September of 2025 marks the twentieth anniversary of my current gaming group. Yes, you read that correctly. While I’m not sure of the exact day, twenty years ago either this week or last week I met with five other nerds in the study room of Carnegie Mellon’s newest freshman dorm, New House (which has since been renamed). The organizer, my friend Dan, had swiped the mailing list from an event run by the university’s chapter of White Wolf’s Camarilla Society; he decided that while he wanted nothing to do with a Vampire LARP, he met some cool people at their D&D one-shot event and would want to play D&D with them. We all decided that yes, we’d like to play D&D, and from there we were off. Three more people joined over the next couple of semesters, a lot of games were played, and we were a close-knit group until graduation in May of 2009.

The story doesn’t stop there, though, not even close. The gaming continued sporadically in the form of a couple PbP campaigns through the rest of 2009. Most of the group had left Pittsburgh except for me; I had taken a job with one of my professors and also got accepted to grad school for the spring semester of 2010. It was in that time between my gap semester and the start of grad school that Mark, another one of my friends from the gaming group, mused with me about playing via voice chat online. We agreed it was worth a shot and began to put a game together, to start sometime in that spring semester of 2010. At this time Mark asked me a question that I did not yet know would change the course of the group and quite possibly my life:

“I know this guy from a Gundam RP board I’m on, his name is Seamus. Is it OK if he joins our game?”

Resurrecting my college gaming group is quite literally the reason that Cannibal Halfling Gaming exists in its current form. Now, I could go on about the history of the group, our troubles with voice chat tech, our membership shifts and our Beach Weekends, but ultimately I think the context that is most important and most interesting for an outside observer would be the games. It’s hard to overstate the impact that this group has had on how I’ve developed as a player, a GM, and a commentator. At the same time, the impact of group and the social system of an RPG is often the invisible glue that holds an RPG writer’s commentary and critique together. By looking back on the group, considering what we played and how we play, I’m in a way providing the missing half to every review I’ve done, whether I played the game I reviewed with this group or not.

Before going headlong into reminiscence it’s worth noting I have had other gaming groups over the years. My very first gaming groups were in high school, with the longest-lived one going through my junior and into my senior year. I played Fate with a group of Bostonians that included a former Cyberpunk 2020 freelancer, and played a number of PbtA games with a few different groups orbiting around one of my exes, our landlord, and the broader social group we all belonged to. I also had online groups with a number of other game designers and critics, most of whom I met through Cannibal Halfling. And I suppose I should mention I started another gaming group this year, with my partners and friends. Everyone I’ve met and played with over the last twenty years has had an impact on my understanding of the RPG hobby, without a doubt. The core of my playstyle and my approach to the hobby, though, started in that study room at Carnegie Mellon.

The college years

When my friend Dan started the college group, we started with D&D, and spent the rest of the first semester after that initial meeting playing through a campaign Dan came up with using 3.5. It was an important start, cementing our social dynamics, injokes, and even a logo we used for our Facebook group.

Our time playing D&D didn’t really last. The campaign was beginning to stall out by the end of the semester, and Dan had asked if anyone else was interested in GMing. I said yes, while conceding that I didn’t really have a good idea of what to run, other than something science fiction. Dan then said something utterly pivotal to me:

“You should check out this game GURPS, you can use it to run pretty much anything.”

I bought the GURPS Basic Set over winter break and immersed myself in it, poring over the manuals in a way I hadn’t since I first got D&D in middle school. We came back to school and I was ready to run. The game was a cyberpunk-adjacent setting of my own making, but not really knowing how to restrict the options in GURPS I set the point total at 75 and assumed it would all work out. ‘Working out’ in this case meant a cast of characters which included a Soviet Bloc cybersoldier whose implants were fueled by alcohol, a powerful AI cyborg who had been rendered innumerate in an attempt to keep him from bootstrapping himself, the AI’s ward/protector, a practitioner of a completely digital martial art, a zombie novelist, the schizophrenic PI of the literal Stanford Prison Experiment (“Can I play Philip Zimbardo?” “Literally?” “Well, Philip Zimbardo if he was also Tyler Durden.” “I guess?”), and a ten year old street urchin. This was both something I was completely unprepared for as well as pretty much the best thing ever. I would run GURPS several more times over the next three years, eventually stopping when I attempted to run a space opera game and the lack of character guardrails sent the campaign careening off-course.

