Nobody is willing to DM except me, and I'm the least creative twit on Earth.

I can come up with an excellent idea, and it's great. But it's just one idea. Great for an adventure, but it doesn't do much for a campaign.. And then we end up doing almost the same thing every game, so it becomes boring. Then the group gives up.

That's what causes my groups to fall apart :P I try the best I can. I'm actually up to 3 good ideas for adventures now.

If you are happy to DM, but are just short on the ideas front, get a subscription to Dungeon magazine. It's packed with great adventures, and even if you don't use them as they are, you can at least steal the ideas.

(yeah, I made a post in the other post, everyone can probably pull together and work it out. This is a good community)

The problem I run into is when two people have a falling out, and they both want to play in the same games. This makes everyone's lives miserable, almost always including theirs, and I do not know why people force the issue, but that is what inevitably ends up happening in ours. Breakups are an especially hard time; It is nice when one or the other half of the couple just leaves the game.

People you can game with consistantly can be hard to find and valuable however. It is usually worth trying to preserve the friendships, at least until you get some other people in the group so that it can split more evenly. yeah, I know, that is cold. I am just talking worst case scenario. Dealing with losing friends is a discussion for another LJ group.

I've noticed the same thing about the community, on occassion. But overall I do like it here :)

There's one guy in my group whom I hate playing with. He's a total powergamer, not to mention really whiney, and he makes playing D&D not fun for me. But I can't kick him out or anything, because he's roommates with one of my other players/friends. As such, I see him around a lot. So I'm just waiting until I graduate in May and then I don't have to tell him when I'm running games anymore and will never have to play with him again.

Maybe a little, but it seems to happen occasionally. There was a period a while back where I was tempted to leave the group because everyone was being so antagonistic (not to me, just in general). The reason for it at the moment seems to be that there have been a lot more rules intensive discussions rather than simple answers and people get heated in these things sometimes. If someone percieves an critique on their way of doing things as a personal attack then they become defensive and possibly retaliate( and so on ad nauseum).

Oh yeah, well your even-handed critique of our interpersonal skills is flawed and immature!

Happy gaming, kid.

Could be right.
Thanks.

first off id like to point out i dont have anything against women gamers....now that thats out of the way....the problem with our group is a woman gamer. she just sits there and draws all night, then when a decision comes up we'll have to recount everything that happened. the reason why we havent kicked her out yet is because some of the people really like her drawings so shes usually drawing for someone.

another problem we typically have is girlfriends calling to see how things are going which usually turns into a 30 min+ conversation about nothing. then one person would get really mad and blow up at him.....only to have his own gf and 30 min+ convo later on in the night.

as far as the community goes....the only thing i really notice is when someone blows up at somebody else over a stupid misspelling. shit happens people. the first one that comes to mind is the whole turrets/tourettes thing. big deal, its kinda a hard word to spell. and it might be a young gamer or something...so just calm down...life is already to stressful to bring it into the community.

As a woman gamer, I have to admit that I hate almost every other woman gamer I've come across. I've seen the ones who do nothing but draw in a game and when the time comes to do something they look up with a blank "cow in headlights" look on thier face. I think my least favorite would be a girl who came into a group I was in because her boyfriend was in the game. She knew absolutely nothing about the game but hey, we were all new at one point so no big deal. We help her start a sheet and she picks Wizard as a class. I try to explain spells to her and she looks at me and says, "My Mom told me this game was Satanic and now I believe her." She refused to do anything else and just sat there making rude comments the rest of the night because her boyfriend was her ride home.

In my current group, I'm happy to say that I'm one of two compitant (sp?) female players.

hehehe, i LOVE messing with people who say D&D is satanic cause you learn to cast spells. one of my favorite lines to use is "as soon as i learn draconic you are SOO gonna pay". the way i see it....people are stupid and theres nothing i can do to change it....so i might as well have fun while im alive right?? ^_^

Why do new players always pick wizards?! Play a fighter for crying out loud! Learn the mechanics with a character who will use some of them, and is simple to make. Even a poorly made fighter is easy to make and use.
Or a ranger, same deal. Heck, even a monk, then you don't even have to worry about weapons!

Hahah, that is so true.

I always tell new players to play either a fighter or a rogue (rogues are great because people learn how to do skill checks, and as such really understand the basic mechanics of the game). Of course, most rogues don't understand sneak attack for a while, but once they do they understand being flat-footed and flanking and stuff.

I don't know if I'd outright ban a new player from playing a spellcaster, but I'd highly discourage it. And then the first step is for them to play a sorcerer, so they don't have to deal with memorization.

My first two characters were sorcerers.

Two years later, I played a healbitch cleric.

Because I didn't understand the mechanic, I was casting spells from the cleric's entire spell list spontaneously.

I only figured out what I was doing wrong when I played a wizard the year after that. Now I feel a bit of guilt... ;-)

Heh. If the DM doesn't catch you though, you can't blame yourself for that. Obviously it didn't break the game, so I wouldn't worry about it :)

Amen to that. I love the icon too, btw.

My standard response to the Satanic thing is "Yeah, so?"

my wife plays, part of our group is another married couple, and i've played with two other women in the past. of those four women who i've played with a lot, they're all pretty good except for one who had this weird fixation on the DM and her pc inevitably tried to be mothering to any NPC we encountered. i wanted to attack her every time it happened. in real life. at any rate i guess i've been fortunate because almost all the women i've played with have been genuinely interested in the game and relatively competent gamers.

just so you know ... I was F***ing around with the whole turrets/tourettes thing. It was silly. If I pissed anyone off, I am truly sorry

Screw you, jerk!

Falling out happens. You can try to hold the group together, but it'll likely be a failing battle. Thankfully, there's never a shortage of dorks around, it's just a matter of getting them to come out of their parents' basements.

For any college students that might be part of the community, it's quite possibly midterm crunch time, at least in the US anyways. Tends to make people grouchy. ^.^; Don't know about everyone else.

As for the falling-out issue, is the fall-out due to the game itself? or just a general lack of interest in keeping up with each other? etc?

in the lj group, not terribly. that one post i made got kind of nasty. when i see something i don't like on LJ i don't read it. or i try not to.

as for real life fallings out among gamers... i don't know. i've had gaming groups dissolve but never with any real animosity.

my problem is dealing with DM styles. we have 3 DMs in circulation, and they all have their problems. one is a power gamer, a min-maxer, and likes to lord his lvl 15 wizard/rogue NPCs over our heads to make us stick to his story. one thinks it's humorous to constantly toss us in jail, strip us of weapons/magic items, and just generally likes to annoy and fluster the players as much as possible. the third is actually quite creative and fun, but he's really spacey and forgets a lot of what he intended to do. he also lets the other two DMs push him around sometimes.

so i think the only solution here is for me to learn to DM and give em a taste of their own medicine.

Shut up, you! :-) Just kidding. Actually, I haven't noticed people being uncivil to each other, but I admit I only read the comments when the posts are of interest to me. Like this one.

As for falling outs, we haven't really had any major ones. There have been disagreements, but those are usually resolved and left behind. Guys are good that way. The major disagreements have led to the people involved not coming back, but those were people who weren't really friends, just gaming buddies. Women tend to hold grudge more than men, but since my group's all guys, we don't have that problem.