It's perhaps both fortunate and unfortunate that I and my friends started playing DnD as a result of the news of Mr. Gygax's death. I guess it's something I'd been vaguely interested in but didn't know anyone who wished to play and I was hesitant to broach the topic; battling goblins and the undead has an element of nerdiness that a lot of people don't wish to associate themselves with, even those who do it on PC and console. Thankfully a friend mentioned the idea of playing so I bought a few books (GURPS - I wished to 'future-proof' my pen and paper (pnp) roleplaying by learning something versatile) and wrote up a simple dungeon crawl with a shallow learning curve. The party consisted of my friend, his girlfriend and my girlfriend*. To my surprise and delight he took a supporting role as his (normally quite introverted) significant other launched herself into the part. It was the most silly, wonderful, exciting four hours I've ever spent with a group of people sitting down. Over the last few months I've been listening to a multitude of podcast 'actual-play' games which have shown me the depth and diversity of pnp RPG's. I highly recommend Role Play Public Radio http://slangdesign.com/rppr/ and Critical Failure http://criticalfailuregame.wordpress.com/ Given that people are playing by forum, via webcam and on IRC I think that DnD is going to become more popular as accessibility improves. Being born after 1990 may present more opportunity to play. *I will now point out that although this is my first post on /. I've been reading long enough to say, "Yes, really - girls." :)