Where We Gamin’?
I always assumed that Necromancer was sincere in her various and sundry misapprehensions. Now I realize I was mistaken. Posted up beneath a bridge, the girl is clearly trolling.
Before I’m shown a richly-deserved Moon Door, however, allow me to say a few words on the plight of the Evil Party. It is one that I’ve shared all too recently. Not the zombies or the fumigation per se, but the unfortunate lack of adventuring venue.
This summer I find myself in foreign climes, working at a sister school in Berlin. I was drawn into my first D&D game on the first weekend at the hotel. And when my peers discovered that I have experience chucking dice, it quickly became my job to GM.
“But Colin!” you say. “You put your other games on hiatus so you could concentrate on finishing your dissertation!”
To which I reply, “You’re not my supervisor.”
Point is that it’s down to me to dust off Phandelver, acquire wet erase markers, and cut out a bunch of paper standees. All of that is well within my wheelhouse. What proved to be harder was finding a space to game.
Rooms out here are tiny, and I don’t fancy clustering together on someone’s bed. The next logical alternative was to use a hotel meeting room. The bloody things are €30/hour though, and trust me when I say that my games are not worth that rate. Fortune seemed to change when I roped in a local player (befriended at a bar during the Leipzig/Freiburg match). Dude had generous friends with a rooftop venue out in Kreuzberg, and it sounded like an ideal spot. Apparently they really are generous though. They gave the place to refugees from Ukraine, and I can’t fault them for that. It does leave me in a pickle though.
While I check in with hotel management about gaming in the restaurant, why don’t you other denizens of Handbook-World tell us about your venues? Have you ever scrambled to find a new place after the old one fell through? And more generally, what makes an ideal place to game? Share all your tales of fancy high-tech game rooms and ant-infested picnic tables down by the river down in the comments!
THIS COMIC SUCKS! IT NEEDS MORE [INSERT OPINION HERE] Is your favorite class missing from the Handbook of Heroes? Maybe you want to see more dragonborn or aarakocra? Then check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. You’ll become part of the monthly vote to see which elements get featured in the comic next!
let’s see: Library computer room(the glass door silenced our voice enough), workplace breakroom (unable to convince site director to join us for after work), the dark corner in bar (less optinal when trying to tell blue and green pieces apart, but the access to beer makes up with it).
Ideally though some ones apartmnet would be nice but I know my bachelor pad is not suited to host games, so I won’t push others to make space in theirs. The people with kids tend to offer their dinner table as an option as they don’t need to hire a baby sitter.
> dark corner in bar (less optinal when trying to tell blue and green pieces apart, but the access to beer makes up with it).
Just wrapped up session 1 of Phandelver. Bartender was so tickled to see people playing D&D he comped the coffee. Turned out to be a solid venue. 😀
Swankiest venue: My buddy Jamie’s man-cave. The wife and kids are on the two upstairs floors (unless the little guys come to listen in or Jennifer bakes us all treats). The bar and mini-fridge hold libations adult and tame, the counter has space for the inevitable pizzas, the long tables and erase mats allow plenty of gaming space for large/small crews, and the DM’s chair is a bar-chair: ridiculously high, but in line-of sight of *everything.*
Most primal gaming experience: A pencil-stub, a pocket notebook, and “guess a number” for RNG– DMing an ad-libbed adventure to forestall boredom on an airport shuttle to Hell– Cimarron, NM to Albuquerque.
Oof. There are few places with more ambient psychic damage than an airport. Did your improvised heroes make their connecting flight?
Mostly, I’ve played in other people’s or my own apartment.
My late group used to meet at a community center that made rooms available for all kinds of social activity without charging money, but some of the other people gathering there took a childish delight in being disruptive, and space was always at a premium.
So yeah: those of us who had digs would play host to those who didn’t.
It was more ideal in that we didn’t have to jostle for space, and the only music playing was what we put on ourselves.
Necromancer… you’re a Necromancer. Casting Command Undead won’t hurt the zombies at all and you can just tell them to leave.
Also? Stop making so many zombies that you can’t control all of them!
“So wait. Don’t… make zombies?”
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/many-minions-2
*visible confusion*
“Don’t make more until the old ones have broken down!”
The Venue-of-Last-Resort? McDonald’s. The number of session zeros I have held at one McDonald’s or another over the years…one time I even ran a Vampire the Masquerade Larp in the closed off upper floor dining room of a major city McDonald’s restaurant.
