sound like it was a RPG.

 

[JAFARR]

Our's wasn't a "rules-lawyer" so much as a "rules - that nobody else remembered - lawyer". Hi -IQ teen who had a 90%+ photographic memory for rules. He would read all the rules and remember them when it was in his favor. What it did was make sure we all remembered them the next time so he got his edge that 1 time. Too bad his memory didn't work as well with his college calcus at Ga Tech.

 

[saundby]

Stellar Conquest used to be a staple with my group, but it was a board game. In fact I have the origional Metagaming version sitting in my lap right now, copyright 1979. I know someone else (AH?) bought the rights to it later, but you sound like it was a RPG.

Yeah, it was a board game. I have the original Metagaming version, ziplock bag and all (and a very floppy glossy paper game "board" with one missing star.) Our group used to play with variants to the game. Changing tech development costs, creating new technologies or adding new tech trees, playing with the starting conditions, and so on.

About half the players were analysis freaks (myself among them.) At the time of the event I recounted, I was the only one without a home computer (I'd loaned out my COSMAC Elf and it never came back.) So I'd cover ledger sheets with analysis. About a year later I got an HP-41C and a Vic-20. Then I started churning out dot matrix printouts on regular tractor feed paper and the paper for the HP printer that looked like store receipts or calculator tapes.

 

[DonM]

I have to confess I get this from both sides...

I was raised Pentecostal (fundamentalist Christian), and my wife and I are active in our current non-denominational church. And we're both gamers -- and I have been the chairman of our local regional gaming convention for the last 16 years.

For a number of years, well-meaning Christians would approach me concerned about my activities (and if not that, our active participation in freemasonry gets the same questions). Since I know everyone's going to see my name on the Winter War flyers, and hear it in the radio ads, I'm very open about the situation.

I've been Sunday School Superintendent at my church for a good number of years now. One Sunday, my son catches up with me after church very alarmed... "Our teacher said you and mom were satanists..." (sigh) They had played that old Dobson canard in the class that Sunday. [And every time Dobson trots that thing out, I write them offering to give an opposing view of role-playing; two years ago, I got a wonderful response about how they recognize the issue has a number of sides, and they were looking at how to deal with that. They haven't reprinted/replayed that thing since...]

The teacher is also the wife of my son's Scoutmaster, so I know she's well-intentioned, but uneducated. So, I called her up, said I needed to meet with her about her class, and met with her and her husband at their home. I said that I had some concerns about the discussion of role-playing in her class, and she started repeating the old Dobson talking points. I responded with the details Michael Stackpole gathered on the subject, and then pulled out the D&D 3.0 PH that had just been released.

[You'd have thought I'd pulled out the Satanic bible. Sigh...]

I let her and her husband know that my wife and I had been role-playing since high school, and we met in college over gaming (technically, it was Axis and Allies), and that I have every edition of D&D ever released, and would be more than willing to assist her in any research she'd want to conduct on the subject. Extremely apologetic, and a few years later my son received his Eagle Scout from her husband's hand. Everything worked out...

But gamers... they often don't understand how we can be "practicing Christians", like every church wants to burn our books, or smash our dice, etc. I've found that for every strange way people treat gamers, I've found gamers willing to look at Christians the same way.

And yet, there's a lot of us out here that are both (we've had families come to our church because they recognized my name, and figured no one would bug them about RPGs here).

And we've gotten a few church high schoolers to start gaming (sadly, mostly Magic, Warhammer and D&D, but I still hold out hope).

Remember, gamers seem to be very tolerant of furries, SF fandom, and alternate lifestyles, but they can occasionally balk at Christians. And it's not like Christians don't go out of their way some times to deserve it. I've found that inviting them to watch goes a long way to solving things.

A church elder that came to watch (my Pendragon campaign) became a strong close friend of our family. A few "ex-gamers" who'd hidden their secret past came out and joined our games.

So the two don't have to be at war with each other. But I still get a few people at church who say "I didn't know you were a gamer" when the ads start up for Winter War each year. And our church leadership has come to accept it as one of my eccentricites.

And at Winter War, we now have a Sunday morning reflection time; we do get some strange looks, but we have proven that the two can co-exist.

 

[dean]

<snip preceding>

He became an engineer of all things, and not some ambulance chaser. I wonder what his coworkers think of him... :smirk:

Guys like that usually wind up in middle management and never get demoted or fired, but are at the top of the layoff list...


@DonM

Good for you! I was actively banned from a friend's house in High School when his ill-informed and devout parents found out I was a "gamer". After that, of course, our friendship waned. At the same time, half my regular gaming group are Baptists, so it evens out in the end.

 

[BlackBat242]

About a year later I got an HP-41C and a Vic-20. Then I started churning out dot matrix printouts on regular tractor feed paper and the paper for the HP printer that looked like store receipts or calculator tapes.

Ahhh, yes. The thermal printer... I assume you had the "card reader" for the HP?
Loved those little magnetic strips.
And a memory plug-in?

 

[Blue Ghost]

DonM; I keep hearing about the "satanic" stuff from the bible belt, but me being in the Bay Area I've never really seen nor experienced the bible thumping victive against gaming.

If anything it was bible thumpers who got me into gaming, so to speak. I dabbled in gaming via my Sci-Fi habbit, but my church going friends were big D&D types. They had the King James in one hand and the 3rd Edition PH and DM in the other. I always thought that was interesting, but neither odd nor out of character. I mean, to me at least, the bible wasn't much different from fantasy, and I don't mean that as a snide remark nor hyperbole of anykind, it's just the way I saw the world.

Again, if anything, I preferred to game with religous types because, again to me at least, they had a real sense of wanting to help make it a pleasureable experience and were well comported. That verse your stereotypical hack-n-slash don't-shave-don't-bathe liveinparentsbasement types, which mars much of honest gaming.

 

[DonM]

Well, I'm in Illinois, but I first played D&D (and Traveller) in Arkansas, in 1979... and both were hard to find. But the misunderstandings are amazing. And while D&D was very off limits at church camps, it was very much in demand in Boy Scout camps. I can remember being a DM for a group of boys older than me in the spring of 80 -- I was in junior high, about to go to high school, and the players were all older boys from other troops (and the only rules I had was my trusty Blue Book). And the Eagle Scouts were very paranoid... I realized that since I didn't know them, I could kill their characters and not feel guilty at school the next day.

:rofl:

I went to college in Indiana, and received much deeper immersion in Traveller (there's a Traveller Book?!). We'd drive up to Indy on the weekends, where I was a Army veteran from the "Cereal Wars" (served with Beatrice in distinction, set sometime during the Long Night).

Heh. Those were awesome days. College was very liberating as a gamer. Especially meeting a female gamer willing to date (and an upperclassman with her own car). Hmm... not too much ostracism there...