The Gaming Area Part 1 or Oh My Aching Butt

February 26th, 2009

This is part 1 of a planned 3 part posting.

A good gaming area is made of four fundamentals: space, comfort, access and environmental control.  My best gaming area was in an old office building at a large conference table with nice comfortable office chairs.  That was 1993 in Colorado Springs and I’m along way from that.   My current gaming area doubles as a dining room.   While it has seen more slain kobolds than slain chickens, it functions as a dining room far better than functioning as a gaming area.  Here are some photos:

game table 1

game table addition

You might recognize this as a table ready to play A2: Kobold’s Lair: Outside from The Keep on the Shadowfell.  Notice that everything looks so organized and there is tabletop visible.  Also notice that all the dice are still in the bowl and there are no players around the table.

Space

Using 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons as the model game, the required space to run a game has exploded.  The minimum requirements include one set of dice, one set of core rule books, a battle map, miniatures, character sheets and pencils.  My 4e games are a little larger.  I use 2 Players Handbooks, a set of dice for each player, character sheets with cut out power cards (Kiznet’s), and a large Chessex battle map.  My group size if 6 (including me) but has been as large 7 or 8.  That is a lot of real estate.

Players need room to spread out.  They need to be able to put drinks down without fear of it being easily knocked over.  They need to be able to open of the PHB without covering other players character sheets.  The DM needs a screen.  I would like a laptop at the table.  With my small dining room table, I have stopped using a DM’s Screen and my laptop sits on a TV tray.  Round trackers, character splat sheets, and various stat blocks get all mixed up.  It has forced me to be slightly more organized in my game prep but ultimately it makes gaming a bit uncomfortable.

Comfort

Dining takes about an hour.  Gaming considerably longer.  These wooden chairs are painful on the back and butt.  My players are all very polite about it but I can tell about 90 minutes into the game they aren’t comfortable.  I feel like the strict parent yelling “please keep all four legs of the chair on the floor”.

Lack of comfort impacts focus level.  Once the players start getting uncomfortable the start to fidget.  They start to think about doing something that isn’t in these chairs.  In my group of young men sometimes things get a little too LARPy with the combat “examples”.

Access

A good gaming area needs easy access to items:  Drinks, snacks, research books, and bathrooms.  This is one area my gaming area does pretty well.  Just on the other side of the doorway behind the DM’s chair is a fridge and lots of counter space for snacks and just off camera to the right is a drink cooler full of soda, water and juice.  My space constraints means I can’t have snacks at the table and players need to get up to get a handful of chips but they don’t need to leave the area of effect of spoken word.

You don’t want players having to take side adventures to go get a Coke or a cut of pizza.  One of the players will inevitably get up to get a snack just moments before the tension level rises.  Even worse, they will want a slice of pizza just before their turn in a round of combat.

I’ll leave bathroom access for another post about gaming etiquette.  I think it is sufficient to say that access is important

Environmental Control

While heat control is important, that not what I’m talking about.  On the hierarchy of needs for gamers heating is fundamental.  A good gaming area needs to have control over the environmental surroundings.  Items like extraneous noise and foot traffic around the gaming area.  Depending on the night this is hit or miss in my gaming area.  If other family members are around they have to go in and out the front door and that means walking right passed us.  The kitchen can sometimes be a high traffic area.  That drink cooler I mentioned as being so great for access to drinks?  It is loud and a problem for environmental control.

Nothing more distracting and mood breaking than when everyone is whispiering because the NPC is whispering about how there is a scary monster in the other room.  One of the players is whispering his actions and the cooler turns on and no one can hear him.  Everyone if forced to talk loud to be heard.  Or imaging a session and someone puts on Lord of the Rings on the TV in the other room.  As soon as Balrog enters players are going to start making mention of it.  Or worse, comparing the boring moment your session just happens to be in with the excitement of Gandalf’s “You shall not pass!”  Good luck competing with one of the masters.

My gaming area needs a little work but that’s sort of the point of this series of posts.  I’ve got some home improvements coming up and will get to rebuild a room.  That room will be my new gaming area.  I think it is important to point of the flaws in my current situation before I start thinking about great improvements.  What sort of flaws do you have in your gaming environment?

