Making a New Gaming Buddy

My current gaming group has been together for going on 6 years. This is longer than any other group of gaming friends I’ve ever had.

I started regularly gaming (mostly RISK, Dark Tower, Mille Bornes, and Dungeons & Dragons) in late middle school, around 13 years old (1980). Our group of friends expanded and contracted through high school such that by the time I was graduating, at 17 years old (1985), my regular game group consisted of no one I originally started with. And then people (including me) started moving away to go to college.

Such was the case over the next several years: game friends and game groups came and went as college and work and life called us all. No group lasted as a whole for more than 4 years.

But then I managed to organize this current group in 2003. We were all full adults, with permanent addresses and careers.

This current group, at its largest, consisted of 7 gamers — 5 men, 2 women — but we’ve been just 4 guys for the past couple of years. We’ve talked about finding a 5th person so our roleplaying games could have 4 players and a game master (a well rounded group). But we haven’t actually tried recruiting anyone.

A few weeks ago, one of the guys mentioned that one of his World of Warcraft guildmates lived in our real-world area, and was looking for a D&D game. Hmmm. We gave serious consideration on whether to bring in someone new. Someone none of us actually knew in the real world.

After some discussion, we decided to invite this guy to join our game for a test run. We’ll all be meeting him for the first time this Thursday night when we next game. Only the one who met him in WoW has ever had any interaction with this guy, and that was all through the online world. All we know about him so far is that he’s 23 years old — almost 10 years younger than the current youngest in our group. (Our oldest player is 51.)

It’s kind of intriguing and weird at the same time. He may a completely normal, nice, intelligent, and well-adjusted fellow. Or he may be some psycho weirdo dressed in black. Or he may be some unwashed dork with no life outside of WoW. I don’t know.

Funnily, though, the thing that worries us the most (or at least a couple of us) is whether he’ll think we’re the weirdos or dorks. Having gamed together for over 5 years, we’ve all gotten used to each other. We sometimes crack some terrible, reprehensible jokes. We sometimes act like total 13 year old pubescent boys. In general, we’re sometimes just not presentable to respectable public society. So it’s quite possible that this new guy will find us unacceptable.

I can only imagine this tension about meeting someone new is how online daters feel. But then, at least they get to see a picture and read a profile to have some idea of what they might be getting into. Us, we’re true adventurers. I hope he is, too.

Bullgrit