After the neighbour leaves the wife comes in and tells me what went on. Turns out the squealing came when the neighbour saw a pile of D&D books. She and her roommate are huge D&D fans. They're both pretty new to the area and don't know many folks, so they spend hours dragging themselves out to the other end of the city every week to play.
So it looks like we're going to be getting a new weekly D&D group together…in my own building. Adding in the neighbours fiancé - also a player - and it's a full five-person crew.
So after my rambling tale of good fortune, a pose a question. How have you found your D&D group(s)? Are your fellow players all old friends? Did you sign up on a store bulelting board? Did you fall ass-backwards into a group? Did you hacve one move in with you like I did?
There is a sad note, however. We've kind of stopped playing. We still head over weekly and BS or watch a movie, but we don't play. We're immensely dissatisfied with the modules we ended up running since our ol' DM bailed (4e and he don't get along - plus he's got other stuff on his mind now). Nobody wants to DM so we ran this stuff cuz it's easier. It's also crap. I'm hoping to get us back on track when Dark Sun comes out, but I'm not sure everyone would be into it. I'm an ok DM but we haven't played DS since 2e and have some fond memories. My pal is pretty sure 4e can't properly duplicate the ol' feel of DS. I think he may be right, but I'll do my damndest to make it feel right when I run. The other problem is that I'll only be able to run for a month or two before I need to take a month or two off. Not the best way to go about it. But I'll likely try. Sundays just aren't quite the same.
My group is basically just a group of friends from my childhood. I've also played with a group of people who I met at work, but only once or twice. For a while, I tried to find a group online, but that never really worked well. So I just go with an hour and a half drive (one way!) to play DnD. Stupid jerks won't come here.
They started playing DnD before me with some weird, old guy (its kind of funny when you think of it). I didn't really like him so I only played with them a few times. But after a few years, we picked up some books and decided to play.
We had to stop with people moving away, but have had a game for the most part for a several years now. We're trying to use some sort of webcam so a friend who live in Boston can join us. I doubt that'll work too well.
It seems like normal group splitting/resupplying, so nothing too exciting.
But I've made a friend in a similar fashion to Zombie_Babies when I was a kid. But instead of armor, the kids was drawing Star Trek style ships battling. I also (uncharacteristically) asked him about it and we became friends introducing me to his other friends who I was friends with in middle/high school. So I guess drawing geeky stuff helps finds friends or something.
It took 6months before i got a nibble, only to have the player move off before game1. 4months later I lucked into a couple and we are having our maiden game this friday.
I may be starting up another group, mainly because some other long-time friends (and their children) are interested.
A bunch of kids in my neighborhood got into playing D&D in elementary school and junior high, although I'd learned to play when I was 8. We'd just play a pick-up game or premade module whenever we got some people together - there wasn't a regular group. But we played pretty regularly after our 4th grade Catholic Catechism class on the weekends, especially after our teacher discovered us all huddled together in a doorway trying to roll dice, hold onto character sheets and keep our books from getting rained on, and allowed us to play in the classroom. (She even joined the party.)
Then in junior high I ran a pick-up game during lunch in the reference room of the school library.
Throughout high school, it was just a rare pick-up game here and there, usually with only myself and one or two others.
When I first got to college, I happened to wander past a group playing a premade module in the school cafeteria - a 1st or 2nd Ed. Greyhawk module where we started out playing the members of the Circle of Eight for the first fight for the sole purpose of getting our arses kicked so that we could then take up the roles of their underlings on a rescue mission to free them.
I asked if they minded me me hanging out and watching, and they shang-haied me into the party. They handed me a premade character - a generic hafling thief with two magic daggers and a ring of jumping that quickly evolved into one of my signature characters: Ripper, the hyperactive, loud, mildly psychotic, immensely-huge-for-a-hafling wildman who eventually acquired gauntlets of ogre power and a sunblade bastard sword, and once beat an ogre to death with his fists after punching it repeatedly in the kneecaps till its legs broke and it fell over.
Later that year, a friend and I got an invite to another guy's house for a 4-man PvP brawl with epic-level characters, which is where I originated the idea of the Drop A House On Em Maneuver when my friend teleported me behind one of our opponents and I placed a Daern's Instant Fortress on the top of his head
before yelling the command word and diving for safety. Since that fateful moment, lol, the list of my "Daern's Instant Hand Grenade" shenanigans has grown long and long, hehehe...Back during 3.0 I DMed a really good group of guys for several months (Damn I miss those guys - If I told them I wanted to run a session where the party was a bunch of penguins dressed as nuns and then asked them to set their heads on fire, they would have done it just to see where I'd take it, lol), but since then I've mostly just played an occasional pick-up game with different groups of folks usually met while checking out the D&D books at various mall bookstores.
For a while I was playing in a 4E group at my local FLGS, but I had to drop out because it was just too much effort to rearrange the rest of my schedule to fit it in.