Was there recently an issue/problem with the name or server or some such?  Just wondering I've not been able to connect for a week or so and then poof! Everything is back again (even if it's as dead quite as before).

Unfortunately I'm almost never in game stores, which is why I never volenteered to make any myself.

My view is that this site has a lot of potential, most importantly because I'm expecting the sacramento D&D meetup to kinda… implode? explode? And this is the best alternative board and meetup point. ;)  I do agree that we need to arrange advertising and such for it.  Maybe create a google group and a yahoo group and link them into here.  I know when looking for gathering points I first use google, meetup.com, then google groups, yahoo groups and then I give up.

Why do I think the meetup site will die?  Partly because of the fees that meetup.com is now requiring which makes things a pain and also because it seems to be becoming more and more "running scheduled RPGA events" rather than "it's a meetup for people to come and play and possibly form groups" which is what I used it for originally.  I've not been there in a while, but I gather right now there is a total of 3 tables, 2 RPGA dedicated to 4-hour slots, meaning 4 games per meetup, vs the one "open" D&D game which is in turn likely to be longer and thus one game.  So 4 "open" RPGA games vs 1 non-RPGA.  Meh, maybe it's my bias, but I don't like meetups having registration and character creation pre-requists.  People saying "Yes, I'll run a 4.0 game at 1st level" is fine but all the registration stuff… meh.  And in all honesty I'm not a fan of ridgid RPGA rules.

As for the lack of posting, I pretty much gave up after the last round of posts I made that got no responses… I figured if I was just talking to myself it's faster and less dull to do it in real life rather than on a forum board.

SkilGalen said:

On the Meetup Group thing. I originally started this site just incase they couldn't get their act together and find the $. When I joined it seemed the whole thing was about to fall appart. Was very disappointing as the meetup had gotten me playing D&D again. I lost touch with my old buddys back home in England and knew no one to game with over here. So 10+ years with no game. 

I don't know if the Meetup really will implode/explode but there does definately seem to be a RPG focus there. Something that doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. I used to play 1E, 2E and Basic and completely skipped through all the Wizards stuff till 4E. 4E seems ok but sometimes leaves me hankering to the good old days, RPGA doesn't really help much since it seems to do a good job of ruining what D&D is all about for me. Some of those things have filtered down to the main game itself like reward packaged when you level up, and limiting treasure. All things that I feel its the DM's job to balance, reward and take away, making sure everyone has fun and the game strikes a good balance.

Humm I'll have to see if I can find a way to prod the popularity of the site and get it into search engines.

I'll grant them, I *like* 4.0 having things like the pre-made encounters for various levels and the random-rolling treasure packets… it saves me a lot of time when I do the DM-on-the-fly thing.  It allows me to focus on planning the story behind events and just leave the minor encounters up to randomness (mostly).  I do find the way the powers and classes work to be kind of… hummm… I want to use the term generic but it's not quite right.  The powers break down by roles, a controller has pretty much exactly the same abilities and powers no matter what he/she actually IS. 

It's the weird characters that people make that I think tend to be more amusing and fun.  Like a Jedi one of my players created once.  You think star wars Jedi and you think jumping lightsaber wielding or deep and mysterious…  Nope, the only ability he had was absorbing blaster fire without getting hurt and the ability to run away (a lot).  This was a guy who usually makes "tank" characters, so it was an amusing change of pace.