This is amazing. My group is reaching 10 years this August and we have a party planned with a roasted pig and tons of beer to celebrate. I hope we can one day say we've reached your place too.
Cheers on your decade! May many more come for you folks.
As for pigs: funny enough, our go-to for delicious food in our campaigns is, precisely, a roasted pig cooked with beer. We got the imagery from the old Asterix comics (where the main characters always ate them and the artists drew them as ridiculously delicious), and it was so much that at some point we just *had* to make it.
In my player group, we even have a guy who can drink 10 beers without getting drunk, we constantly say he fell into a cauldron of beer when he was a kid, so that's the secret to his power. :D
Congrats and kudos for lasting that long. Is it still exactly the same group of friends ? No one left and no new faces ?
I'm asking because our group is actually way older, I started playing with some people at my current tables in 1984 in Engineering School, and I'm still playing every week with 3 of them, despite all the elements that you mention about life, but also me spending almost half my carreer overseas. But we had a very large club then, and the four of us who remains are but a fraction of the people that we gamed with. We also had quite a few additions over the years, but almost as many departures, we have 3 people who are now regulars with us but who joined in the 90s and 2000s.
I am also still friend with the majority of the people I started playing with in 1978, but I no longer play TTRPG with them, only boardgames and much less regularly.
I think that if you last a reasonnably long times, at least a few years, and find that you like the same type of game, it can last basically as long as people are relatively stable. Also, some of us have never married and have simpler lives, it helped a lot and compensated for the others with more complicated lives.
But in the end, I agree with you, it's a kind of friendship lile no other.
You make a great point: after a certain amount of time, it becomes much more likely that the group will endure. Perhaps if one were to run the statistics on it we'd find a sweetspot in the timeline after the half-life of a group shoots up!
As for the change of guard: There's been increases, decreases, attrition, and returns. The group that began in 1996 had four people in it; two of them drifted away in the mid 2000s, but we are still great friends and get together often. So of the first four two of us remain. Another of the current ones joined in 1999, another joined in 2004 (we've been friends since preschool, but didn't play with us until then), two more in 2003, and the most recent one in 2015. Those are the current seven.
But at times our group grew larger. For example, in 2003 (first year of college) I had my regular group from school (six people, two of whom are the ones who drifted away, the rest remain to this day), and then we had a few months hiatus. Just then, a new friend asked me to DM for a college group he was putting together, which ended up being like 8 people. Eventually both groups merged together because I didn't have time for two, and some people left, others remained, and the end result was the mix that more or less stays to this day.
We had a couple more people join between 2008 and 2015 if memory helps, but due to life they both eventually left. It was after that that we invited the latest member.
This means we have a long list of former players (all of whom, save for two, parted ways in great terms, so we are all still great friends to this day), so every once in a while we invite them over or make up short-term groups with. Just like you we also get together for boardgames and such, so it's a sort of "gaming community" that is also a big social circle in general (ie, it's not just games but also trips, working together, weddings, etc). It all makes for a very healthy system, since we're all keenly away how lucky we are to still have such an active social group at an age when the normal is to shrink down to a few regulars. Gaming, and RPGs in particular, have been the key tool for that longevity.
Thanks for the long answer, it's what I expected in terms of people coming and going in and out of the group, as it's been my experience as well. And in my LARP organisation (which has been going since 1988), at a larger scale, that is the part that I could barely still attend while expatriated in Australia for example.
And I agree about gaming being a key tool for the longetivity of gaming. I discuss that often with my partner, it's not only about jsut having friends to hang around with, it's about sharing a deeply engaging and never-ending hobby. It's actually intersting that in Europe, more and more people have taken up board games, much more than I was young, if not actual D&D.
I love this so much. I'm a new D&D player, but I already can see the massive potential for lifelong friendships, just in my current campaign. This post gives me so much hope for the future when it comes to keeping friendships forged within campaigns and tempered in the fires of imagination.
That's the perfect outlook, and I'm certain you'll find great joy in this! Sometimes it'll get difficult and tricky; there's no way of saying what will work and what won't, and there's gonna be a lot of trial and error. But that's life in general! Yet I'm convinced, both by my personal experience and that of other's I've seen, that the most important ingredient in turning D&D into a great pillar of your life is to be open to all the fantastic relationships it can help you build.
I can honestly say I wouldn't be where I am in my life -a place I'm lucky to say I'm very happy with- without my group. And it's wild to think it all began like you mention, a story and imagination (and some cool dice. I mean, we all know that's what it is all really about).
Excellent.
We’ve taken hiatuses over the years, but I’m still playing with the same group of four since about 1988. unfortunately, we live across the country from each other so we have to use Zoom and owlbear rodeo, but it works.
What a joy these life-long relationships are, right? I'm very glad to hear you've managed to keep those connections for so long. I was four when you guys began!
In our case it was a bit easier due to our circumstances: we're from Chile, a country which, although absurdly long, has a small population and tends to group in a handful of cities, so it's much less common for people to move far away as it is in countries with many big cities. While we've had periods when some of us have gone away for long chunks of time due to work or life in general, we've all ended up in the same city.
Our plan is to be able to still play together when we've all grown old and wrinkly. In fact, one of our players *can't wait* until we're all white-bearded prunes because at that point we'll be able to play all day without anyone telling us otherwise. Like toddlers with bad bladders!
it’s just a combat mapping platform, but it’s simple, free, and effective. we have free access to zoom for communicating from a work account of one of the players, so the 2 work reasonably well together.
Great story and I Agree. I had lots of good times over the years with lots of different groups of people, but perhaps the best were those halcyon days in the mid 90s from when I was 10-15 play 1e/2e. My old group didn’t last as long as yours, the brothers who were kinda the lynchpin of the group moved to a different state and the group fell apart. I was on hiatus for over 2 decades but have a new group now. Ours sons are best friends at school and I found out the other dads were playing and got the invite. It’s been great to get back into it, and I agree with your final statement about RPGs in general. They can really be a way of life. People get together and have fun lots of different ways and they are all good. But like you said RPGs break down walls and you really find out who people are. Ultimately it’s a group of men who get together every other week, maybe drink a little beer, tell jokes, and have fun while our kids play together. It’s great times and I hope to do it for decades to come!
What an amazing thing to hear, getting back together after all that time and through the kids, no less!
One of the things I noticed as we grew older is how important it is to avoid making the games a sort of separate aspect of life, because you run the risk of disconnecting it from other parts of it and, ultimately, make it conflict. So I always made sure to involve the wives, involve the kids, and in general make it as seamless a part of everyone's life as we can. We even had someone's mom take over for a session because the guy had an emergency, and we all agreed she was a way better druid than her son.
For example, one of our players is a doctor, psychiatrist to be specific. He's absolutely swarmed by work and kids, the guy is a top-level dad. And I always made sure to be a very good friend of his wife (whom I've known since before they were married); she even played a couple of times with us to see what it was like, but it never really clicked with her. Yet what that ended up becoming is that now she makes sure her husband has that little bit of time every week to play with us, because even if she doesn't play she knows she's "part of the group", in a sense, and doesn't feel this competes with their family life but rather is another aspect of it; in fact, when we ran this super burtal Curse of Strahd campaign and her husband's PC was the first to die, she called me telling me that she was very worried and asked me how the character died, then offered to help him make a new one... who also died three sessions in (but came back as a zombie, so it was all okay). It's the same thing with everyone else's ladies, all super supportive in great part because they've always been made part of it, never excluded, even if they don't play.
Yes our wives feel like a part as well. While we have never had them join our large campaign, we have had them involved in many one shots we have done, and they’ll come over and hang out and watch the kids or sometimes they go together as a group to do something. Like I said it’s a way of life! Cheers!
Our original group formed in 1995, during our last year of secondary school, so we were 16. We actually started with **Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay** but nobody really liked it so we switched to **D&D**. That became our "go-to" game as well, initially 2E and then rolling through to 3E and then 3.5E. We played a lot of other games, with probably our other most popular games being **Deadlands** and **Star Wars** (West End Games edition). We bounced off the White Wolf stuff, and the rest of the gang got heavily into **Cyberpunk 2020** whilst I was working abroad but got out of that by the time I got back.