The other main game we played during this time was Cyberpunk 2020, and that system was what taught me the value of drama. Like many novice GMs I spent a lot of time trying to rein in the power creep in the session and system, but the most memorable moments were when things went wrong. The first campaign ended in disaster with a string of character deaths (almost all PvP), but it also told an incredible story.

With most of our time split between three games (we returned to D&D senior year), the group’s in-person genesis was not the time when we developed a penchant for exploring multitudes of games. Still, the exploration we did do laid a lot of groundwork. In addition to expanding beyond D&D (which few of us in the group had done), we played around with game ideas, running a number of one-shots including my first time playing Paranoia. Even by the end of college, we all realized that what we had done in our games and what was most interesting about our games was something that none of us were finding when we joined ‘D&D groups’ back home.

The online beginning

When we brought everyone back together to play online, I volunteered to run Cyberpunk 2020 because I wasn’t interested in D&D but also wasn’t prepared to write something for GURPS. The campaign was a nostalgia play, putting us all back in a cyberpunk-ified Pittsburgh, and it got everyone interested and excited about continuing to play. 2010 was not a straightforward time, and it took literally a year to get the kinks worked out. I ran the game through my first semester of grad school but had to stop when I took an internship out of state. Second semester was a whole mix of things, including my grandfather passing away, so no gaming really occurred then. After I finished my Master’s, though, I restarted the game and brought everything to a reasonable conclusion, even as I was accepting a job and moving to Massachusetts. After that first campaign, though, we really got going. Several group members other than me started GMing, which helped widen everyone’s perspective. We also were trying more games, though not all of them stuck. Over the next five years, in addition to Cyberpunk 2020 (and yes, more GURPS) we played Exalted, Shadowrun, Savage Worlds, and even some more D&D. Two games are worth noting. As much as it was a silly and short game, a four session game of Fate entitled “Escape from New Jersey” is still one of the experiences that has most shaped how I GM. It was an improv exercise where my unfailing commitment to ‘yes, and’ literally everything turned what was supposed to be a mildly silly 80s action movie premise into full-on time travel nonsense involving aliens, copyright lawyers, and a hypothetical collab between Jon Bon Jovi (with chainsaws for hands) and Tupac (but the holographic AI version) that would literally break the timestream. The other game of note, or rather three games of note, were campaigns that took place using FFG Star Wars. Running games across all flavors of the game, both the Star Wars games and Genesys were cemented in our repertoire, as well as being a microcosm of our evolution, from a self-contained ‘Star Wars story’ to a Return of the Jedi heartbreaker to a narrative experiment literally dedicated to breaking the canon of the prequel movies. All of these games shaped how we gamed, no doubt. But in 2016 we discovered something that would change how we gamed forever.

Discovering Apocalypse World and growing up

In between two of our Star Wars games, I finally got the group to agree to try Apocalypse World. I had been terminally online in RPG spaces, including browsing around (though not commenting in) The Forge, and when I got a copy of the game at a bookstore in Western Massachusetts, I knew I had to give it a try. It took a bit of convincing everyone; there was some reluctance for a number of reasons, but I finally got a chance to run under the auspices of a short-run ‘low-quorum’ game when our main GM was unable to run. I’ve told the story before on Cannibal Halfling Radio, but the second the group understood what the game was trying to do, everything fell into place quickly. The game went very well, with great characters and all the drama you’d expect from an Apocalypse World game. It did not technically conclude, but that was not due to the game but rather because one of our members had to drop in order to go to med school.

Real life continued to happen all around us; in addition to a new chapter of our gaming, 2016 also marked the beginning of members having kids and our scheduling travails, well, travailing. Even so, the commitment really started to swing up at this point. I turned 30 in 2017 and for those of you young enough not know, everything they say about maintaining friendships in adulthood is true. We saw both life milestones and a whole range of new gaming experiences; Seamus ran Dark Heresy for us but also Masks. We played The Veil, Eclipse Phase, more Genesys, and even tried D&D again. By the end of these five years, life milestones turned into life disruptions as the pandemic started in February of 2020.

