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Hey all! This might sound a bit weird but I feel curious...

I wondered how much people enclose their social lives with the hobby (meaning hanging out with your friends and the like), and also I'd like to know what you do after you finish your gaming day. Do you just go home? Is 40k a very sterille hobby to you? Are the people you play it with opponents or beer buddies?

Now I'm 16, so I don't drink (don't plan to either, hate the stuff ), but I always used to go out and about with my friends once we finished at the LGS, or go off for lunch together, discussing tactics and how much we enjoy our hobby

So, in short, does your social life with your friends and club members integrate, or are they two separate things?

Thanks to all who don't take this as a wierd-ass thread and post!

I used to do the same thing. Then as we got older beer eventually came into the picture. Not much tho, since we still had to drive home.

My social life and my 40k gaming is kept very, very seperated. Mostly due to the fact that I no longer have the tolerance for anyone bar a few persons in the 40k club I used to frequent. When I am done I go home and try to forget that I just waisted a few hours in the company of snivelig grotts. Its really sad how much a influx of new players can utterly ruin what used to be a decent club. But thankfully the fantasy club I game with are much more pleasent to be around. Same can be said for the people I play historical games like FoW, Pike & Shot and Hail Caseare with.

I generally just play pick up matches, so I just tend to go home after

I just play with a few of my friends that I've been playing with since grade school. Now that we are in our 20s, we just drink while playing and hang out after.

40k is very fun and social if you do it with good friends.

thanks for all the replies guys! all the posts are appreciated and all....

just and additional to Trondheim - my LGS seemed to have this problem towards the end times of me visiting it often. After moving countries, I've heard that it's been getting worse - there's just a massive influx of new, too young gamers who kinda ruin the feel. But this kind of discussion is for another thread, so I won't rant

To all the posters who said that they don't experience the hobby with their friends, does this bar your 40k experience? does it feel wrong with what you are doing, or are you right where you belong?

thanks again, keep the posts rolling!

I try to keep my social group and my Gaming group separate simply because some friends I keep in school are almost out of necessity because it would be more awkward to not be friends with them, while friends in my gaming group are people who I share common interests with and people who I truly enjoy the company of. So yes, I would foster a gaming group and be social with them (As in gaming at each others houses, going to eat ((Does MC Donalds count as a restaurant?)) together) but my gaming and social group are very separate things. I just happen to be social with my gaming group as well

I game with close friends. We drink, we smoke, we throw some dice. We normally will be chatting about comics we read or whats going on with our wives/gfs. Im the only one really into the hobby i paint everything and what not, my buddies just play the game. So the hobby doent really conflict. I have to come to dakka to chat about the actual hobby.

I have a few separate groups of friends, only one of which plays 40K (or other "nerdy" hobbies). Generally, I play against the guys at my local store, however, as most of us work we don't start until 1630-1700 so it's usually a couple of quick games and then home to bed.

So, for me, it's actually the other way around.

Five years ago, I moved to Champaign, IL, not knowing anybody there in the world except my wife. Stuck with the options of silently weeping alone in the dark basement with only my Diablo II characters to give me comfort, and getting out into my new environment and meeting people, I wisely chose the latter.

The problem is that I'm terrible around strangers, which means making friends for me can be rather difficult. With 40k, though, I had a segue. I could show up every thursday night, and there would be people there. People who I could talk to, and could play games with in a well-understood, structured environment.

I didn't bring friends to 40k, I brought 40k to friends.

I actually have someone from my FLGS that I now hang out with independently of that environment, but the rest of the people are now my monday night friends (40k night changed), and so yeah, I spend only about half my time actually playing. A slowly growing amount of my time there with people isn't even spent directly discussing 40k either.

Anyways, 40k and church were the two ways I tried to break into my local community, and I only bother with one of those two anymore. I've yet to decide which community is less preachy, though...

40k games are very social to me. Depends on the opponent a bit. Some don't like to talk at all. I talk a lot and with everyone. After games at the gaming club we usually tend to talk and follow other unfinished games. When playing with friends it's usually even more social.

Warhammer 40,000 for me, is a social hobby. I've somehow managed to land a good buddy who does the same things I do in the hobby, along with being about five minutes away from my LGS. So when I work on a new model, buy something new, or paint up a new model, I have a buddy who does the same things I can show it to, and talk to. And alternatively, if he's busy, there's a gaming store not too far off that I can go to, that supports getting players together on a regular basis.