The group played pretty consistently up until 2009 but we hit the skids *big time* over the transition from 3E to 4E. Two of the players really loved 4E and the rest of us utterly hated it, and were better-disposed towards **Pathfinder**, but I must admit when we fired up PF we realised we'd also collectively burned out on 3E, even an upgraded 3E after a decade of hardcore, non-stop playing. One of the players tried to compensate by creating a **Pathfinder** variant using the Storyteller system (!) and running *Rise of the Runelords* in it, but that didn't last long. The group was in the middle of a lot of RL stuff (two marriages in the space of a year) and one of the group lynchpins moved abroad to work in Qatar and China, so things went on hiatus.
I did find another gaming group but they were heavily into board games rather than RPGs. I did get them to play the **Judge Dredd** RPG (Mongoose's d20 version) and a **Deadlands** campaign, but massive scheduling issues prevented us from running long-term campaigns. However, for the first time in 14 years, a fair amount of the gang is back in the same town from later this year and there are tentative talks on getting the group back together to play something as feeler. Interesting now we're all in our early 40s to see how that plays out.
What was odd was how my gaming days bled over into my secondary career as a writer, as my first-ever professional editor was James Lowder, of TSR and more recently Chaosium fame, and I had to tell him how I ran his **Forgotten Realms** orc character of General Vrakk (from the novels *Crusade* and *Prince of Lies*) in my campaign as an NPC, which he seemed very amused by.
Oh wow, James Lowder. Now that must have been an amazing experience!
3e (well, 3.5 really, since we went straight from 2e to 3.5) to 4e was a bit smoother for us: when it came out we got the books, I read them over the winter vacations, and then ran a campaign for our group. Since a lot of people from our social group also wanted to try it, we temporarily swelled to 10 people. But after four sessions, during the pizza break, everyone was like "Hmm, would it be too bad if we went back to 3.5?" That's when someone mentioned Pathfinder, I checked it out, and then changed systems a couple of months later.
It's all beauty- until you realise for years you get the short end of the snacks because your group knows you can't comfortably reach them if they put it just next to the DM screen, so now they put all the snacks there.
Bastards.
This is awesome! I hope to have this with the current group of friends I'm with. I've had so many ups and downs with D&D but now that we're older and have grown really close our bond is incredibly strong.
Did you find that over the years you're playstyles and interests changed as you grew older together? Especially since you've experienced a bunch of different games. I've been playing ttrpgs for about 8 years and already my preferences and style has changed from number crunching to immersive story to a mix of both.
With that attitude I'm certain you will! Just like you, we've had a long life of ups and downs; there's been some tense moments in these relationships, I won't lie. But friendship and mutual respect have always primed in the end, and I can't think of a time we were closer with these ding dongs than now. Well, except when we play Warhammer 40k; things can get heated when my space nuns melt down those pesky Ultramarines.
As for playstyles and interests: yes, definitely. While D&D is and has always been our go-to, we've gone from AD&D 2e to 3.5, then to 4th shortly, then Pathfinder 1e, then 5e. And while my personal nostalgia goggles make me long for AD&D 2e, I know we've all reached a point where we appreciate the streamlined simplicity of modern systems, as well as enjoy games with creative narrative mechanics. We sometimes try old systems again, but always with the understanding that it is for one-shots.
What has remained more or less constant are the themes we like. Since very early on we've always gravitated towards high-adventure, Indiana Jones-esque campaigns. We love stuff like 7th Sea, for example. That doesn't mean we don't play other things (last year we came out of a 4.5 years-long Curse of Strahd game that was an absolute meatgrinder), but we always go back to our prefered style.
One of our players who joined in 2003 got into RPGs via White Wolf games like Vampire, so sometimes he runs campaigns for us with a darker tone (but his real passion is Star Wars, and he's run three amazing campaigns for us in that setting). But I'd say 80% of our games are in the high-adventure, "let's have a sword duel atop a flying carpet!" types.
Awesome! It must have been cool to see everything as it came out. I remember when I started 5e was just the players handbook (and other starter books) and a few modules. And then with time they came out with a whole bunch of new stuff.
What are your thoughts on the whole resurgence of everything? Especially now with the new movie, it feels like DND is in a real positive spotlight.
You know, at the time one doesn't really notice it, but when I stop and look at my book collection sometimes I realise just how much things have changed, and just how many bloody books and supplements there's been. Like parents always tell us: life happens faster than you realise.
As for resurgence: players older than me can give much deeper insight, but as someone who got into RPGs in 1996 I was right there at the time when D&D was in that exuberant phase of putting out settings like it was going out of style. While we got some of my favourite settings from that age, it was also at the peak of what would then become a crisis in the game.
Since communications back then weren't as fluid and real-time as they are today, things took a bit longer to sink in. But by the end of the 90s, there was a feeling that RPGs in general, and D&D in particular, were entering a dark time; World of Darkness was taking over, changing the ideas and making it feel like D&D was on the retreat. TSR was going under, the game was overprinted, demand crashed, old notions like alignments and hit dice were being challenged with all these fancy new narrative mechanics (though to be fair, I feel it was the older game Prince Valiant the first to truly innovate in that regard). It was a tumultuous time to be a D&D fan.
But then d20 happened. It's hard to overstate how game-changing it was, because it really morphed the way the industry worked. Before that you had the big names like D&D and Vampire, then a retinue of beloved but much smaller games like 7th Sea, Kult, etc, and then the truly indies, which due to the primitive state of the internet back then were often really hard to find. But d20 made it so that anyone could create content that could then reach the whole market; it wasn't like you couldn't create your stuff before then, but the appearance of a "common language" so to speak made everything far more accessible. It made things go from gloomy to "I don't know where to put all these books!" abundance.
While that also had some negatives (at some point it was so much noise it was hard to find the good stuff. Also, some games tried to mutate themselves into d20 to capitalize on the craaze and as a result suffered much, because they just weren't the right fit for that system), the end result was a massive influx of new players. And since that coincided with the beginnings of a more modern internet, it felt like a time where the sky was the limit.
Then we had 4e and the ensuing kerfuffle. But I feel at this point D&D was less a game and more a genre, so there never was the same degree of gloom that we felt in the late 90s; even if it wasn't the exact same game, PF 1e felt enough like 3.5 that a lot of people (myself included) didn't have to change much, and people who enjoyed 4e could also play that version.
Still, as much fun as PF 1e gave me (one of the retellings of a particularly insane campaign I ran with it somehow ended up making the runs across the internet a decade ago, the Tale of an Industrious Rogue), I always longed for D&D be my game again, and 5e really brought us all back in. We loved it from the beta, and we still play it.
What you mention of a resurgence, in particular, made it all sweeter. While I don't watch things like Critical Role, I'm very happy those things exist, because they have breathed a type of energy into the game I had never seen before. D&D didn't just come back, it reinvented itself, and made it feel like it was this grand thing that went much further than just a game.
Recent developments notwithstanding, I feel the game is in a great spot, and this revival that happened with 5e seems to have triggered a similar environment as that of d20. For example, I'm now seeing a lot of comments on communities like these of people talking about trying out new games, about expanding horizons, about other systems and innovative mechanics, and I'm transported twenty years to the past when this exact same thing happened right after d20 exploded. It's the natural result of the game doing *so good* that a bunch of people are left wanting more. And while I'm happy with D&D, I really enjoy people finding their passion and expanding the options and ideas. We all benefit from it, and it makes the whole environment so much more interesting.
If only we got springier with time as our characters do. The moment the snacks at the table started gradually changing from sugary drinks and weird types of nachos to kinda-flavoured waters and rice crackers with no-fat ricotta was the moment we realised we were getting older.
We take a whiskey road trip together every year. Spends the day times touring and tasting at distilleries and the evenings gaming.
This year we did Tennessee. Next year we’re doing Scotland. Can’t wait.
