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just a few observations

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jhocking:

--- Quote from: nycpunk1 ---it's not like we're all in high school, waiting for the cool girls (or boys) to notice us. Can't we get by this by now?
--- End quote ---

Actually, my college experience was an interesting example of this sort of highschool drama on a massive scale.  On the one hand, people at Carnegie Mellon were relatively friendly towards geeks (although it should be noted that my gf frequently teases me about my nerdy ways.)  On the other hand, the school itself was a known geek haven (eg. we had a top computer science program and a top drama school.)  Meanwhile, just down the street (and I mean literally two blocks away) was Pitt, a state school with a top basketball team.  I remember going to a party and chatting with a Pitt student; when he realized I went to Carnegie Mellon, he said, "Oh.  So, you're a dork?"  More recently, I met a friend of a friend who went to Pitt.  Somebody else mentioned I also went to school in Pittsburgh.  She asked what school, and when I responded CMU, she let out a disgusted, "Ohhhh, you're one of them."


--- Quote from: Se7en ---What other type of music can you imagine appealing to that sort of person?
--- End quote ---

Most people I know who are into computers/games like electronic as well.  Interstella 5555 was mana from heaven.


--- Quote from: Catfish_Man ---It does have a metric assload of rules though, which tends to attract really technical gamers like you describe above. That's one reason I've found that the people I prefer to play with are all theatre and writing geeks, rather than the computer geeks (despite being a computer geek myself).
--- End quote ---

This is why I stopped playing tabletop RPGs.  The group I started playing with were mostly theater people, but then after I moved the only people I could find to game with were all hack&slash rules lawyers.  Yawn.

happybirthdaygelatin:
Actually I'm an advocate of the idea that people intensely into sports (keeping track of stats, fantasy sport leagues, favourite players, etc.) are just another breed of geek.

Bunnyman:
My geeky obsession wasn't D&D, but rather Battletech.  And the Fallout series.  As well as guns in general.

I play Fallout:PNP.  SPECIAL is a great system - you can just throw together some random setting and it all works fine.

I played Call of Cthulhu in various incarnations through College.  I find that with less rules (SPECIAL, CoC) there's quite a bit more roleplaying...people are more willing to fill in the gaps where one rule ends and the next begins.  D&D wouldn't be too happy about the time we did the better part of a session communicating entirely in Interactive Fiction text parser commands...or the time in Fallout where I impaled a dude through the jaw on a pointy stick and threw him through a nearby plate window.

Got all my Juno Reactor (and a bunch of Massive Attack) at a LAN party in the Edge, if that helps.

1patheticloser:
Well I am both an online gamer (SWG for around a year and a half, but have since given it up) AND a table top gamer (Shadowrun FTW). Then again, I also watch NFL a great deal, and have known other gamers who were sports fanatics. I do find it odd that at work, if I start talking about my Elf Phys-Ad I get about the same amount of blank stares and questioning glances as if I mention Vick's rushing yardage in my gaming group. Then again, my "scenester" friends look at me funny if I mention either. And I'm pretty sure, depending on the pretention level of the club, the only reason you don't get burnt at the stake is because they may take you playing D&D as ironic, and therefore, cool. I am pretty sure if I started talking about the feats I took for my 18 level samurai/iujitsu master and the bonuses to dueling I got, I wouldn't be taking home that waifish tatooed vixen with the sweet ass.

Strangely enough, I didn't start table top gaming until college. All throughout highschool I stuck to being a music and film geek, with some video games thrown in for good measure. But yes, as said before, I think it's the combonation of math and statistics skills mixed with the roleplaying/improv that pins gamers as geeks.  I mean, seriously, have you seen the Shadowrun players handbook? It's around 350 pages long, and you most people don't wait around for you to look up everything you need to play the game. I mean, look at how esoteric the combat system is:

1. Roll the number of dice in your combat skill, with any additional combat pool dice you would like (remember to save some for attacks against you) at the target number designated by the game master.
2. For the defender, subtract you armor level from the strength of the attack, this is the target number for you soak.
3. Roll you Body pool combined with any additional Combat pool you have remaining.
4. After negating attack success with soak success, use additional successes to stage the power of the attack down, hopefully taking no damage.

Did that make any sense to you? That's just normal combat, and that happens a whole lot. So yes, it is almost required that you be a "geek" who has been previously identified as someone with an obsessive knowledge of useless information and trivia.

Bunnyman:
Don't get me started.  Since I was always the only one with a copy of Shadowrun, everyone spent about an hour apiece kitting out, because there was so goddamn much cyberware and gear in the back, and someone would be obsessively minmaxing.  Yeesh.  And that dice system...bloody arcane, it was.  Though truth be told, all this took a lot less time than a game of Battletech.  FASA just can't be concise, can they?

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