You Might be a Gamer if... losing your dice bag would be a serious financial blow. you could paper you bathroom in character sheets. you could paper your bathroom in different versions of just ONE character. you are unable to walk past the latest TSR supplement without leafing through it, even though you know it's going to be bad. you have more entertaining "No-shit,-there-I-was-in-a-game" stories than you do anecdotes about your family. you talk about your characters as if they are real people. you alternate between referring to your characters in the first and the third person. and none of your friends gets confused. you've ever spent a significant fraction of your life modifying game rules that you didn't like and, as soon as the system worked to your satisfaction, discarded it. when someone says "The blue books," you don't automatically picture the kind that they give you during a college final exam. you worship idols of Gary Gygax in your basement. you burn Gary Gygax in effigy in your back yard. you will not buy comic books with the Dragon Strike (tm) logo on the back. you've ever seen the old AD&D tv series. you're still reading this list. you hang out with people you actively dislike because they give good role-play. you've ever gotten into a screaming match over something that happened in a game (You are so dead! I am not dead!) you've ever neglected to buy the new edition of your favourite game because you already have three. you have more than one photocopied bootleg of a gaming text. you keep old characters around just in case someone might run that system again. (Never mind that its TS: SI) You knew what I meant when I said TS:SI. you have a PhD in manipulating point systems to the best effect, even though you failed high school geometry. you can consume your body weight in junk food in one gaming session. you consider Altoids, Salt-&-Vinegar chips, and blue Teeni Hugs a balanced diet. (or even an acceptable combination.) you have been known to drive to far away places where you paid enormous amounts of money for the privilege of sleeping on floors, eating crap, buying little pewter statues of Gandalf, and meeting dozens of psychopathic members of the alternate (or similar) sex who will follow you around for months, merely for the pleasure of playing with gamers you don't know. and then signed up en masse with all of your friends to play in games with game masters who you've known since high school. you own your own weight in gaming books. the owners of local hobby stores take your checks without ID because they know where you live. you can do AD&D money conversions in your head. you could wallpaper you bedroom in Dragon Mirths (tm). you consider the demise of "What's New With Phil & Dixie" a blow to great literature. you consider the resurrection of "What's New With Phil & Dixie" the redeeming feature of Magic: The Gathering. you consider the 20th century a state of mind. you have a random NPC generator, written in BASIC, designed to run on the Trash-80 or the Commodore 64. you've ever designed your own character sheets. you can be more that three NPCs at the same time without generating more than reasonable confusion in your players. you have ever played a Dwarven character who did not have "axe" or "beard" ANYWHERE in his or her name. you've ever tried to explain gaming to a school counselor, parent, or other PW/OC (Person With/Out Clue). you've suceeded. you've played Talisman more than once. you've finished a game of Talisman. more than once. you're STILL reading this list. you can quote extensively from the Wandering Damage Tables. you've mistaken a d12 or a double d10 for a d20 while playing AD&D and had a THAC0 low enough to hit the 8HD monster, anyway you understood that. you carry AD&D insurance. your AC is so low that even you can't hit yourself. an 87 point Balrog is no big thrill anymore. you bring your dicebag even to diceless roleplaying events. you've ever discovered, after gaming with your significant other, that you like their character better than you do them. you have friends or acquaintances who regularly refer to you as "Og." (Or something similar.) you've ceased responding to your birth name. you spend more money on dice than on food. you sometimes forget what century this is. your first response to any frustrating situation is, "I bash it with my axe." you know a lot of gaming jokes that used to be funny once. your friend(s) who does not game feels very left out of all of your conversations. you have more gaming books than the local hobby store. you've discovered that spare dice make good beanbag filler. you knew that that last question was a ringer: who has more dice than they can use? you have a copy of "Dark Dungeons" kicking around somewhere because a: you thought it was funny b: your parents got concerned that you were living in a fantasy realm. you're sort of disappointed that you haven't reached the level where they start teaching you the real spells (as described in the above "Dark Dungeons" pamphlet) yet: You're sure you must be a high enough level. you've been gaming for more than half of your life. you still laugh when someone says "Hey, Dave, I think the barbarian in the corner wants another beer." the phrase "Collect Call of Cthulhu" brings back fond memories. you can quote the whole "Trolls! Mutants! Trolls! Mutants!" strip from "what's New With Phil & Dixie." you knew a female gamer once. you were a female gamer once. you tend to play characters as different from you in race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, and what have you as possible, just to confuse your friends. (New Englanders only) You were able to find stuff at "Flock, Stock, and Barrel." you've been known to have in-depth conversations about the relative merits of Champions, V&V, Marvel, and DC heroes ignoring the fact that all superhero systems are intrinsically sucky. you like one of the above systems enough that you yelped when I called them all, "sucky." you actually bought TSR's "Dungeoneer's Survival Guide" when it first came out. you've ever tried to discover the strengths and weaknesses of a hemophiliac werewolf. someone is attempting to explain the floorplan of a building to you and you immediately start thinking in terms of 10X10 squares. or 6'x6' hexes. your first though upon walking into a friend's domicile is to reflect on where you'd put the machine-gun nest. you frequently gripe that the Tech Level of Earth isn't advanced enough. you've thought of four or five additions to this list.