Playing with people

I joined a local Dungeons and Dragons group and had my first game today. I was fortunate enough to join the start of a campaign so everyone's at my level. We had a hoot - I play a lawful neutral paranoid elven mage. I did rather well too - around 5 unassisted kills or so (Wand of Magic Missile was definitely a good buy!). Not bad for a caster who's just starting off. :)

I haven't played D&D since I was still in school. That would have been a minimum of 15+ years ago. I feel old now. :( I used to play a lot of tabletop/pen-and-paper social gaming when I was a student. Some of my happiest memories are of Magic:the Gathering games with my friends in MacEwan Hall. As my career progressed, that all stopped and I moved to solitary gaming on computers. Oh, I did the MMORPG thing for a while and it was fun but it never did quite have the sparkle when friends come together to spend face-to-face time with one another. I place social gaming between face-to-face chats and movies; it doesn't have the awkward silences that regular face-to-face chats end up having after a while because you run out of things to talk about nor does it have the non-interactivity that going to see a movie in a darkened room imposes. In social face-to-face gaming, you interact with one another; fun happens naturally.

Yes, I know I'm way older than the standard demographic when it comes to social gaming. However, I am in the process of rebuilding my life from scratch and yes, I also know you all are really sick of hearing that. ;) I had been going through my past history and reviewing it, trying to avoid the same mistakes I made in the past. And that happy period in my life when I was playing M:tG jumped out at me. I'm a game-player and I always will be. So, I'm parlaying that into something I can use to rebuild. D&D satisfies my desire to play games and it also gives me an opportunity to meet large numbers of people out of which I can rebuild my social life. Granted, I'm choosing a segment of society that is quite peculiar and I don't seriously expect that I'll meet my insanely rich future husband there ;)

But I'm starting a new paragraph in my life. One that I hope will bring me the same fond memories in the decades to come as I view those precious M:tG games long ago.

BTW, if your first impressions of the title for this post didn't match what I've written, just bear in mind I'm all Sweetness and Light now. :)