Otherwise, usually someones house (often mine), a library, game club, an enclosed car port, or an old Children’s Court building…
Ah man… I can just hear the opening chords of vampire club wafting over the McDonald’s PA system:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2j4vbaK2VI
We’re lucky to have a dedicated boardgaming-bar in town
Just gotta make certain you reserve a table, especially when the game’s set for friday evening or the weekend.
My friendly local may have a lead on a dedicated board gaming club.
The hotel bar is good enough, but it would be nice to have a bit of privacy so that I could enact a proper goblin warcry.
I’ve had RL gaming mostly in conventions and occasionally in tabletop gaming hobby shops (the kind of stores that sell dice).
I’ve been spoiled over the years. Lots of in-house gaming in my own hobby room.
Loving the casual / modern setting outfits the evil gang has. Very murderhobo-y. Surprised they still haven’t started recruiting for a beefy replacement for their party.
Yeah, those outfits do look good on them. A fresh new wardrobe can do wonders for a character. ^_^
> Surprised they still haven’t started recruiting for a beefy replacement for their party.
I need to decide if Paladin is joining them before I hold open auditions.
What, no Patreon polls for such decisions?
Don’t tempt me, Frodo!
For what little it’s worth, I vote “yes”. That sounds hilarious.
If anything, the fumigation will make sure there’s no pesky maggots and other necrosis-munching critters infesting Necro’s adored subjects.
On the other hand, that’s also how you end up with undead lobster shells, ghost rats, scarab exoskeletons or infernal swarms.
Come on, bro. I’m scarred enough by the scarab swarms from “The Mummy” without needing the undead version.
The scarab swarms from “The Mummy” were already the undead version. How else do you think they survived for millennia in an underground tomb with no food?
Movie bugs can sustained indefinitely by feeding off the sounds of plucking violins.
You won’t like the Mummy’s Mask AP then. Or Dwarf Fortress.
Gaming exclusively online for the past few years. Prior to that, we used a meeting room at my workplace after-hours, but management unsurprisingly shut that down when the pandemic started…
Super disappointed that I couldn’t find any wet erase markers in time. Apparently it’s Whit Monday in Germany. Everything was closed.
In consequence, it was in-person Roll 20. Boo and hiss!
Yeah, that was an advantage of playing at the office… access to the stationary cupboard, whiteboards and markers, etc. Some of the diagrams left on the whiteboards probably confused people the following morning…
I love the notion of unwitting folks puzzled at the detritus of gaming. Always imagine “his master’s voice.”
Denny’s, Steak and Shake, and occasionally the common rooms of people’s dorms, used to be our “emergency go to’s. Even ran games in a gazebo once.
Of course those were “sit-down rpgs”, for LARPs I’ve run in night clubs, parking lots, parking garage ‘roof’, city parks after dark, camp sites, condemned buildings and lots, an entire abandoned neighborhood†, storm tunnels/sewers†, empty stores, unused college buildings, community clubhouses (rented for the weekend), and undeveloped public and private land. Used an outdoor amphitheatre at a park once as well, kinda fits under “city park”, but we had to ‘rent’ it (refundable deposit).
But then for LARPing you need a good deal of space, more than you can get in one person’s apartment or house (though I’ve done that too, you work with the space you’ve got not the space you wish you had).
.† Those were both exceptionally dangerous, scary, and afterwards I swore I’d never use those type of spaces again. This is what comes of “desperate for a large space and has friends who have stupid ideas”.
> Even ran games in a gazebo once.
A profoundly risky endeavor.
My players spent a great amount of time trying to find a proper venue in a very, very shitty part of town. The first one was a motel run by a very creepy gnome, had no locks and the TV sometimes randomly turned on and started telling them not to trust the gnome.
After they decided to leave, they discovered that while the next one was pretty nice, the entire staff were actually dog nazis pretending to be humans with magic items, and they collectively decided that, that was someone else’s business and left that place as well.
The third was actually supposed to be a normal one, a nice little mom and pop place. That freaked them out even more and they left that one as well.
The final one was just a regular shitty motel, and I don´t think I have ever seen a group be so happy about that fact.
Apart from that most of my parties tend to be pretty mobile, rarely sticking to one place for long. Through my longest running group have recently learned the benefits of staying at really expensive hotels, where they do their best to carter to your whims and don´t ask too many questions if the hot-tub is filled with blood.
Can see that I totally misunderstood the question for being in game places. Out of game I am so lucky that I have friends who own nice big tables.
