Card Flopper or Dice Chucker?

If you're scratching your head over this title then you've obviously never played an RPG before...in non-geek terms that would be "Role-Playing Game".

I work at a game and hobby store so I'm surrounded by a world of fantasy every day and I started thinking about how I could really classify everyone here into two groups, card floppers or dice chuckers. There should actually be a third group for the employee that farts every 5 minutes. Of course, if I wanted to I could just use the one classification of "freak" and that would pretty much take care of everyone, myself included, but I was overcome by a sudden feeling of compassion (mark it on your calendar).

A "card flopper" is anyone that plays collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh! or Pokemon and the such. Magic started in 1993 and it's the CCG (collectible card game) that all others have been based on. They even have a Pro Tour and World Championship which you can catch sometimes on ESPN2. Don't roll your eyes...it's at least as exciting as poker and they've been showing the same championship game on there for an entire year. Most of these Magic players tote boxes upon boxes of cards to trade with other players or decks to challenge someone with. My girlfriend calls it math with pretty pictures. Card floppers are usually competetive people that like math, which is weird because I hate math and would consider myself a "card flopper".

A "dice chucker" is someone that plays role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, World of Darkness, Vampire and so on. Does anyone else remember when people thought D&D was satanic? Oh wait, some people still do. The reason they are called dice chuckers is because various types of dice (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20 - the number denotes how many sides are on the die, i.e. d20=20-sided die) are rolled to determine character stats and probabilities for most actions. These gamers aren't always the sharpest tool in the shed, but they can unleash a barrage of useless information unlike anything you've ever seen when spouting off statistics for any of the thousands of creatures in the D&D universe. Dice chuckers are usually highly imaginative gamers with strengths in science(fiction).

Normally a person is either a card flopper or dice chucker, but not both. A hybrid is possible but you would end up with someone that has coke-bottle glasses and the personality of a cashew nut. In the gaming community however this would be known as "a fine catch".

What does all this teach us...nothing in particular, but it lets me keep Harvey off my back (har, har) and you get to find out some personal details about myself. The reason I bring it up is to illustrate how even a sub-culture of gamers and sci-fi nuts can have very different interests and not just lumped into a "one-size-fits-all" category...although a large majority of them do fall into the "30 years old and never seen a tit" classification.

It's best not to question this oddball post lest you be assaulted by my mathematical onslaught of cardboard pictures.