So, as some of you may know, I'm in South Korea at the moment. I've met a wide variety of people, to put it mildly, but I actually managed to run into a pretty decent and diverse group of nerds. My South African friend spent 200k won (near but less than $200) on a 3.5 DM book, Player's Guide, and a couple pre-made campaigns. Then we hauled up to Changwon (home of LG) and met up with a Brit and two Newfies. The Newfie was experienced but the Saffer wanted to DM. Most us, though, had no experience. I'd played loads of BG, IWD, PS:T, and NWN so I was familiar with the general set-up but the character creation from scratch was new to me. It was fascinating getting a peek under the hood of those games (how stats are actually generated). The character creation process took us ages but we finally managed to get it down. Only got an hour or so into the campaign of awkward silences as we tried to figure out what kind of "checks" to do, though I think we're getting the hang of it. The first combat scenario was a bit of a mess as my dwarven fighter was immediately tripped, drew aggro, and wept under his shield, but we got through it okay. We had been at the table for over 5 hours so we called it a night, but I gotta say, as dubious as I was doing actual role-playing, it was a really enjoyable time. The laid-back group helped a lot.
Then we hit up a couple waygook bars and got shitfaced. 9/10