After this week's gaming session, as I was cleaning up, I thought about the evolution of our gaming space.
We've always played at my house, but have moved and changed quite a bit. We started on my back porch, when 4E was released. That worked well for a little while, but we played too late and were getting too loud. So I moved us into the garage. We used the same patio furniture.
That worked well until it got cold. Then we finally moved into the family room. I don't think my wife was thrilled, but she understood and didn't complain.
At first we dragged the patio furniture in, but after we added another player, we outgrew that. So we moved to 2 fold up rectangular tables and folding chairs. To this point, we had used a gridded whiteboard and some maps I drew in Dunjinni and printed out.
Then I wanted to make it easier for myself, so I found an old LCD projector and mounted it from ceiling projecting down on the table. That worked fairly well, but then I was spending too much time setting up and taking it down...we are playing in my family room.
Next stop, move the couches, setup the tables, and project on the wall. This, along with laser pointers and a migration to maptools worked well for us for a long time. But setting it up and tearing it down was getting annoying, especially after getting a new couch set.
We wrapped up our 4E campaign(lvl 30, thank you), and have been playing a little savage worlds, D&DNext, and now AD&D. We don't need a big table anymore. So I hooked a PC up to our 50 inch family room TV, everyone sits on the couch, and we're good to go. Setup is simply cleaning the coffee tables and setting up a couple tray tables. Cleanup is the same. The players are much happier sitting on the comfy couch for hours instead of hard chairs.
So, how has your gaming space evolved?
We've always played at my house, but have moved and changed quite a bit. We started on my back porch, when 4E was released. That worked well for a little while, but we played too late and were getting too loud. So I moved us into the garage. We used the same patio furniture.
That worked well until it got cold. Then we finally moved into the family room. I don't think my wife was thrilled, but she understood and didn't complain.
At first we dragged the patio furniture in, but after we added another player, we outgrew that. So we moved to 2 fold up rectangular tables and folding chairs. To this point, we had used a gridded whiteboard and some maps I drew in Dunjinni and printed out.
Then I wanted to make it easier for myself, so I found an old LCD projector and mounted it from ceiling projecting down on the table. That worked fairly well, but then I was spending too much time setting up and taking it down...we are playing in my family room.
Next stop, move the couches, setup the tables, and project on the wall. This, along with laser pointers and a migration to maptools worked well for us for a long time. But setting it up and tearing it down was getting annoying, especially after getting a new couch set.
We wrapped up our 4E campaign(lvl 30, thank you), and have been playing a little savage worlds, D&DNext, and now AD&D. We don't need a big table anymore. So I hooked a PC up to our 50 inch family room TV, everyone sits on the couch, and we're good to go. Setup is simply cleaning the coffee tables and setting up a couple tray tables. Cleanup is the same. The players are much happier sitting on the comfy couch for hours instead of hard chairs.
So, how has your gaming space evolved?