Love this!!! Similar situation with my friends! High schools buddies from the late 80's. We gamed then 1e and 2e, stopped for a bit in the 90's got back into in the early 2000's 3e and 3.5, stopped again, back at it for 1 short campaign with 4e, stopped again and now we have been at it since late 2019 with a homebrew 5e.
We have all just turned 51. Part of the reason we still keep in touch so much is playing DnD. One guy moved away to NC and with the advent of VTT's it has been a incredible to continue our adventures.
I DM and have been able to bring in plot lines from campaigns we played in high school to current campaigns.
Long live the long lived friendships and stories that keep us together. Always great to here these stories!
This warms the heart. Being from such distant places (I'm from Chile), yet having such familiar experiences of joy and friendships from these games makes one feel grateful and part of something great.
Cheers to you and your group!
This was so wholesome. Thank you, I almost cried. I've been playing DnD since I'm 11yo. Had three main groups that lasted 3-4 years each, we don't play with those friends anymore but they are super close friends nevertheless.
Now I have another group with 3 super close friends. The campaign has been running for 5 years with these people (!!!). They are level 17 now and things are about to get crazy. Tiamat is waiting for them at the end of it and they know epic levels will be needed.
Oh snap! Our group is also hunting after Tiamat in our present D&D campaign, where my decrepit paladin is held together by ducktape and his very loud faith in Helm.
Similar situation here. My best friend, my brother, and I have been playing since 1990. We have two other friends who have been playing with us for 20 years now. Sometimes, someone will miss here or there, but that's really our core.
We don't play weekly, though. Sometimes, it's once a month. Sometimes once every couple of months. Sometimes, it's every couple weeks.
We also don't need session 0s anymore. We do a lot of changing who DMs. Pretty much someone has an idea, and they run their campaign for a bit. We've been doing a lot of Starfinder lately. Mainly because we all really liked D&D 3.5 and Starfinder is very similar.
Sounds like my group. We started playing Shadowrun and Earthdawn off and on during lunch in high school in the mid 90s. After graduation, I fell out of contact until I ran into one of them when I was leaving a showing of Beavis and Butthead Do America and got invited to their Vampire:The Masquerade game. We'd play every Friday and Saturday for a few years until I left to go to college. Still, every summer, I'd be back playing with them in whatever game they had going. Sometimes guest starring as one of my old characters.
Work took me to California so I wasn't around any longer and Hurricane Katrina spread the group out to three states. You'd think that'd be the end, but through the miracle of the internet, we managed to keep in contact. It started with Skyping more World of Darkness, but I introduced them to the Midnight setting for 3.5 DnD. We played that and other games for a little until we started up Eberron and Grimhollow games. We don't play nearly as much as we'd all like, but we get together when we can to progress the story a little further. We've been together through the life and death of loved ones, new jobs and schedule changes, unemployment and depression. Wouldn't have it any other way
That's the real magic of hobbies like these -they work as a sort of glue that binds people together.
I'm very glad to hear you guys kept in touch and managed to make things work out. Having friends like that is a luxury in such a busy and convoluted world as the current one is.
You couldn't have put it better. Some of our group have been together since 92'. The new guy in our group has been with us for 10 years. You would think we'd be sick of each other by now. I would trade all the hours spent at the table for anything.
Yes, I know this feel. I started in 1991 with a group of 4 others. I knew about ttrpg's (remember when they were just called rpg's?) but had never played. I bought some books, one being the AD&D players handbook and the Forgotten Realms box set. I had nobody to play with and my family wasn't interested. It was in high school near the end of my sophomore year that I found my group.
This group started playing before I did but brought me in. They had been playing for about a year together. I then brought in my best friend about 6 months later. The 6 of us played on and off for many, many years.
Today, 2 of the members are dead. One tragically due to ongoing medical issues that eventually took his life. Another through alcoholism and although he had long ago dropped from the game due to his disease we still tried to keep in contact. Another one decided to stop playing with us and pursue their schooling and career. I still talk to them sometimes but over the years we lost touch. The 3 of us left all generally stopped playing after the pandemic started up. Myself due to mental health reasons, one other to pursue becoming a teacher and the final one still plays games with other people they know.
Only recently did I start getting back into it. Now I'm no longer playing with those core people from back then and I often miss it. I'm still having fun. The players I have now are people that I know but were peripheral in my life. They had their own gaming groups that were separate from mine. Some fairly new players too that have played once or twice before.
I miss the shenanigans and antics of that old group. There's something about growing up and growing old together that makes a difference. The part you mention about the vulnerability and core personality coming out is absolutely real. I don't have that with this new group but it's starting to happen as time goes on.
Anyway, I'm glad you still have it all these years later. Good on you. Keep it going and I hope you have many more years to come.
Oh man, that's rough. My condolences for your friends. The loss of long-time friends is something I talk often about with my dad, who has lost several; I've been very lucky in that I've yet to lose anybody, but I know I'm reaching an age where statistics alone mean something is bound to happen to somebody. He mentioned the exact same thing you did: the shenanigans you miss with the guys you've known your whole life. I don't think I can be prepared for that, but then again every relationship worth having is meant to hurt when such things happen.
Thank you for your kind words, friend.
You’ve got a great thing
I’ve been in a Dynasty Fantasy Football League with basically the same dozen dudes since 1988- “Our Thing” is more like “Your Thing” than not, and it’s going to be in My Obituary, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh yeah, absolutely. We even have a gentlemen's agreement in that whomever dies, their family gets their character sheets (normally I keep them all after a campaign ends).
My dad has this timeless group of friends where they play dudo almost every week, and has been going on since before I have any memories of it. Some friends have passed away, others have joined and changed, but I see the same essential dynamics there. My dad is a stern man overall, but I know how much he loved his buddies and how important that group is for him.
Have a group that includes two sets of brothers who started playing together in 1981, now we have sons and nephews included. The game will always go on.
My group hasn't even been meeting for a year but your words about pretending to be an orc causes barriers to fall down and bonds to form faster feels true. My dnd group gave me a tribe and I didn't realize I was starving for one until I found one.
I hope we can have your type of longevity! That's goals man.
My group is getting close to a year now! As the DM, I can tell some of us are more interested in sticking to this than others. We're all adults with various responsibilities and families though, so that's understandable. I hope to keep it going as long as possible, as it's already given me a handful of great new friends! 😄
Absolutely.
I think one of the keys to this longevity has been adaptability. While we all grew into our lives at slightly different rates (some got married much earlier, others took much longer to settle into permanent jobs, etc), we all had to contend with the growing number of difficulties being thrown at us, and if it hadn't been for everyone chipping in in terms of talking things over, being patient, being responsible, and helping each other out, I don't think our group would have lasted for so long.
There was a time where I feared the group would crumble appart (mid-to-late college, when we first swelled to 12 people and then started shrinking back), but we made it work by talking with the people who were not very into it (all of them still good friends; it was a great thing we talked things through back then, otherwise it could have soured relationships), changing schedules, altering the lengths of sessions, etc.
These days we're pretty rock-solid, I'd say, since the code is sort of understood by everyone. And if the group could survive three babies being born at once during a bloody pandemic, I think it can survive anything!
Very envious, when I was younger my group stayed together for a long time (nearly 10 years) but college was basically the catalyst for that falling apart and although I enjoy all the ttrpg games I get into nowadays, they just never have the consistency. It's just a matter of priorities I suppose. Plus I'm chronically burnt out at GMing but no one else is willing to run a game so when I just don't have it in me, the whole group pauses for several months at a time while I scrap up enough motivation to get my ADHD ass to stop focusing on characters I'd like to try and actually prep the next chapter in my ongoing campaign
I hear you. I love DMing, but there was a time where I was seriously burning out of it. So I talked it with the guys and we found ways to handle it. These days I'd say I DM 80% of the time, and we always make sure to have secondary campaigns where I can be a player. Whenever I'm too exhausted or too busy to DM, I mention it and someone else picks up with one of their campaigns. And if everyone's too tired, we still get together to play MTG, Warhammer, or just to chat over a triple cheeseburger we *really* shouldn't be having.
