The topic for Day 13 of the RPGaDAY 2024 Challenge is Evocative Environments. I pull up a search engine and learn that Evocative means “To bring an especially emotional response.” So a good memory of an RPG environment that comes to my mind?
I think I’m going to talk about the physical (and not-so-physical) environments that I’ve played in the past. For myself, one of the biggest reasons I want to participate in this hobby is the friendships that I make with my fellow players. Obviously a good gaming environment will enhance the joy of the games we play.
Private Environments: Gaming at my house or the house of a friend. In my humble opinion, this is the best option for gaming. Either myself or someone I know very well is in charge of the room, the times available, what can be brought in for food, etc. This is the one that I find most relaxing, especially if I’m the person doing the hosting. At the previous house we lived in we had a near-perfect setup for a gaming area. The new house that I moved into several years ago isn’t quite there yet, not without attempts from my wife and I. I’d love to get back into a position where we could host a monthly or every-other-week game again. I did host a game when I introduced my daughter’s 5E playing friends to an OSR game.
Public Environments: Back in the 90’s I know that a group or two tried to game at an all night diner. However they tend to frown on you if you stay for more than a couple of hours without ordering a ton of food. We quickly learned that this wasn’t a solution to our gaming location needs. Then and now I’ve gamed in local gaming stores. There have been quite a few over the years that realized that bringing in gamers help drive sales. However if the store gets popular, it can lead to another layer of scheduling issues. Sometimes you can bring in your own food, sometimes you cannot. It would depend upon the store ownership. This isn’t a bad option, but may have it’s own set of challenges. Playing at a park is also a major challenge as well. Especially as more gaming environments are needing electricity for laptops and tablets. I know I’ve tried them in the past and we didn’t continue with that option.
Online Environments: I’ve tried and attempted a few online campaigns. I’ve mentioned a previous Starfinder campaign that I did with friends. While the system was OK, gaming with friends was great, but I will never use Fantasy Grounds again as the program sucked to high heaven. Later I was in a Far Trek campaign over Roll20. Being browser-based program it ran 1000% better than the Fantasy Grounds disaster. In both games we used Discord as our method of in and out-of game communication. As I mentioned on my Day 2 RPGaDAY2024 entry I was going to be in a Castles and Crusades campaign that was just about to start on The Foundry VTT, but the Castle Keeper had to cancel after too many scheduling issues came up. I was looking forward to both the C&C system and learning about The Foundry. While in-person gaming is my first choice when sitting down to play, I won’t turn down an online game as long as it’s not on Fantasy Grounds and if we have a good session zero to learn about the (hopefully) new gaming friends that I’m going to play with.
Convention Environments: I’ve become an addict to playing at my local SaltCON gaming convention. Not only am I playing, but I even broke my “no volunteering” rule that I had originally set up for this con and started running games for them. I also like the fact that I’ve been able to network with local (and sometimes not local) members of the gaming community. There are a couple of other smaller gaming conventions in the state, but they are not as close as SaltCON. So I hope to try them out sometime soon, even if it’s only for one day. A con two counties away had a booth at an earlier SaltCON, but there was no one there the entire weekend for me to inquire with. GenCon just ended and I’ve been reading the online reports from attendees. It would be nice for me to attend this event, and perhaps someday it may happen. But right now it looks like I’ll have to put it in the same category as attending a DragonCon other big-ticket events, nice to think about, but logistically not reachable at this time.
What is the most ideal environment for you to game in? Did I miss an environment that I didn’t mention above? Tell me about it. This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com with any comments.