First steps to pen and paper

In September I changed jobs and instead of taking a 3.5 hour round trip to work it’s now more like 1.5. Obviously this is good for all sorts of reasons, the main one being I get to see much more of my children, but what it also meant is that I could do some “after school” activities.

Because of my work hours I haven’t really been able to make any friends where we live so that was the first thing to be remedied. I thought a lot about what I’d ultimately like to do with my new friends so I’d know where to start. The resurgence of board games was very much on my radar, as was a desire to play some of the 40k table top games I loved in my early teens. I'd also been listening to a new podcast called The Adventure Zone and that made D&D sound like an awful lot of fun. But, to be honest, I thought RP was something people would be less inclined to do with complete strangers. So finding some people to play an RPG with wasn’t a strong motivation; it was more something I thought might come with time. 

Armed with this self-awareness I set about searching for groups and message boards for clubs in my area. A lot of the clubs seemed to play old school war games or straight board games and games like 40k didn’t get much of a look in. The best bet was a local group on meetup.com that seemed to do a bit of everything. It felt a bit weird signing up to try and meet people online until I thought about online dating. If people can find love, I said to myself, I can surely find some people to play toy soldiers with.

As chance would have it, the first meetup I attended was actually a one-off D&D 5E taster session that the meetup leader ran. After that it turned out that I didn’t actually have all that much time to attend the meetups and I only managed to attend a few of the more social events. That did the trick, though, because me and another prospective dungeoneer managed to find our way into a D&D group starting a campaign with a novice DM. We’re now playing 5E with a nice mix of beginners and experienced, but patient, players. It really couldn’t have been a better start for me. 

We've only played two sessions so far and both have been fun. I'm really looking forward to getting to know the group better and I think the campaign could be pretty long running. I'm already formulating a plan to broaden my horizons even further but more on that another time.