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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 993449" data-attributes="member: 99">*A dapper chap sporting a handlebar moustache, wearing a three piece suit, saunters up to the bar at Talon's Gentlemans Gaming Club...*"Good day, Geeves.  Geoffrey, Reginald and I were going to get back to our RttToEE game in just a few moments, but I thought I'd take a drink first.  Smiting evil is a dry and thirsty business and all that, you know."Amusing thought.  But not practical I don't think.The problem that I see with this whole business is precisely one of the things that makes this hobby great:  Minimal requirements.I'm a scuba diver too.  Want to talk about a bunch of gear and having a "place to play"?  The gear alone costs hundreds and hundreds of dollars.  And getting to a place to go diving usually requires a boat that even the serious diver doesn't want to have to buy.  The high costs of the stuff and the transportation justifies what people spend to rent those things.Face it, what it takes to engage in a roleplaying game is not terribly daunting.  Once you've got the books and dice, all you really need is comfortable seating.  Everything else is very optional.My group wouldn't dream of trying to play 3E without a battlemat, but that only bumps our requirements to needing a decent sized flat surface (which isn't hard to come by).  We use miniatures, but we could (and have) gotten by with tokens of some sort.  Could the game store provide all these things?  Of course.  And they could make the whole set up very comfortable and nice too.  But that costs money and costs must be recovered through either significantly increased sales (which I'm not convinced would naturally result from such a setup) or charging to use the gaming table.The kicker is that, assuming that a group already has a place to play and is primarily using the store's gaming space because it is "nicer" than what they have at home, their dollars may be better spent actually improving their own space than renting somebody elses.  If it costs each player $5 each week to rent the table space for a few hours, he could have spent that money on a miniature or some new dice or dry erase pens and the group would quickly amass a treasure trove of stuff for their home setup.  It is just too relatively easy to spend that money on the stuff rather than the table rent and have something nice to show for it in the end.Somebody mentioned a store with a LAN setup.  That seems a more workable idea because you can't just save up $5 per week for a few weeks and have a LAN setup in your house.  In other words, it is a much harder situation to replicate in the comfort of your own home for a fairly low cost.  Even so, the only place that tried such a business around here (that I know of) quickly went under.  I'm lucky though since one of the guys in our game group DOES have a LAN setup in his house <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> .I'm all for making the store look nicer and I agree that little touches (like spacecrime's framing of the posters) help make for a more "neat" environment.  And if you're going to have gaming tables, something besides hard metal folding chairs would be great.  But I still can't see enough people paying to play to justify anything approaching a Gentleman's Club atmosphere.If you do make it work though, and Gary Gygax happens to drop by, he likes Bombay Saphire martinis with 3 olives stuffed with Blue Cheese.  Just so you know.</blockquote>

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