Knights & Knaves Alehouse

We usually game in one of the player's dining room. They have a lot of pottery his wife made, and a massive shelf of gaming books, mostly GURPS (he used to be a buddy of Steve Jackson's and got free stuff). Gaming usually starts slow because there are two kids to get to bed - the excitement of guests showing up is more than the two little nippers can stand.

What room and general environment is your place of gaming?

Back before SWMBO came into my life, I had converted the largest of the bedrooms in my house into a dedicated game room. Huge dinning table one wall of nothing but bookshelves with my gaming books, etc. etc. Of course it had the obligatory gaming posters, maps, and such and a trunk in the corner had all the props in it to convert it into what ever mood setting we needed depending on the game.

Since SWMBO, all the games have moved to the dinning room with the same big old table. But, all the bookshelves and game books have migrated to my office. We are considering converting my office to the new game room. Tina wants a new dinning table and I can't part with our old one. Either that will happen or if I get the new garage I want (heated and cooled) I will be moving all the gaming gear out there and build two or three 4x8 tables so we can get back into some mini wargames and board wargames as well as RPGs without having to worry about taking them all down at the end of the day.

I also used to have a dedicated gaming room too. It was musky, smelly, and poorly lit, but it was true gaming heaven.

Then came the kids

Since the kiddos have come along, I've sold or traded off a good 90% of my games and now enjoy life as a gaming minimalist. Other than some sacred gems, if I don't play it once a year at least, it's gone. Now I just grab the few books I need (soon to be my boxed set, hooray!), some dice, and setup shop around the dining table.

I have a finished basement room that contains 2 small book shelves of game books and 8 large wall shelves of miniatures and 2 tables, each 5 foot by 2 and a half feet, that can be pushed together for a 5x5 gaming surface. There's even a half bathroom attached.

It's kind of cold in the winter, and before I had put in a new flourescent light on the ceiling, it was very, very dark. The carpet's a mess with some water damage (and a thousand little soda stains, thanks guys). But, all in all it's a damned fine game room.

DrSkull wrote:There's even a half bathroom attached.

My room had one of these as well. Come to think of it, it may have been one of the sources of the odors...

Generally I set up the big table in my dining room on gaming nights.

Subsidiary question:
Of the DMs out there, who has a dedicated desk or chair for writing adventures and such?

I used to have a comfortable chair right next to my shelf of gaming books. Then computers came along, and for a long time I used the computr that was near the bookshelf. Then the internet came along. Now I have a desk with no computer where I do most of the creative work, but I move back and forth to the computer desk for internet resources.

It's not the most efficient set up in the world, but I find that sitting in front of a computer actually reduces my creativity.

I game at wheggi's dining room table.

Mythmere wrote:Subsidiary question:
Of the DMs out there, who has a dedicated desk or chair for writing adventures and such?

I totally don't have a dedicated desk or chair and I always compose everything directly onto computer. There are three PCs at home that I use (two desktops and a laptop) and a couple at work, so I keep all my material on a USB key.

Right now we game at the kitchen table. Sometimes in the formal dining room or informal dining room. I am setting up a dedicated area on the second floor of my garage. I hope to have it done in a month or two. It will be heated and cooled and has a full bathroom available downstairs (including shower) and a fridge and two microwaves. Might even put a toaster oven up there for mini-pizzas and such.

The group that meets at my house is usually eight or nine strong, so the dining room table is out. We sit around the family room, which has been dedicated to gaming since we got the house. I set out tv trays all over for rolling, writing, and, of course, holding your munchies. There's even room in the middle of the floor for the one guy who must play from the prone position every week.

The family room has a big writing desk where I work on all my adventures, when I get all my work clutter out of the way. It also has one big chair that has become the "DM chair," because it's the nicest single-seat furniture we own that doesn't rock or swivel (bad news for the DM one week when he swiveled and took out his entire DM table).

I'll write stuff anywhere, as I use my laptop, but my maps are all done on a drafting table in my office. There is something to be said for a clean, well-lit place and creativity.

--Ghul

:::EDIT:::

Oh, yeah, forgot to mention -- my group games in a stinky, smelly garage (though it's heated), where we can drink, smoke, fart, scream obscenities, throw dice, and behave like scurvy dogs. Argh! There, in that abysmal place, no wife tells us to quiet down, and no children are disturbed from their sleep, and the pizza delivery guy is quite entertained by our antics...

Dining room table.

My house has an fairly large kitchen. On game nights, I add a long folding table at the end of the normal kitchen table and we can comfortably seat twelve people.

Its funny you bring up a dedicated spot to do work on games. I have always wrote up my games in spiral notebooks. My preferred place to work is in bed or on the couch surrounded by whatever resources I am using. It has been so long since i designed a new game from scratch that the last time was before me and Tina got together. So for the past few months everytimg I have sat down to work on my new Call of Cthulhu campaign I have been getting these sideways looks from her. Finally last week when I was writing up yet another adventure she comes into the bedroom and demands to know why we spent so much money on a good laptop compter if I am going to be writing everything out in notebooks.
LOL. I had never eally thought about it, its just they way I've always done it. Anywho, I assured her that the computer wouldn't go to waste for my campagin material. I told her as we finish each adventure she is more than welcome to enter them in for me. Heh. Funny thing though... she didn't seemed too amused about that idea. Heh.

When I am writing (non-game) i tend to use my compter but have had sever probelms keeping motivated. I finally figured out my writers block. When i was writing constantly i workd on an old royal portable typewriter. I was loosing concentration becasue I couldn't hear my work.
Yeah it sounds silly. But, i recently found a little plugin program called Tiper that i configured to sound just like a typewriter and I can once again sit and write without my brain wondering off in the middle of a sentence.

Jerry