I'd recommend just going to your friendly local game shop, and checking out the bulletin boards there.

Not a terrible idea. It's been a while since I've been in there and I don't recall a board, but I wasn't looking at the time. I'll check it out.. I just hope it isn't the same guys from 8 years ago. Freaking werewolf ninja PC, I kid you not. It was like someone was playing a joke. Also the DM's friend was a lvl 8 elf somethingorother, and everyone else was lvl 1.. wtf.

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Or, if not willing to put your phone # up on a card in public, talk to the guy who runs the gaming shop. We found an excellent group that way, basically by explaining to the guy at the store that we wanted to game, but were now married, with children, and not wanting to wade thru all the crazy in a small town. He put us in touch with a guy (also married, with kids) who'd just had a couple players drop out. They turned out to be very good friends, I still miss them.

(Now I'm a little sad. Sniff...)

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"When someone shows you who they are believe them" M. Angelou

Well, I found a pathfinder group on meetup that looks promising. They play every week at a comic shop, but they're not terribly local. Still, it's a start and I'm sure some of them play more than just a weeknight at a comic shop.
/end hijack

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I have a problem with groups that meet at comic shops. I tend to have an uncontrollable potty-mouth, and an over-abundance of adjectives when gore is involved. I actually made the wife of one of our full-time members kind of ill. She was an occasional gamer in the group too. Something about a ghoul eating too much, splitting open... smells...

I cannot play - but you should do this if you could. PBP it here too, Ficition or this page both make sense.

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President ZSC011
Part Viking, Part Siamese

I've never played by post before but I'd def be willing to try. Can you explain how it's done?

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You are
What you do
When it counts.

Definitely would be interested in observing a play-by-lay on the boards. I have hardly any experience participating in one and it'd be nice to get a better feel for how they're done.

I don't have much of a "gaming rig" myself, but I do have a set of dice in my EDC backpack, just in case. I just a couple months ago discovered how nice "miniatures" on a big board/mat are compared to scribbling on graph paper. The only problem is we were using legos for minis and it was hard to keep the session from devolving into just playing with legos.

I've pretty much always just played with my close friends, I've never went out looking for a gaming group. I'm sad to say I don't think I'm a good match with my friends that currently live in the area. For the most part I'm the only one who will GM, and the last several campaigns I've tried to run have flopped. A good part of it was failings on my part, some of it was weirdness on their part, and a lot of it was difference in style. There is one guy who's pretty good to play with, and I think I might make campaigns just for him. Unfortunately he loves fantasy, which I hate/suck at running.

Tactical play with minis is good for systems like D20 (3.x, Pathfinder, et al). Some games just don't need it though like World of Darkness and Call of Cthulu.

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President ZSC011
Part Viking, Part Siamese

"Okay, so the unspeakable, indescribable horror, of a color out of space is HERE, and you're HERE... Now you're insane."
"But, you were using a mini I could describe pretty well..."
"That was just a stand-in. If you saw what it REALLY looked like, you'd be more of a gibbering idiot than you already are."
"Uncalled-for, dude... Uncalled-for!"

Also... unnecessary, but AWESOME...

Way better than a blob of Playdoh or a salt shaker.

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President ZSC011
Part Viking, Part Siamese

if you ever want to make your players happy, use peanut M&Ms for mook counters. Once defeated, they get eaten!

I've done this with Hershey Kisses too. The more you kill, the more you eat.

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President ZSC011
Part Viking, Part Siamese

So it's you two that are responsible for the stereotype of the overweight, acne ridden role-player.

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You are
What you do
When it counts.

Yeah, well, we don't pretend it's part of the game, we just bring lots of snacks and set them out on the bar...

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"When someone shows you who they are believe them" M. Angelou

Uhhhmmmm.... It's a stereotype?

Funny anecdote about stereotypes:

I read a blog called Quest for Fun - a game shop owner's blog in Northern CA, Black Diamond Games, and his anecdotes and business details about running a shop. One year a few years ago, and the blogger is well known for keeping track of business/money minutiae like this, he noticed an anomoly in his expenditures and pinned it down to the amount he was spending on chairs for the gaming tables in his shop. He tracked that for awhile and saw it was a major expenditure yearly (over $1000 a year) called it "chair attrition". He thought it was natural until he did some research on chair attrition and found other places that have a lot of customers sitting in chairs were not even close to the amount he was spending on chairs (like restaurants and such). He wondered why his chair attrition was so high perspectively.

Then, one day, a gaming group came in and he noticed the 300-400 pounders that were sitting in his chairs, saw them teetering and squeling, and he had his aha moment.

I asked my friend Otis, also owned a game shop called Game Geex, about this and he said that is very true. He was buying chairs every quarter to replace the broken chairs he bought last quarter. He wanted to get good chairs but those were just not in his budget.

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President ZSC011
Part Viking, Part Siamese

That's hilarious. Chair attrition. I'd say half of my regular group is overweight or obese. Does buy once cry once go for chairs at geek stores?

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You are
What you do
When it counts.

Gotta have the credit and/or cashflow to do buy once, cry once... Also, chairs that will stand up to those weights safely are really uncheap, we just got a couple for the office...

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"When someone shows you who they are believe them" M. Angelou

I'm going to use my power as a level 18 forum necromancer to resurrect this thread. Why? Just because there hasn't been enough pen and paper talk around here.

Has anyone tried 5th Edition D&D yet? What are your thoughts? A friend of mine bought 4th Edition, but we never even tried to play it. Seemed too complicated and tedious.

I'm trying to put together an airships campaign again. I've been trying to do that for about eleven years. I always get bogged down in the details. I also can't decide which system to use. The people I play with are most comfortable with D&D, but when I start spending a lot of time "fixing" the system to work better with my campaign I start thinking that maybe a different system would be best, if I can get them to give it a shot.

Not I. My wife hates games, so I rarely play anymore. I started around 1980 in high school.

Had a group of six or seven 15 years ago, and it was hell getting us all together. On a typical Saturday, around the time the last person showed up, the first one had to leave. We elected to play EverQuest instead, so some could play longer than others. We'd get on a conference call (before teamspeak) and have the times of our lives.

So, anyway, I'd love to get with a D&D group again, and I even have a friend who DMs for his kids and their friends; but committing to the same window twice a month is two more windows of time away from home. I guess those days are behind me. All I have left are iPad games that I can play for a couple of hours, a couple of times per week.

=/

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Some friends and I were looking at Roll20. It's one of many free online platforms for playing what would traditionally be pen & paper RPGs. The big difference is this one looks to actually be good, while the couple other ones I've tried in the past were more difficult to learn and didn't offer much functionality. We haven't actually managed to get a campaign going yet, so I can't give it a full review.
http://roll20.net/

This is probably old news to most, but WotC actually put the core rules for D&D 5th Ed. up on their website for free download. This includes four races (Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, Human) and four classes (Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, Wizard). There are of course more races and classes, as well as more content in general, in the full fledged rule books. Still, this includes most of the more common races, classes and equipment.
http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/basicrules

Looking at the basic rules and some reviews, I think 5th Edition looks really promising. It looks like they fixed a lot of what was annoying about 3.5. I never bothered to learn 4th Edition.

I went ahead and ordered the PHB, DMG and MM. Unfortunately I didn't see any ebooks for sale.

I think I might still succumb to the urge to screw with the rules. I can't help myself.