For me, as long as I have space for my computer to look up stuff when I DM, then I am good. Generally try to keep tech away from the table otherwise, but I have had some rather successful games where everyone had a computer at the table. How we kept focus I don´t know.
Apart from that, the most high tech tool I tend to use is Excel to keep track of things. Stuff like music I generally leave to a player to handle as I don´t really have a strong grasp on it.
The most important thing for a venue, IMO, is a nice kitchen (Or having a take-out place nearby) and a good, big, table. The rest is just a bonus.
Thank Christ. Here I thought you were gaming in Nightvale.
Ideally, either a local game shop is hosting the game, or one of the players involved has a nice basement or something they’re willing to lend out. But I’ve had plenty of other arrangements, especially earlier in the pandemic. How many of you can say you’ve played Pathfinder in a barn?
(It’s well-ventilated…too ventilated to use in winter, though we certainly tried. Have you ever tried rolling dice while wearing mittens? ☆☆☆☆☆, would not recommend. ★★☆☆☆ in the other seven months of the year, though. Would recommend if your friends still think the pandemic is worth worrying about, and one of them has a barn.)
Bet it would be good for an Animal Farm RPG though.
Well, the best gaming venue I’ve ever played was probably Round the Table, a board game store in my hometown area, where they had their own root beer they sold in growlers and the guy behind the counter would take your little caeser’s order and phone it over to the one two doors down in the same strip mall. Lots of open games to try, magic cards for people who are into that, lots of dice sets to lure in the rest of us.
The only public place I’ve gamed that wasn’t a Gaming Space was an Alfie’s Pizza—a group of 18-20 year olds posting up and pulling out Eclipse Phase books and a bunch of pencils and paper in a pizza place during slow hours? I like to think they saw it as a mutually beneficial arrangement.
I hope you entertained the pizza guys. I know I’d have appreciated the live performance during a slow shift.
Does playing Ace of Aces (the WW1 flipbook airial combat game) count as playing an RPG? Did that with a friend of mine while donating plasma at the bloodbank. The nurses, and a lot of the other people there, where rather bemused.
Being an older gamer, with a family with kids, we usually play at our dinner table, which can seat 10 in a pinch, so is able to seat 6 comfortably. Or at friends houses and gaming tables that have similar setups.
Started rpg-gaming at a gaming club that was in the party room above a bar. The owner had an interest in both board-gaming and RPG’s and so we could play these there every Sunday night, as that was a slow day for the bar and parties anyway, and we would get drinks at the bar downstairs.
Played in a 16th century French castle during a convention there. And in a rebuild medieval castle, now a youth hostel, in Bacharach, Germany, with a magnificent view of the Rhine river, at the yearly convention there. Actually, if you were in Germany last Pentecost weekend, you could have gone to that place and convention yourself! I needed a sixth player for my Pendragon game there…
Did you convert any of the bloodbank folks to gamers in a sort of reverse-vampirism?
Too bad I missed you, Louis! Would have been happy to try and pull some strings and sit in. Hit me via the socials if you’ve got any other openings in the country. I’m on the continent through the end of July.
Since I think about 2017 all my gaming has been done online, before that it was either a room in the students union, a string of student kitchens, or the living room of one of the few in the local gaming community that wasn’t a student, games have switched from one player’s kitchen to another, or on more than one occasion the game moved to skype for that week if no physical location was available, or indeed if a game was continuing to run during the summer, I do miss gaming in person
One day when I’m grow up and get rich, I’ll have a proper gaming room. Then I’ll be King Geek of Nerd Mountain!
Wow! Coming back from a lengthy hiatus (and thus forgetting my former pen name) first thing I learn is that you’re in Germany w/o a place to play. Can I invite you over to my place? It is a two hours drive from Berlin, so to any redblooded US citizen this is considered as “in the neighbourhood”, isn’t it?!
Cheers, TGFKauW!
Sadly I got no car, so the distance is suddenly relative. While I doubt I’ll convince my gaming group to make the trek, hit me on the socials if you’d like to figure some kind of meetup. Always happy to roll dice and drink beers. 😀
I have been lucky enough to live in the same city as my awesome parents for most of my life, and they love board games enough to already have a gaming room I can borrow. My tabletop games have never been a problem. As someone else mentioned, it’s LARPs that are the real sticking point. At the moment I’m trying to run a werewolf larp, and while backyards will work for a couple more months, come Wisconsin winter that will cease to be an option.
Just gotta wait for your winter coat to come in. 😛