The starkville group has two people that have been playing together for a few years, one whose been in for the last year, and one who joined 4 sessions ago. All 4 of us have played various games for years but the newest guy has only played 3.5 with the group and the player whose been around for a year has only played 3.5 for that year.
We do have some house rules but I don't think you will find a game anywhere that uses only the written rules as they are written. That's one of the things about RPGs... one of the common rules is only use the rules that your group think add to the fun. That is the way its supposed to be played.
In our case, the House rules are there to make the game a little more realistic. The House rules document can look a little overwheming but it breaks down into just a few changes and it wouldn't be hard for us to point out in play what the normal rule would be.
We play on saturday night. If you want to meet in person and talk about joining we could do lunch or dinner and see if we'd be a good fit for each other. You could try it out for a few weeks and see how it goes. (As it happens we aren't meeting at the regular time this week because I have a conflict and I just realized NOLA con is this weekend. Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!! You need to
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I can't say much about other groups. I've looked on craig's list, yahoo, the wizards site, meetups.com and other places. The gaming options since Katrina aren't great. We've had a few people find this forum and post but like most forums, there aren't enough people for a critical mass that will keep new people checking daily. There is the halfing from Baton Rouge who posts a lot and he might know some people there but I assume you are in New Orleans. There is a convention coming up soon and we are going hoping to meet more locals and getting a few new players.