Regular In-Person Games: How long do you travel?

[AnotherGuy]

This was prompted by @Sword's comment in another thread about the time taken for him/her to travel to their in-person games, so I just wondered how long Enworlders travel these days to participate in in-person games.

 

[Reynard]

Before the pandemic ended our in person game, it was about 45 minutes each way.

 

[payn]

For a long time my gaming group was all within 20min one way of each other. Since pandemic folks have moved around a bit now nobody is really centrally located anymore and travel is up to 45min or so for at least one person. We have not returned to F2F

I do read about some people travelling 1,2,3 hours for a session. Thats some dedication and is believable in the U.S.

 

[Ulfgeir]

If I go by car, it takes maybe 50 minutes or so to drive (one way) the 65 km to the place my group play at. The time depends a bit on the traffic, but usually it is no problems on the highway. If I were to go by bus, then it is about 1h 40m one way. When I worked in Gothenburg, it still took 30+ min or so to get there by car, despite being much short distance, but then I had to go through bad traffic from the centre of the city.

 

[TheSword]

So there is a history to this. I’m from the Midlands and when I was a teenager my best friends family moved to Kent (about 3-4 hour drive away). I used to go and visit a couple of times a year for a week or so vacation and when I did I’d always jump on to his weekly D&D game in the local pub. That’s were I met @GuyBoy and others.

After a few years of that, @GuyBoy and the most engaged players in that group split off to make a more invitation only weekend group and slowly phased out weeknight games in the local. This coincided to me moving to Guildford (an hour or so away) and I started attending a regular weekend game every 3-4 weeks.

Fast forward 10 years and a job came up in Kent and I moved in with one of the DM players as a lodger for 4 and bit years. These were the golden years of gaming! Then when work took me back to the midlands it was back to commuting. It’s a long way to go but we play all Friday night and most of Saturday so it’s worth the effort. The nice thing is we generally fit 2-3 campaigns in each weekend so we get a mix of playing and DMing.

Ultimately I think sometimes you have to make an effort if you want to keep in touch with people and when you’ve been playing regularly with people for 20+ years they become friends for life! The down side is it’s harder to acquire newer players but I think that’s another way online games have been brilliant.

 

[billd91]

I've had a local game group for over 25 years now and the travel time is usually 20 minutes or less from home to site, even when the site bounces between a couple of different hosts in the group. A couple of players in the surrounding bedroom communities go a little farther, but we've got decent highway connections so it's not too bad - except for the games with kids on school nights, then we go hybrid F2F/online.

I've very rarely had a longer commute to gaming aside from special occasions.

 

[cranberry]

Never more than an hour.

 

[delericho]

Two rooms over.

Back before my gaming was hugely curtailed, it would depend on the length of the game session - when we had games on a weeknight evening, my limit was half an hour each way for a 3-hour game. Before that I used to have much longer sessions on a Saturday, where I would travel 45 mins each way for a 6-hour game. I can't see that ever becoming a possibility again, at least this side of retirement.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Before going online with the pandemic, I hosted one of my games, and drove about 10 minutes for the other (finding parking, however, sometimes bumped that time up, and could be the bigger hassle).

 

[Umbran]

For in-person tabletop play, usually I am the host and GM.

For live-action games, I've been known to drive through several states and get a hotel room for weekend-long campaign games.