So I'll spend long evenings just painting and tossing dice, and other days I'll play a few pick up games. But outside of work, it's really my only social activity. A tad bit sad, no?

Aside from sitting in my bedroom playing Total War games, free games from the psn, and browsing dakka dakka, I generally only leave the house to play 40k with people or go to work.

So it is a big part of my social life.

When I go to my local GW I chit chat with everyone there, but sometimes it gets awkward:

- Often people are very fixated on talking just 40k (this is fine, it is a GW after all), but you get the impression that they simply have nothing else to talk about.

- Secondly, when we do manage to talk about non-40k related things such as whats going on in our lives... that's when it gets awkward. I'm pretty young with a very good job and things in general are great. After telling them what I do... I ask them in return whats going on with them and they reply "I'm unemployed and not in school right now"..... its like Oh okay, well I feel like a gloating jerk now...

So to answer your question.... 40k socializing is kept 100% separate from my social life with friends outside the hobby.

I think that 40k and other wargaming is a great medium for those who are socially awkward. Not that I'm saying everyone who is a wargamer/plays tabletop RPGs is socially awkward.......but it sure seems to trend that way. The fact that I can show up at a store and know other people are there for the same thing as me makes me feel comfortable in openly speaking to them whereas in general public I'd be much more cautious.

I met one of my close friends and by extension a whole gaming circle thanks to showing up to a 40k game night at a LGS during college.

However, I have a "nerdy"/gaming group of friends and my non-gaming group of friends which I try to keep entirely separate from one another....

Out of my circle of longtime friends I have a small group that plays semi regularly, we rotate buying the beers and picking out music. my wife continuously walks into the room and calls us nerds though, then she starts playing the Sims.

Some of my best friends are people I play 40k with. It is quite literally all we have in common. Now If I could convince them to play some of the other games I play with the same fanaticism then it wouldn't only be 40k we played and talked about. As it is though, with those friends when we talk on the phone it is often about 40k, about our dex, our current modeling desires, and about tournis we either have attended or would like to attend.

40k is a great (though expensive) hobby. It is something I can do when I visit new towns or new clubs to meet people. I chat online and spend a fair amount of time engaged in play. Not a sterile environment at all.

As Wil Wheaton once said, "Gaming is the foundation of the best friendships I’ve ever had, and it’s the mortar that has held my group of friends together." At this point in my life my group of friends are pretty much only people I game with. Whether it's 40K, online gaming, DnD, whatever it happens to be. Most of my gaming sort of stays within this group of friends. There aren't a lot of venues nearby to do social gaming for 40K though I am still looking. For the most part, regardless of the game being played, it's being played it's at one of our houses. Since those in our group are all very well acquainted as we've known each other for some time it's a lot easier to segue into personal things during or after gaming. To us it's all one in the same.

I game with beer buddies. It's social gaming that we do (although some of them DO like to cheese it up and go tourney-mad. We just smile, shake our heads and live with it, though.
(the rest of us are pretty much burned out on tourneys. Too many douchbags for too long, I suppose.)

That is, we drink beer when we game. I only see them on weekends - but I've got other mates who are roleplayers or non-gamers. There's usually booze involved with them, too.

I keep them actually very close. I try and make my closest friends from my gaming store. This gives us a ton to talk about, and always something to do when we hang out. And friends I have who didn't play beifre they met me play now, and I would rather have someone already know how to play then to wait 2 years beifre there really a challenge.

My life is a series of hobbies that are inexorably entwined.

More specifically I spend my free time only in ventures that involve hooking up with random strangers in dark, musty places to whom I have no relation other than the task at hand, often spending a regrettable amount of money and guiltily wondering why later. Worse still, we often perform these duties for hours at a time, listening to verbose music at deafening volumes, practicing positional tactics on one another in hopes of landing a truly worthy opponent later. Never once do we see that our true challenge is to admit that we are content in each other's company regardless of flaw or grievance; instead we depart into the arms of the spinning solar cycle, depressed and in search of a paradoxical comfort of our other venture.

So the answer to your question is more than likely a definite maybe.

Thanks again guys! These replies are all very interesting.... great to see how everyone enjoys their hobby, be it in social company or not.

keep posting!