I've been gaming with pretty much the same bunch of guys for the last nine years or so. I met these guys in my first year of college when I decided to go the collegiate role-playing club, the Berkeley Campus Adventurer's Club or something like that.

Back then I was pretty focused on AD&D. I had played other games like Champions and Star Frontiers, but AD&D 2nd Ed is where I spent my money on. So that's the kind of game I was looking to get into.

The first game I enrolled in was an AD&D game run by John. He wanted to run a beginning campaign which would culminate in the characters becoming Spelljammers. I played "the fighting mage", due to my proclivity for getting into combat once I cast my one spell for the day. That's where I initially met the group.

The next semester I they convinced me to play this game based on RuneQuest called ErzoQuest. I played a giant rabbit warrior. Very simple to play and I figured it would give me a chance to learn the system. But that character never died permanently and survived to the end of the campaign about a year and a half later.

The ErzoQuest game was played on Saturday noon to five or so. There was also a night game, which I also eventually joined after a few months. That was Pendragon which was very cool. That led to me joining the Friday night game which was Ars Magica. And that's the way it's been more or less for the last nine years. Three different role-playing games a week.

The group has been rather stable. A few people come and go, but there's a core group that's been around forever. We've gotten into set patterns, with some players being the leaders, some being the manipulators. We have our alpha male and female, beta male and female, and all that other monkey stuff that Eric goes over every few years.

There's Eric, our primary GM and currently the oldest one in the group. Eric has run a good 2/3 of our campaigns, at one point running two games on Saturday and one on Sunday for a period of months. He's a good general GM and has a rather relaxed philosophy on GMing. As a player though, he's annoying as heck. It must be his way of getting revenge for our antics when he's running a game.

Shannon is our secondary GM. He runs a fantastic Pendragon campaign, good Ars Magica sessions, and fair in other games. The Pendragon games have been the most memorable because of his extensive research in the Arthurian legends. Shannon has also written a few RPG supplements for Ars Magica and Call of Cthulhu (maybe Pendragon too). As a player he's the manipulator. He makes an ok leader but doesn't make the best decisions, although he does make the moral decisions. When he's not leading his character gets the whole party into trouble by plunging ahead when the rest of us are more cautious.

Dave P plays the leader characters best. He's run an occassional Ars Magica, Boot Hill, and a Star Wars campaign. Dave's characters are survivors when they're not leading. He makes the most rational choices and when leading he can keep everyone in line, not an easy thing to do in our group.

I'll continue in the next journal entry, since I'm trying to do two at the same time.