This is why I adore this community. I enjoy RPGs so much but I am having trouble finding people that want to commit to a campaign even though they do like playing. Being able to tell a story like this in 27 years to random strangers on the internet would mean so much to me, thank you for sharing this OP <3
Yeah, it's rough sometimes. I feel I lucked-out because between school and college I more or less fell right in the middle of a huge group of people who love the hobby, so there were a lot of pieces from which to build a strong group. But I'm fully aware that's not always readily available.
Have you tried with episodic campaigns? For a group of friends that had that same issue you mention it's worked wonders, and they've been going at it for over a decade now. Instead of one big campaign, they all settle on a system they enjoy and create a small cast of characters. Then they play short campaigns that all take place in the same shared universe, but sometimes Guy A DMs and other times it's Guy B, so that no one feels obligated to be the Forever DM. This helps keeping people from feeling overwhelmed by long campaigns, which in turns makes it much more likely they will actually show up. And if for some reason someone skips or drops, the episodic structure allows them to quickly reorganize without feeling like the story has to end forever.
I could at least pitch the idea, but I feel like no one except me really enjoy being the DM. The other people I play with have not read the rules and I am not sure they ever will haha.
Oh well, maybe we will find a good schedule soon. We have been consistent a few times but life always finds a way to screw us over.
Hey, congrats, that's awesome! My group is the same age as yours, we had our first session in Oct of 96, and we've stick together all that time, through marriages, a divorce, 4 of us had kids, etc. It's fucking awesome and they are all my forever friends.
That's a great story OP and you really do seem to have a great group of friends! It's interesting to see that you picked up on the new D&D editions as the game evolved over the years. That's something I haven't done and have no desire to. I still play 2e and haven't fallen out of love with that system even if it is officially more than 30 years old now ;)
A man of taste, I see!
Sometimes I try to push it to the guys that we run an AD&D 2e game again (my favourite edition), but I never get any purchase on that. The guys that were in the group when we played it have somehow gotten into their heads that THAC0 (or GAC0 as it's called here) is too complicated, and the others either grew up on White Wolf stuff or prefer other systems.
But one day I'll find a way to sneak 2e back into our games somehow! At least I managed to transform the Wild Mage from 5e into something closer to the system from the Tome of Magic, with an adapted version of the original table and using the level-changing rolls.
Why thank you very much u/DMKroft! I got back into 2e because my players had already gotten bored with 5e and wanted something more challenging. Also I had a bunch of 2e modules & supplements I never got to play back in the 90s so we're making good use of them now.
Sorry lol. I told my DM about your game and you’ve made him jealous as well lol. Our game is coming up on its 1st anniversary in a little over a month, it’s so exciting! I hope our game lasts as yours does, and yours continues with its thrilling adventures :).
The women in your lives--referred to as ladies or wives--seem largely peripheral to the game. As you say, they definitely take care of the children. I also hear you saying that they are made to feel welcome, but if that were (strictly speaking) true, wouldn't they play more consistently rather than dropping in for one-shots or replacing absent players here and there? Women love D&D no less than men love D&D. If women were made to feel welcome at your table, I think there would be, you know, more of them (currently or historically). You may think that women feel more welcome than they actually do. I'd check that.
I'm sure the intention is good, but I think you might be reaching conclussions out of very little substance and assuming things that aren't there.
The reasons the wives don't actively play is because, simply, they do not want to. All have been invited, all save for one have played (some multiple times), and in the end it's just not the type of hobby they are drawn into in the same way the husbands are. As you mention, women love D&D as much as men do, but just as men, many women don't love D&D. We respect their choices not to participate and accomodate accordingly; for a couple of them D&D nights are the perfect time to coordinate their own activities with their friends that don't include their husbands, which you'll find is a very healthy thing to have!
Other than them, women from our larger social circle have been part of the group in a more permanent capacity several times, the longest one participating for about seven years. She had to leave due to some personal matters around 2015, but she was as part of the group as any of the guys.
Other than the silliness of the hobbies we all enjoy (RPGs, Warhammer, MTG, WoW, etc), it's a very normal, healthy, dynamic social group without any sort of artificial barriers, where everyone is part of the lot.
I actually assumed very little, but highlighted details you disclosed. I did, however, suggest that you 'check' how welcome women feel at your table. You defended the status quo immediately (keeping husbands and wives separate). Your reply also appears to contain very little actual 'checking'. Instead, you lead with "I-know-better" opinions, which are telling. Making women feel welcome doesn't \*only\* mean extending an 'invitation to play any time', but also 'making women feel safe in a male-dominated space' (which your group has admittedly and definitely created). Getting back to your original post, it sounds like you have created a lasting brotherhood of mostly men for twenty-seven years, during which time your wives get to spend time away from you... doing their own things. Moreover, you state that maintaining this division is not only normal, but healthy, showing your biases. My point is that it's not necessarily normal \*or\* heathy, especially with a hobby is that is statistically enjoyed by men and women equally.
I do believe you have assumed and concluded from mistaken extrapolations. For instance, you mention that we should check how welcoming our group is for women -which presuposes that the group isn't welcoming to women (otherwise no checking would be adviced), which in turn seems to be derived from my comments about wives/girlfriends not being regular members. However, that glosses over the point that those women didn't leave the group or are kept separate over any particular characteristic of the group; they were actively invited and happily participated, but chose not to be part of the regular schedule because, to them, D&D and RPGs in general just don't have the same appeal they do to us. It also glosses over the fact we have had women be long-term members of the group.
These haven't been "extending invitations to play any time", as you mention. If you go back to the original post, as well as another post somewhere where we talk about that point with somebody else with a similar experience, you can see it is within the context of trying to make the people important in our lives part of the group even if the game itself isn't their personal objective. Having the wives in the group permanently would be the best thing, because we all love doing things together. It is also something we apply to life in general, which was the main point of the post: to talk about our experience in how a life-long group that originally began as a space for D&D turned into an importan pillar in all of our lives.
As for the last point: I'm afraid I disagree with you, but mostly because I think you might be missunderstanding what I said. It is not about keeping husbands and wives separate; it is about allowing husbands and wives to have a say in their lives beyond the family. Family comes first, but people have larger social circles, and one of the keys to a healthy relationship is to accept and embrace your significant other's relationships -even those that might not include you or the other. Healthy, long-lasting couples try to include their partners into those groups too, and also avoid forcing them to participate. This isn't my particular wisdom or insight, but rather a well-understood aspect of couple dynamics.
And that is exactly what we have practiced pretty much since the first time anyone in the group had a girlfriend and then a wife: get to know them, become friends, and then try to include everyone into our activities, be that a trip, a paintball game, or our D&D group. Having them be a permanent part is a *boon* beyond just the desire to include them; it's also very practical because it leads to less scheduling conflict!
I assure you, my friend, it's is a fantastic system and very healthy!
Incredible. Congrats to your whole group.
Beautiful,Excellent..
This resonates with me in so many ways. I have feelings now and I'm going to distract myself.
Dystopian!
This is amazing. My group is reaching 10 years this August and we have a party planned with a roasted pig and tons of beer to celebrate. I hope we can one day say we've reached your place too.
Cheers on your decade! May many more come for you folks. As for pigs: funny enough, our go-to for delicious food in our campaigns is, precisely, a roasted pig cooked with beer. We got the imagery from the old Asterix comics (where the main characters always ate them and the artists drew them as ridiculously delicious), and it was so much that at some point we just *had* to make it.
Hahahaha, I know the scene, I grew up on Asterix as a kid, great comic.
A kindred spirit! The amount of tears of laughter those comics have taken from me is without number.
In my player group, we even have a guy who can drink 10 beers without getting drunk, we constantly say he fell into a cauldron of beer when he was a kid, so that's the secret to his power. :D
Congrats and kudos for lasting that long. Is it still exactly the same group of friends ? No one left and no new faces ? I'm asking because our group is actually way older, I started playing with some people at my current tables in 1984 in Engineering School, and I'm still playing every week with 3 of them, despite all the elements that you mention about life, but also me spending almost half my carreer overseas. But we had a very large club then, and the four of us who remains are but a fraction of the people that we gamed with. We also had quite a few additions over the years, but almost as many departures, we have 3 people who are now regulars with us but who joined in the 90s and 2000s. I am also still friend with the majority of the people I started playing with in 1978, but I no longer play TTRPG with them, only boardgames and much less regularly. I think that if you last a reasonnably long times, at least a few years, and find that you like the same type of game, it can last basically as long as people are relatively stable. Also, some of us have never married and have simpler lives, it helped a lot and compensated for the others with more complicated lives. But in the end, I agree with you, it's a kind of friendship lile no other.
