I have felt a little down for the past year or so. My regular gaming group was family based. We had a friend who gamed with us, but the rest were me and my three kids. However, kids grow up, get jobs and significant others. Life changes. Seems the story of my gaming life.
I grew up gaming with the same core group of three or five friends. I had been the first to find AD&D, and I sort of did exactly what Derek Sivers talks about in the video. I stood up at our junior high bus stop and did the crazy gamer dance, and I had them hooked before we were driving out of my block to school. That first group of friends carried me through almost a decade of gaming.
Of course those were tempestuous times. I was not the most level headed teenager, nor common sense young adult. Things changed. We got lives, jobs, significant others, and things change. Which for me meant a hiatus from gaming from about 1995 to 2005. Oh, I missed it, believe you me. But things happen when the time was right, and enter 2004 or so and I realized the kids I was teaching at my new junior high were playing third edition. I didn't know much about it, but I knew how to start a movement!
I put up flyers, did my crazy gamer dance, and thus entered into the second best gaming time of my life: running the junior high school gaming club. We ran through 2012. I had as many as 30 students in the club at one time, many of them first time gamers. I would say the club introduced gaming to literally hundreds of kids, many of which I still see today as adults who still game, or remember it fondly and wish they could start again.
In 2012 I took a job as a school principal and the sheer investment in time was too much to try and run a game club. So my gaming was seriously curtailed. However my kids brought me the 5e books the Christmas after its release. Thus was born our home game which continued for some years afterwards. We gamed more or less through until 2018 or so when my oldest went off to college. We didn't stop entirely, gaming a lot with her over Roll 20 or the like. But as she graduated and job a full time job, and also her own gaming group closer to her home, things slowed down. My other kids grew up, got jobs, and the gaming slowed to a trickle. So our family friend found other gamers to play more regularly with.
And here I am today. The last year seeing very little in the way of gaming. I have reached out to a few online, but I just can't get into a full online game. Maybe I'll resign myself to that one day, but not yet. Thing is I do remember how to start a movement. It's really not the hard. I just have to have the courage to get up and risk being seen as silly until I find some friends who want to be silly with me.
I have much the same story. I am, however, going to start a BECMI campaign at a local game store that will have me. Having moved from my old haunts of Ohio to Detroit, I gotta find me some players, so I figured that was a good way to start.
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