Starting The Party

 

So I'm taking a deep breath and diving in.

Taking a leap of faith.

Lighting the torch and treading the crumbling steps into Level One, Room One.

My first blog post.

This is a real dungeon BTW. I think.

I wrote this post initially .... then read it, and got a bit confused myself - so decided I should boil it down here. This is going to be a blog about two things:

1) Gaming with your family. Yes, those people you tend to love and hate in people measure. Gaming with them like you might break out the Monopoly or the Ludo. This includes your parents, no matter how old they might be. And your siblings, no matter how much you might annoy one another. I've geen doing it for a couple of years and had plenty of successes and failures I'd like to share.

2) Gaming with your kids. Bringing forth the next generation. I've got a three-year-old son and one-year-old daughter and as the months and years go by I'm lookng forward to bringing them in to the wild, imaginative world of tabletop gaming and RPGs. Hell I've started with the eldest already.

I'm a novice blogger but I've been gaming for almost 30 years, on and off. For a whole decade, it was mostly "off" as work, life, girls, beer and a whole host of other distractions worked their distraction-y magic.

I didn't have time for gaming and I didn't really know anyone else who was in the hobby, certainly not in my new "adult world" of dinner parties and house hunting, and then painting nurseries and sleepless nights with the baby....

But I'm going to share with you the story of how my most solid RPG group was hewn out of - wait for it - my own family. Yeah, I know plenty of gamers these days share sessions with their wife, even their kids, if they're lucky.
But I game with everyone from my three-year-old son to my father who is pushing seventy. More than half the group are women, including my wife as well as two sisters - none of whom ever touched a d20 until a couple of years back.

So no, none of the women in my life look like this

Oh, and none of them would consider themselves "gamers" in the sense that I do - but all enjoy shooting the breeze, solving puzzles, slaying monsters, rescuing their companions from certain death and generally bveing THE ONE WHO SAVES THE DAY.

Does that make our group weird? (I doubt it - most gamers love doing that stuff, which just goes to show the universal appeal games like DnD should really have)
Does that make me weird? (Er, possibly, but moving on...)
Who cares, most gamers are weird.

Most gamers are just anxious to get a game, and as our hobby ages (and is threatened by video games, smartphones and other demands on our time) we need to make sure that it also grows.
Introduce new people. Spend quality time doing what we love.

Too many people bury the hobby in the closet and never bring out the glorious, madcap social affair that is a truly great RPG session to show it off to the family.

It's time to share the thing you love, with the people you love.

Although believe me, it can be kinda annoying when after all your efforts, your sister still sometimes confuses her Hp with her AC and your dad still thinks a d20 is shaped like a diamond....