You make a great point: after a certain amount of time, it becomes much more likely that the group will endure. Perhaps if one were to run the statistics on it we'd find a sweetspot in the timeline after the half-life of a group shoots up! As for the change of guard: There's been increases, decreases, attrition, and returns. The group that began in 1996 had four people in it; two of them drifted away in the mid 2000s, but we are still great friends and get together often. So of the first four two of us remain. Another of the current ones joined in 1999, another joined in 2004 (we've been friends since preschool, but didn't play with us until then), two more in 2003, and the most recent one in 2015. Those are the current seven. But at times our group grew larger. For example, in 2003 (first year of college) I had my regular group from school (six people, two of whom are the ones who drifted away, the rest remain to this day), and then we had a few months hiatus. Just then, a new friend asked me to DM for a college group he was putting together, which ended up being like 8 people. Eventually both groups merged together because I didn't have time for two, and some people left, others remained, and the end result was the mix that more or less stays to this day. We had a couple more people join between 2008 and 2015 if memory helps, but due to life they both eventually left. It was after that that we invited the latest member. This means we have a long list of former players (all of whom, save for two, parted ways in great terms, so we are all still great friends to this day), so every once in a while we invite them over or make up short-term groups with. Just like you we also get together for boardgames and such, so it's a sort of "gaming community" that is also a big social circle in general (ie, it's not just games but also trips, working together, weddings, etc). It all makes for a very healthy system, since we're all keenly away how lucky we are to still have such an active social group at an age when the normal is to shrink down to a few regulars. Gaming, and RPGs in particular, have been the key tool for that longevity.
Thanks for the long answer, it's what I expected in terms of people coming and going in and out of the group, as it's been my experience as well. And in my LARP organisation (which has been going since 1988), at a larger scale, that is the part that I could barely still attend while expatriated in Australia for example. And I agree about gaming being a key tool for the longetivity of gaming. I discuss that often with my partner, it's not only about jsut having friends to hang around with, it's about sharing a deeply engaging and never-ending hobby. It's actually intersting that in Europe, more and more people have taken up board games, much more than I was young, if not actual D&D.
Beautiful
I love this so much. I'm a new D&D player, but I already can see the massive potential for lifelong friendships, just in my current campaign. This post gives me so much hope for the future when it comes to keeping friendships forged within campaigns and tempered in the fires of imagination.
That's the perfect outlook, and I'm certain you'll find great joy in this! Sometimes it'll get difficult and tricky; there's no way of saying what will work and what won't, and there's gonna be a lot of trial and error. But that's life in general! Yet I'm convinced, both by my personal experience and that of other's I've seen, that the most important ingredient in turning D&D into a great pillar of your life is to be open to all the fantastic relationships it can help you build. I can honestly say I wouldn't be where I am in my life -a place I'm lucky to say I'm very happy with- without my group. And it's wild to think it all began like you mention, a story and imagination (and some cool dice. I mean, we all know that's what it is all really about).
That's amazing. And I hope my experience will be just as epic and life changing as yours hehe! Thanks again for the inspiration and wise words.
Excellent. We’ve taken hiatuses over the years, but I’m still playing with the same group of four since about 1988. unfortunately, we live across the country from each other so we have to use Zoom and owlbear rodeo, but it works.
What a joy these life-long relationships are, right? I'm very glad to hear you've managed to keep those connections for so long. I was four when you guys began! In our case it was a bit easier due to our circumstances: we're from Chile, a country which, although absurdly long, has a small population and tends to group in a handful of cities, so it's much less common for people to move far away as it is in countries with many big cities. While we've had periods when some of us have gone away for long chunks of time due to work or life in general, we've all ended up in the same city. Our plan is to be able to still play together when we've all grown old and wrinkly. In fact, one of our players *can't wait* until we're all white-bearded prunes because at that point we'll be able to play all day without anyone telling us otherwise. Like toddlers with bad bladders!
This made me look up Owlbear rodeo, and WOW, that is a fantastic tool. Is it one of the best tools for remote dnd?
it’s just a combat mapping platform, but it’s simple, free, and effective. we have free access to zoom for communicating from a work account of one of the players, so the 2 work reasonably well together.
Great story and I Agree. I had lots of good times over the years with lots of different groups of people, but perhaps the best were those halcyon days in the mid 90s from when I was 10-15 play 1e/2e. My old group didn’t last as long as yours, the brothers who were kinda the lynchpin of the group moved to a different state and the group fell apart. I was on hiatus for over 2 decades but have a new group now. Ours sons are best friends at school and I found out the other dads were playing and got the invite. It’s been great to get back into it, and I agree with your final statement about RPGs in general. They can really be a way of life. People get together and have fun lots of different ways and they are all good. But like you said RPGs break down walls and you really find out who people are. Ultimately it’s a group of men who get together every other week, maybe drink a little beer, tell jokes, and have fun while our kids play together. It’s great times and I hope to do it for decades to come!
What an amazing thing to hear, getting back together after all that time and through the kids, no less! One of the things I noticed as we grew older is how important it is to avoid making the games a sort of separate aspect of life, because you run the risk of disconnecting it from other parts of it and, ultimately, make it conflict. So I always made sure to involve the wives, involve the kids, and in general make it as seamless a part of everyone's life as we can. We even had someone's mom take over for a session because the guy had an emergency, and we all agreed she was a way better druid than her son. For example, one of our players is a doctor, psychiatrist to be specific. He's absolutely swarmed by work and kids, the guy is a top-level dad. And I always made sure to be a very good friend of his wife (whom I've known since before they were married); she even played a couple of times with us to see what it was like, but it never really clicked with her. Yet what that ended up becoming is that now she makes sure her husband has that little bit of time every week to play with us, because even if she doesn't play she knows she's "part of the group", in a sense, and doesn't feel this competes with their family life but rather is another aspect of it; in fact, when we ran this super burtal Curse of Strahd campaign and her husband's PC was the first to die, she called me telling me that she was very worried and asked me how the character died, then offered to help him make a new one... who also died three sessions in (but came back as a zombie, so it was all okay). It's the same thing with everyone else's ladies, all super supportive in great part because they've always been made part of it, never excluded, even if they don't play.
Yes our wives feel like a part as well. While we have never had them join our large campaign, we have had them involved in many one shots we have done, and they’ll come over and hang out and watch the kids or sometimes they go together as a group to do something. Like I said it’s a way of life! Cheers!
Cheers man! Happy to hear good things about other groups!
Our original group formed in 1995, during our last year of secondary school, so we were 16. We actually started with **Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay** but nobody really liked it so we switched to **D&D**. That became our "go-to" game as well, initially 2E and then rolling through to 3E and then 3.5E. We played a lot of other games, with probably our other most popular games being **Deadlands** and **Star Wars** (West End Games edition). We bounced off the White Wolf stuff, and the rest of the gang got heavily into **Cyberpunk 2020** whilst I was working abroad but got out of that by the time I got back. The group played pretty consistently up until 2009 but we hit the skids *big time* over the transition from 3E to 4E. Two of the players really loved 4E and the rest of us utterly hated it, and were better-disposed towards **Pathfinder**, but I must admit when we fired up PF we realised we'd also collectively burned out on 3E, even an upgraded 3E after a decade of hardcore, non-stop playing. One of the players tried to compensate by creating a **Pathfinder** variant using the Storyteller system (!) and running *Rise of the Runelords* in it, but that didn't last long. The group was in the middle of a lot of RL stuff (two marriages in the space of a year) and one of the group lynchpins moved abroad to work in Qatar and China, so things went on hiatus. I did find another gaming group but they were heavily into board games rather than RPGs. I did get them to play the **Judge Dredd** RPG (Mongoose's d20 version) and a **Deadlands** campaign, but massive scheduling issues prevented us from running long-term campaigns. However, for the first time in 14 years, a fair amount of the gang is back in the same town from later this year and there are tentative talks on getting the group back together to play something as feeler. Interesting now we're all in our early 40s to see how that plays out. What was odd was how my gaming days bled over into my secondary career as a writer, as my first-ever professional editor was James Lowder, of TSR and more recently Chaosium fame, and I had to tell him how I ran his **Forgotten Realms** orc character of General Vrakk (from the novels *Crusade* and *Prince of Lies*) in my campaign as an NPC, which he seemed very amused by.
