In all honesty, I just got home from my (rather large) gaming group. At one end of the room they were playing Nobilis; I was teaching FATE Core to a group of n

In all honesty, I just got home from my (rather large) gaming group. At one end of the room they were playing Nobilis; I was teaching FATE Core to a group of new players. The worlds in the games are different, the rules are different... and yet I can't help but agree completely that there's a grand culture of cooperation, friendship, and acceptance among hardcore gamers. If that's some kind of "fantasy world", where everyone works together, believes in each other, and where the arguments are resolved with a roll of the dice? Then I'm more than content to live in that fantasy; and work every day to make it closer to reality. The author got in before I did (I started with the computer games based on 2E and moved up and down from there), but I can relate to everything he said. I can even relate to Gygax himself as the author says it: "From which you could conclude, I guess, that games are everything for Gygax, or that everything is a game; but I don’t think that would be quite right. I think that he has found a way to live." I want to keep fighting to find that way to live. Where someday, I might have a home with an open-door policy, where we can sit down and for those few hours reclaim something essential about the human existence, regardless of that world outside.