COVID and the present

The COVID pandemic both did and didn’t affect our gaming. We were luckily online and had a standing session on Sundays, there was no direct impact on our scheduling. That said, we were all weathering a lot of other disruptions to our lives; I started working entirely remotely which I still do to this day, and many others had differing schedules due to work, childcare, or simply where they were living at the time. With all of these disruptions, though, we did continue to explore, playing Star Trek Adventures, Cyberpunk Red, and trying The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power (although that one didn’t stick). We also solidified a change to our GMing structure that we had played with before but decided to formalize. For the last four or five years, we’ve officially had two GMs, alternating weeks for play. This has allowed us to have longer campaigns without burning out either players or GMs; our most recent Cyberpunk campaign as well as our campaign of Legend of the Five Rings and a second Masks campaign all lasted over a year. At the same time it’s allowed for some more experimentation, with Burning Wheel finally being run after PDFs were available, Twilight:2000 being our first campaign-length YZE game, and Apocalypse World re-entering rotation at the beginning of 2025.

COVID also caused us to re-evaluate our Beach Weekends. Back in 2012 we began meeting in person for one weekend a year, down at a beach house in Delaware that belonged to one member’s grandmother. After the beach house was sold in 2017, we needed to figure out another option. In 2018 I arranged a gathering in the Poconos due to its central location and plentiful vacation rentals, but ‘Woods Weekend’ didn’t work as well as ‘Beach Weekend for a multitude of reasons. In 2019 an attempt to find another alternative was scuttled due to scheduling conflicts, and in 2020 Beach Weekend was cancelled due to the pandemic. In 2021 I found a rental on the same beach in Delaware, and Beach Weekend was back on. Over the next few years we collectively decided not to move Beach Weekend, and there will be another trip to Delaware later in the fall. Beach Weekend was a time for experimental gaming, but it got much more focused to that end after the trips resumed post-pandemic. This is where we played DIE, Back Again from the Broken Land, FIST, Zombie World, and many others, and the number of players who dip their toes into the GMing pool expands every year. These trips may not drive our gaming in the same way our weekly sessions do, but they’re a welcome change to how we game and a little taste of, as Seamus has called it, “Cannibal Halfling Con”.

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How does the group play? I think one of the strengths of the group is the diversity of playstyles. We have a couple of hardcore optimizers, mechanics-driven and combat-driven folks. We have others who are much more into the narrative, into making crazy events happen and seeing the world react to them. We have yet others who enjoy straight-up roleplay and the spotlight. Balancing and writing for so many different kinds of players is a challenge but it also makes you appreciate what games do and do not do well, whether you like the particular game or not. It’s also taught all of us not only what to appreciate at a gaming table but also how to appreciate playstyles that perhaps aren’t your own. Even from my experiences in other groups, running con games, and actual play, finding a truly stylistically diverse group is tough, and the GMs who are actually good at balancing the motives and desires of some many different kinds of players are usually only those with experience at it. And though I have a fair amount of experience, I’m not going to say I’m perfect at spotlight management or that I always have a better solution than ‘wait your turn’. What I will say though is that having players who have seen and appreciated all these playstyles will also mean you have players who learn how to derive enjoyment from multiple different playstyles. I know not every player has enjoyed every game we’ve run, but when our top games include DIE and Masks but also Twilight:2000 and Genesys, you know we’re a bit all over the map.

More than anything, I’m so glad I have a group that has been willing to jump around and have so many experiences over the two decades we’ve gamed together. Although I know having a group for so long and having such a breadth of experiences is a rare privilege, I also know that there’s so much to see in this hobby and so many experiences that will resonate widely for most people, if only they’re able to open their mind to it. I’ve seen it personally so many times and on all parts of the playstyle map. The experiences I’ve had are all reflective of the people I’ve had them with, and I think I have been uniquely blessed with the friends I’ve shared gaming experiences with all this time. Thank you to Seamus, Mark, Aki, Marcus, Mike, Hans, Immanuel, and Dan for playing games and nerding out together. Thank you also to Ian, Tilia, Luther, Chris, Geni, Dan M, Sergey, and Jason for joining us in our travels for at least part of the time.

If I can leave you all with one takeaway, it’s that an enduring gaming group is not about playstyle compatibility, genre interests, or even schedule alignment. If you are serious about this hobby and the possibilities it unlocks for group storytelling, improv, strategic gameplay, or fictional immersion, you need to surround yourself with likeminded people. Members of a long-running gaming group should become friends, because good gamers should be as open to seeing the outer lives of their co-conspirators as they are to seeing their inner lives at the table. Long-running gaming is not the only gaming, not by a long shot. That said, everyone in the hobby should strive for the kind of gaming that only long-developed trust and camaraderie will bring you.

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