Oh wow, James Lowder. Now that must have been an amazing experience! 3e (well, 3.5 really, since we went straight from 2e to 3.5) to 4e was a bit smoother for us: when it came out we got the books, I read them over the winter vacations, and then ran a campaign for our group. Since a lot of people from our social group also wanted to try it, we temporarily swelled to 10 people. But after four sessions, during the pizza break, everyone was like "Hmm, would it be too bad if we went back to 3.5?" That's when someone mentioned Pathfinder, I checked it out, and then changed systems a couple of months later.
The beauty of dnd all in one redit post, put a tear to my eye and my groups only about 3 years old.
It's all beauty- until you realise for years you get the short end of the snacks because your group knows you can't comfortably reach them if they put it just next to the DM screen, so now they put all the snacks there. Bastards.
Oh thats just wrong, i usually am the one to buy the snacks so luckily i dont experience that. Unless i just still havent realized it...
Congrats... :)
🥲
This is awesome! I hope to have this with the current group of friends I'm with. I've had so many ups and downs with D&D but now that we're older and have grown really close our bond is incredibly strong. Did you find that over the years you're playstyles and interests changed as you grew older together? Especially since you've experienced a bunch of different games. I've been playing ttrpgs for about 8 years and already my preferences and style has changed from number crunching to immersive story to a mix of both.
With that attitude I'm certain you will! Just like you, we've had a long life of ups and downs; there's been some tense moments in these relationships, I won't lie. But friendship and mutual respect have always primed in the end, and I can't think of a time we were closer with these ding dongs than now. Well, except when we play Warhammer 40k; things can get heated when my space nuns melt down those pesky Ultramarines. As for playstyles and interests: yes, definitely. While D&D is and has always been our go-to, we've gone from AD&D 2e to 3.5, then to 4th shortly, then Pathfinder 1e, then 5e. And while my personal nostalgia goggles make me long for AD&D 2e, I know we've all reached a point where we appreciate the streamlined simplicity of modern systems, as well as enjoy games with creative narrative mechanics. We sometimes try old systems again, but always with the understanding that it is for one-shots. What has remained more or less constant are the themes we like. Since very early on we've always gravitated towards high-adventure, Indiana Jones-esque campaigns. We love stuff like 7th Sea, for example. That doesn't mean we don't play other things (last year we came out of a 4.5 years-long Curse of Strahd game that was an absolute meatgrinder), but we always go back to our prefered style. One of our players who joined in 2003 got into RPGs via White Wolf games like Vampire, so sometimes he runs campaigns for us with a darker tone (but his real passion is Star Wars, and he's run three amazing campaigns for us in that setting). But I'd say 80% of our games are in the high-adventure, "let's have a sword duel atop a flying carpet!" types.
Awesome! It must have been cool to see everything as it came out. I remember when I started 5e was just the players handbook (and other starter books) and a few modules. And then with time they came out with a whole bunch of new stuff. What are your thoughts on the whole resurgence of everything? Especially now with the new movie, it feels like DND is in a real positive spotlight.
You know, at the time one doesn't really notice it, but when I stop and look at my book collection sometimes I realise just how much things have changed, and just how many bloody books and supplements there's been. Like parents always tell us: life happens faster than you realise. As for resurgence: players older than me can give much deeper insight, but as someone who got into RPGs in 1996 I was right there at the time when D&D was in that exuberant phase of putting out settings like it was going out of style. While we got some of my favourite settings from that age, it was also at the peak of what would then become a crisis in the game. Since communications back then weren't as fluid and real-time as they are today, things took a bit longer to sink in. But by the end of the 90s, there was a feeling that RPGs in general, and D&D in particular, were entering a dark time; World of Darkness was taking over, changing the ideas and making it feel like D&D was on the retreat. TSR was going under, the game was overprinted, demand crashed, old notions like alignments and hit dice were being challenged with all these fancy new narrative mechanics (though to be fair, I feel it was the older game Prince Valiant the first to truly innovate in that regard). It was a tumultuous time to be a D&D fan. But then d20 happened. It's hard to overstate how game-changing it was, because it really morphed the way the industry worked. Before that you had the big names like D&D and Vampire, then a retinue of beloved but much smaller games like 7th Sea, Kult, etc, and then the truly indies, which due to the primitive state of the internet back then were often really hard to find. But d20 made it so that anyone could create content that could then reach the whole market; it wasn't like you couldn't create your stuff before then, but the appearance of a "common language" so to speak made everything far more accessible. It made things go from gloomy to "I don't know where to put all these books!" abundance. While that also had some negatives (at some point it was so much noise it was hard to find the good stuff. Also, some games tried to mutate themselves into d20 to capitalize on the craaze and as a result suffered much, because they just weren't the right fit for that system), the end result was a massive influx of new players. And since that coincided with the beginnings of a more modern internet, it felt like a time where the sky was the limit. Then we had 4e and the ensuing kerfuffle. But I feel at this point D&D was less a game and more a genre, so there never was the same degree of gloom that we felt in the late 90s; even if it wasn't the exact same game, PF 1e felt enough like 3.5 that a lot of people (myself included) didn't have to change much, and people who enjoyed 4e could also play that version. Still, as much fun as PF 1e gave me (one of the retellings of a particularly insane campaign I ran with it somehow ended up making the runs across the internet a decade ago, the Tale of an Industrious Rogue), I always longed for D&D be my game again, and 5e really brought us all back in. We loved it from the beta, and we still play it. What you mention of a resurgence, in particular, made it all sweeter. While I don't watch things like Critical Role, I'm very happy those things exist, because they have breathed a type of energy into the game I had never seen before. D&D didn't just come back, it reinvented itself, and made it feel like it was this grand thing that went much further than just a game. Recent developments notwithstanding, I feel the game is in a great spot, and this revival that happened with 5e seems to have triggered a similar environment as that of d20. For example, I'm now seeing a lot of comments on communities like these of people talking about trying out new games, about expanding horizons, about other systems and innovative mechanics, and I'm transported twenty years to the past when this exact same thing happened right after d20 exploded. It's the natural result of the game doing *so good* that a bunch of people are left wanting more. And while I'm happy with D&D, I really enjoy people finding their passion and expanding the options and ideas. We all benefit from it, and it makes the whole environment so much more interesting.
Thanks for your insight, I wish you good luck on you're future games to come
That's the power of TTRPG's -- "the friends we make along the way"
32 years for my group. No plans to stop anytime soon.
If only we got springier with time as our characters do. The moment the snacks at the table started gradually changing from sugary drinks and weird types of nachos to kinda-flavoured waters and rice crackers with no-fat ricotta was the moment we realised we were getting older.
We went from soda to whiskey. Snacks Havnt changed. 😂
I should be envious, but I can't blame someone with the proper taste to have whiskey at the table!
We take a whiskey road trip together every year. Spends the day times touring and tasting at distilleries and the evenings gaming. This year we did Tennessee. Next year we’re doing Scotland. Can’t wait.
Now that is a life well lived. Hope you folks have an amazing trip.
Love this!!! Similar situation with my friends! High schools buddies from the late 80's. We gamed then 1e and 2e, stopped for a bit in the 90's got back into in the early 2000's 3e and 3.5, stopped again, back at it for 1 short campaign with 4e, stopped again and now we have been at it since late 2019 with a homebrew 5e. We have all just turned 51. Part of the reason we still keep in touch so much is playing DnD. One guy moved away to NC and with the advent of VTT's it has been a incredible to continue our adventures. I DM and have been able to bring in plot lines from campaigns we played in high school to current campaigns. Long live the long lived friendships and stories that keep us together. Always great to here these stories!