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I Think My Heart Might Explode

February 24th, 2009

I have a group of college students that I DM a game for during their breaks.  We were playing 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons and a few Savage Worlds one-shots.  All of them were new to role-playing games before this group.  When we first started I was a little nervous about how it was going to turn out.  I was old enough to be their fath…really cool uncle [1].  After the first couple of sessions I knew everything was going to be okay.  I had no idea how okay until recently.

Of the members of the group:

These young men are all incredibly smart and motivated.  The fact that they went off to do their own thing at their respective parts of the world speaks to their character.  Gaming is now part of who they are.  It will shape, if even minutely, who they will become.

When I look back at people who shaped my life it is a strange hodge-podge of people.  Their is my father who gave me my DNA and a sense of responsibilty.  Their is my mom’s husband who gave me toughness and the “everyone is an individual” philosophy.  Their is my band director who gave me culture.  Finally there is my DM.  He gave me creativity and problem solving.

It makes me so incredibly happy that maybe, just maybe, these young men will look back on me as influencing their lifes.

[1] Okay.  I’m technically old enough to be their father if I had ‘em at a young age.  I’m a form of father figure to one of them.  He is the son of my girlfriend.

[2] Anyone know a gaming group in Australia looking for people?

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A First Glance at 4th Edition

May 31st, 2008

I am a dirty, no good, thief. I, maybe, have a 3% in pick pockets but I have a laptop of thieving +97% so it got away with it. Wait a second! If I got away with it why am I posting about it and admitting guilt? Told you I’m not a good thief.

In case you haven’t heard, and I seriously doubt you would be reading this if you hadn’t, Dungeons and Dragons, 4th Edition, Core Rule Books were leaked on the Internet. I fought the urge for about 30 minutes and then had to download them. I will justify my download with the fact that I’ve had my 4E books on pre-order for a long time. I, like Chatty DM, prefer books over PDFs so my pre-order still stands. Oh, and I have no doubt these are the actual books.

WotC’s is partially to blame as well. How can you sell me a module with Quick Start Rules that don’t cover the things you KNOW your players are going to ask for?  What’s a respectable Dungeon Master (no good thief) supposed to do?  There was a module I bought for a game I am dying to play.  It doesn’t provide rules for everything I know I will need when I run the game. Then, there is an opportunity to get the rules.  I need to use all resources at my disposal when DMing. [1]

When looking at 4E, I’m wearing the glasses of a jaded, old, Second Edition player.   I never owned a 3.X book.  To me, THAC0 is modern gaming.  When comparing my first look at 4E to the trusty 2E, man is it ever different.  Let me pick an area where things are different: death and healing.

Second Edition AD&D was brutal on its players.  Characters have a set number of hit points and when you hit 0, death.  Lots of DMs have a house rule for negative hit points but the rules state when you reach 0 you are dead.  4th edition things are different.  When you hit 0 hit points you are unconscious.  Each round, at the end of your turn, you make a saving throw.  If you should obtain damage equal to the negative amount of your character’s “bloodied value”, your character dies.  Death in 4E appears to be pretty rare.  More so when you look at the new healing.

Second Edition offered two types of healing: natural and magical.  Natural healing is achieved via rest at a maximum rate of 3 hit points a day[2].  Magic healing is from items, such as potion of healing, or spells.   It is magical so it works better and used as a more immediate form of healing.  4th Edition offers second wind.  Once per encounter, unless you rest for 5 minutes during the encounter, a character can spend a healing surge and restore some hit points.  There are a limited amount of healing surges.  Oh yeah, and you restore to full hit points after a night of rest.

I haven’t played a single session of  4th Edition yet.  I want to but I have yet to get enough players together.  But, after a reading, healing and death really change the feel of the game.  If people from the forum I had this discussion with read this they will crucify me.  Crucification aside, it does change the feel of the game.  Gone are the extended role-playing session while a character needs to heal.  Gone are the problem solving ways to deal with combat.  Why not just run into combat when you can heal and run nearly at will?

There are also a lot of good things I have seen in these PDFs that I’ll cover in future posts.  It is just easier to point out the negative differences without playing the game.  I don’t think the 4th Edition rules will make me change my style of game and I am dying to get a group together to play Keep on the Shadowfell with.

[1] For the record: I don’t think it is WotC’s fault.

[2] There is also the healing/herbalism proficiency

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