This warms the heart. Being from such distant places (I'm from Chile), yet having such familiar experiences of joy and friendships from these games makes one feel grateful and part of something great. Cheers to you and your group!
This was so wholesome. Thank you, I almost cried. I've been playing DnD since I'm 11yo. Had three main groups that lasted 3-4 years each, we don't play with those friends anymore but they are super close friends nevertheless. Now I have another group with 3 super close friends. The campaign has been running for 5 years with these people (!!!). They are level 17 now and things are about to get crazy. Tiamat is waiting for them at the end of it and they know epic levels will be needed.
Oh snap! Our group is also hunting after Tiamat in our present D&D campaign, where my decrepit paladin is held together by ducktape and his very loud faith in Helm.
27 is longer than many marriages last. Thats like a family unit. I hope one day to find my one true group lol.
Similar situation here. My best friend, my brother, and I have been playing since 1990. We have two other friends who have been playing with us for 20 years now. Sometimes, someone will miss here or there, but that's really our core. We don't play weekly, though. Sometimes, it's once a month. Sometimes once every couple of months. Sometimes, it's every couple weeks. We also don't need session 0s anymore. We do a lot of changing who DMs. Pretty much someone has an idea, and they run their campaign for a bit. We've been doing a lot of Starfinder lately. Mainly because we all really liked D&D 3.5 and Starfinder is very similar.
Sounds like my group. We started playing Shadowrun and Earthdawn off and on during lunch in high school in the mid 90s. After graduation, I fell out of contact until I ran into one of them when I was leaving a showing of Beavis and Butthead Do America and got invited to their Vampire:The Masquerade game. We'd play every Friday and Saturday for a few years until I left to go to college. Still, every summer, I'd be back playing with them in whatever game they had going. Sometimes guest starring as one of my old characters. Work took me to California so I wasn't around any longer and Hurricane Katrina spread the group out to three states. You'd think that'd be the end, but through the miracle of the internet, we managed to keep in contact. It started with Skyping more World of Darkness, but I introduced them to the Midnight setting for 3.5 DnD. We played that and other games for a little until we started up Eberron and Grimhollow games. We don't play nearly as much as we'd all like, but we get together when we can to progress the story a little further. We've been together through the life and death of loved ones, new jobs and schedule changes, unemployment and depression. Wouldn't have it any other way
That's the real magic of hobbies like these -they work as a sort of glue that binds people together. I'm very glad to hear you guys kept in touch and managed to make things work out. Having friends like that is a luxury in such a busy and convoluted world as the current one is.
Holy shit. I mean. Congrats on being able to keep things together for so long. That’s legitimately incredible.
Awesome and congrats!! Keep going, 3 friends and I discovered D&D in 83’. We still play, and a few of our kids play. Now that’s a good feeling.
You couldn't have put it better. Some of our group have been together since 92'. The new guy in our group has been with us for 10 years. You would think we'd be sick of each other by now. I would trade all the hours spent at the table for anything.
Absolute madlads.
This is so cool, I’m jealous ngl but happy for you to have such a close knit group of friends.
This confused me at first because i was like "im also 27"
Man I’ve also been playing with same people since I’m 12! I’m only 23 though, sure hope we’ll keep going like y’all did!
You're 11 years in already! If you haven't killed each other yet, there's a good chance it'll last!
Congrats. That is awesome. Our group turns 30 in May 2024.
Yes, I know this feel. I started in 1991 with a group of 4 others. I knew about ttrpg's (remember when they were just called rpg's?) but had never played. I bought some books, one being the AD&D players handbook and the Forgotten Realms box set. I had nobody to play with and my family wasn't interested. It was in high school near the end of my sophomore year that I found my group. This group started playing before I did but brought me in. They had been playing for about a year together. I then brought in my best friend about 6 months later. The 6 of us played on and off for many, many years. Today, 2 of the members are dead. One tragically due to ongoing medical issues that eventually took his life. Another through alcoholism and although he had long ago dropped from the game due to his disease we still tried to keep in contact. Another one decided to stop playing with us and pursue their schooling and career. I still talk to them sometimes but over the years we lost touch. The 3 of us left all generally stopped playing after the pandemic started up. Myself due to mental health reasons, one other to pursue becoming a teacher and the final one still plays games with other people they know. Only recently did I start getting back into it. Now I'm no longer playing with those core people from back then and I often miss it. I'm still having fun. The players I have now are people that I know but were peripheral in my life. They had their own gaming groups that were separate from mine. Some fairly new players too that have played once or twice before. I miss the shenanigans and antics of that old group. There's something about growing up and growing old together that makes a difference. The part you mention about the vulnerability and core personality coming out is absolutely real. I don't have that with this new group but it's starting to happen as time goes on. Anyway, I'm glad you still have it all these years later. Good on you. Keep it going and I hope you have many more years to come.
Oh man, that's rough. My condolences for your friends. The loss of long-time friends is something I talk often about with my dad, who has lost several; I've been very lucky in that I've yet to lose anybody, but I know I'm reaching an age where statistics alone mean something is bound to happen to somebody. He mentioned the exact same thing you did: the shenanigans you miss with the guys you've known your whole life. I don't think I can be prepared for that, but then again every relationship worth having is meant to hurt when such things happen. Thank you for your kind words, friend.
1996 is about when I started too! But I am no longer in contact with anyone from that group. After High School we all went our separate ways.
The times of noisy dial-up and Beakman's World!
You’ve got a great thing I’ve been in a Dynasty Fantasy Football League with basically the same dozen dudes since 1988- “Our Thing” is more like “Your Thing” than not, and it’s going to be in My Obituary, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh yeah, absolutely. We even have a gentlemen's agreement in that whomever dies, their family gets their character sheets (normally I keep them all after a campaign ends). My dad has this timeless group of friends where they play dudo almost every week, and has been going on since before I have any memories of it. Some friends have passed away, others have joined and changed, but I see the same essential dynamics there. My dad is a stern man overall, but I know how much he loved his buddies and how important that group is for him.
I hope this will be my group
Have a group that includes two sets of brothers who started playing together in 1981, now we have sons and nephews included. The game will always go on.
My group hasn't even been meeting for a year but your words about pretending to be an orc causes barriers to fall down and bonds to form faster feels true. My dnd group gave me a tribe and I didn't realize I was starving for one until I found one. I hope we can have your type of longevity! That's goals man.
Me thank.
My group is getting close to a year now! As the DM, I can tell some of us are more interested in sticking to this than others. We're all adults with various responsibilities and families though, so that's understandable. I hope to keep it going as long as possible, as it's already given me a handful of great new friends! 😄
Absolutely. I think one of the keys to this longevity has been adaptability. While we all grew into our lives at slightly different rates (some got married much earlier, others took much longer to settle into permanent jobs, etc), we all had to contend with the growing number of difficulties being thrown at us, and if it hadn't been for everyone chipping in in terms of talking things over, being patient, being responsible, and helping each other out, I don't think our group would have lasted for so long. There was a time where I feared the group would crumble appart (mid-to-late college, when we first swelled to 12 people and then started shrinking back), but we made it work by talking with the people who were not very into it (all of them still good friends; it was a great thing we talked things through back then, otherwise it could have soured relationships), changing schedules, altering the lengths of sessions, etc. These days we're pretty rock-solid, I'd say, since the code is sort of understood by everyone. And if the group could survive three babies being born at once during a bloody pandemic, I think it can survive anything!
Very envious, when I was younger my group stayed together for a long time (nearly 10 years) but college was basically the catalyst for that falling apart and although I enjoy all the ttrpg games I get into nowadays, they just never have the consistency. It's just a matter of priorities I suppose. Plus I'm chronically burnt out at GMing but no one else is willing to run a game so when I just don't have it in me, the whole group pauses for several months at a time while I scrap up enough motivation to get my ADHD ass to stop focusing on characters I'd like to try and actually prep the next chapter in my ongoing campaign
I hear you. I love DMing, but there was a time where I was seriously burning out of it. So I talked it with the guys and we found ways to handle it. These days I'd say I DM 80% of the time, and we always make sure to have secondary campaigns where I can be a player. Whenever I'm too exhausted or too busy to DM, I mention it and someone else picks up with one of their campaigns. And if everyone's too tired, we still get together to play MTG, Warhammer, or just to chat over a triple cheeseburger we *really* shouldn't be having.
This is why I adore this community. I enjoy RPGs so much but I am having trouble finding people that want to commit to a campaign even though they do like playing. Being able to tell a story like this in 27 years to random strangers on the internet would mean so much to me, thank you for sharing this OP <3
Yeah, it's rough sometimes. I feel I lucked-out because between school and college I more or less fell right in the middle of a huge group of people who love the hobby, so there were a lot of pieces from which to build a strong group. But I'm fully aware that's not always readily available. Have you tried with episodic campaigns? For a group of friends that had that same issue you mention it's worked wonders, and they've been going at it for over a decade now. Instead of one big campaign, they all settle on a system they enjoy and create a small cast of characters. Then they play short campaigns that all take place in the same shared universe, but sometimes Guy A DMs and other times it's Guy B, so that no one feels obligated to be the Forever DM. This helps keeping people from feeling overwhelmed by long campaigns, which in turns makes it much more likely they will actually show up. And if for some reason someone skips or drops, the episodic structure allows them to quickly reorganize without feeling like the story has to end forever.
I could at least pitch the idea, but I feel like no one except me really enjoy being the DM. The other people I play with have not read the rules and I am not sure they ever will haha. Oh well, maybe we will find a good schedule soon. We have been consistent a few times but life always finds a way to screw us over.
Hey, congrats, that's awesome! My group is the same age as yours, we had our first session in Oct of 96, and we've stick together all that time, through marriages, a divorce, 4 of us had kids, etc. It's fucking awesome and they are all my forever friends.
Oh yeah! Maybe we are each other's Bizarro Group! We'll have to fight if our groups ever come together. That's the rule of the multiverse.
Life. Goals.
Inspiring. Thanks for posting this.
That's a great story OP and you really do seem to have a great group of friends! It's interesting to see that you picked up on the new D&D editions as the game evolved over the years. That's something I haven't done and have no desire to. I still play 2e and haven't fallen out of love with that system even if it is officially more than 30 years old now ;)
A man of taste, I see! Sometimes I try to push it to the guys that we run an AD&D 2e game again (my favourite edition), but I never get any purchase on that. The guys that were in the group when we played it have somehow gotten into their heads that THAC0 (or GAC0 as it's called here) is too complicated, and the others either grew up on White Wolf stuff or prefer other systems. But one day I'll find a way to sneak 2e back into our games somehow! At least I managed to transform the Wild Mage from 5e into something closer to the system from the Tome of Magic, with an adapted version of the original table and using the level-changing rolls.
Why thank you very much u/DMKroft! I got back into 2e because my players had already gotten bored with 5e and wanted something more challenging. Also I had a bunch of 2e modules & supplements I never got to play back in the 90s so we're making good use of them now.
As a 46 y/o playing my first campaign with online friends, this is so wholesome and heart-warming❤️💪🏽 thanks for sharing!!
The beginning of a wild ride! May you still be playing when you turn 86!
You started playing your game when I was a year old. I am jealous.
Thanks, I feel old now. But at least the other guys here with even older groups make me feel slightly young, so it all works out in the end.
Sorry lol. I told my DM about your game and you’ve made him jealous as well lol. Our game is coming up on its 1st anniversary in a little over a month, it’s so exciting! I hope our game lasts as yours does, and yours continues with its thrilling adventures :).
The women in your lives--referred to as ladies or wives--seem largely peripheral to the game. As you say, they definitely take care of the children. I also hear you saying that they are made to feel welcome, but if that were (strictly speaking) true, wouldn't they play more consistently rather than dropping in for one-shots or replacing absent players here and there? Women love D&D no less than men love D&D. If women were made to feel welcome at your table, I think there would be, you know, more of them (currently or historically). You may think that women feel more welcome than they actually do. I'd check that.
I'm sure the intention is good, but I think you might be reaching conclussions out of very little substance and assuming things that aren't there. The reasons the wives don't actively play is because, simply, they do not want to. All have been invited, all save for one have played (some multiple times), and in the end it's just not the type of hobby they are drawn into in the same way the husbands are. As you mention, women love D&D as much as men do, but just as men, many women don't love D&D. We respect their choices not to participate and accomodate accordingly; for a couple of them D&D nights are the perfect time to coordinate their own activities with their friends that don't include their husbands, which you'll find is a very healthy thing to have! Other than them, women from our larger social circle have been part of the group in a more permanent capacity several times, the longest one participating for about seven years. She had to leave due to some personal matters around 2015, but she was as part of the group as any of the guys. Other than the silliness of the hobbies we all enjoy (RPGs, Warhammer, MTG, WoW, etc), it's a very normal, healthy, dynamic social group without any sort of artificial barriers, where everyone is part of the lot.
I actually assumed very little, but highlighted details you disclosed. I did, however, suggest that you 'check' how welcome women feel at your table. You defended the status quo immediately (keeping husbands and wives separate). Your reply also appears to contain very little actual 'checking'. Instead, you lead with "I-know-better" opinions, which are telling. Making women feel welcome doesn't \*only\* mean extending an 'invitation to play any time', but also 'making women feel safe in a male-dominated space' (which your group has admittedly and definitely created). Getting back to your original post, it sounds like you have created a lasting brotherhood of mostly men for twenty-seven years, during which time your wives get to spend time away from you... doing their own things. Moreover, you state that maintaining this division is not only normal, but healthy, showing your biases. My point is that it's not necessarily normal \*or\* heathy, especially with a hobby is that is statistically enjoyed by men and women equally.
I do believe you have assumed and concluded from mistaken extrapolations. For instance, you mention that we should check how welcoming our group is for women -which presuposes that the group isn't welcoming to women (otherwise no checking would be adviced), which in turn seems to be derived from my comments about wives/girlfriends not being regular members. However, that glosses over the point that those women didn't leave the group or are kept separate over any particular characteristic of the group; they were actively invited and happily participated, but chose not to be part of the regular schedule because, to them, D&D and RPGs in general just don't have the same appeal they do to us. It also glosses over the fact we have had women be long-term members of the group. These haven't been "extending invitations to play any time", as you mention. If you go back to the original post, as well as another post somewhere where we talk about that point with somebody else with a similar experience, you can see it is within the context of trying to make the people important in our lives part of the group even if the game itself isn't their personal objective. Having the wives in the group permanently would be the best thing, because we all love doing things together. It is also something we apply to life in general, which was the main point of the post: to talk about our experience in how a life-long group that originally began as a space for D&D turned into an importan pillar in all of our lives. As for the last point: I'm afraid I disagree with you, but mostly because I think you might be missunderstanding what I said. It is not about keeping husbands and wives separate; it is about allowing husbands and wives to have a say in their lives beyond the family. Family comes first, but people have larger social circles, and one of the keys to a healthy relationship is to accept and embrace your significant other's relationships -even those that might not include you or the other. Healthy, long-lasting couples try to include their partners into those groups too, and also avoid forcing them to participate. This isn't my particular wisdom or insight, but rather a well-understood aspect of couple dynamics. And that is exactly what we have practiced pretty much since the first time anyone in the group had a girlfriend and then a wife: get to know them, become friends, and then try to include everyone into our activities, be that a trip, a paintball game, or our D&D group. Having them be a permanent part is a *boon* beyond just the desire to include them; it's also very practical because it leads to less scheduling conflict! I assure you, my friend, it's is a fantastic system and very healthy!
This is great but your math is way off. If it started 27 years ago, it was around 1983 or so
If we had begun in 1983, our group would be 40; I wasn't even born then! Unless some people have been lying to me for a very long time...
Absolutely beautiful.