Where you live: Gamer Paradise or Gamer Wasteland?

[Caliban]

Phoenix, Arizona is good place to game. We have several gaming stores (Imperial Outpost Games, Game Depot, and Samurai Comics to name just a few) that host games, we have an active gaming community in RPGA's, wargames, cardgames, miniatures, and board games.

We also have an active RPGA club (Shield of Almor RPGA club) that runs Living Greyhawk, Living Acanis, Living Force, and Living Spycraft games every month, with a yahoo group (AZ_RPG) to coordinate the games with.

We also have several gaming conventions (Gilacon, Hexacon, and DarkCon) every year.

 

[WaterRabbit]

I live in a gamer Wasteland. We have a couple of comic shops that dabble in d20, but to get anything worthwhile, we have to drive 1 hr. north to Las Cruces, a much smaller town than the mighty city of El Paso, then another hour home. Not to mention there are just not that many players I know about out here. The town is full of what I call closet gamers; individuals who game with 2 or 3 friends from high school and refuse to spread the fun around . My gaming group is 7 strong. We alternate out running everyonce in a while. but, mention gaming to people in this town and they want to grab the nearest priest and perform an exorcism on you.
On another thread, i described the time when a card store owner exclaimed in shock that D&D was the game of the Devil when I asked if he stocked it. all the while standing beneath his huge collection of SPawn toys and Magic TG cards. Man, this place is a horrible wasteland. May have to do something about it....

Las Cruces seems to be a gamer wasteland as well. A very insular gaming community as far as I can tell. I assume you go to COAS as that is the only place I can find any gaming material. They do have a lot of old & out of stock games.

 

[darklight]

Am I the first European to post on this thread?

I live in a wasteland. The nearest shop that has any rpgs is in Copenhagen, 2 hours away, at least they have a pretty good selection and are very mail order friendly. The only gamers I know around here, are the ones I used to play with, and they are just not that interested anymore, though it seems we might get a Call of Cthulhu game going with three players and one GM
There is NO gamer networking and rpgs are generally even less widespread than in the US. Man, I guess I should just move to Boston

darklight

 

[Crothian]

As an aside....my God High St. sucks these days! What exactly are OSU students supposed to do in their free time?!

Usual stuff I guess . So, you local? I know of or have at least tried to meet all the locals on the boards....

 

[masque]

Gamer Wasteland - Your area is relatively a poor place for gamers to live. The selection of gamers to game with is either very small or very poor or both. The occurance of gaming events is either very rare or non-existant. There are very few stores to purchase gaming supplies at, limited to the larger bookstore chains or the Internet. Very few of the people who live here have heard of an RPG and have a hard time understanding the concept.

Where do you live? Why do you think your area is a Gamer Paradise/Gamer Wasteland/or a little bit of both?

Wasteland, definitely. No game books at any store in my city, the next city over I haven't been able to find any either (but I'm sure they exist). In Tokyo, I found the V:tM revised corebook in Japanese, and my friend said he'd found the D&D 3.0 books, but...

No gamers that I've found. My advisor's son is, but he's in Sweden studying. I think my tutor/helper/gofer might play, since he commented to me he thought that Gandalf should have used more magic since he was a wizard. But that's the only lead so far.

PBeMs never seem to go anywhere, and I'm half a word away from the time schedules of the people who would play over AIM or chat or IRC.

The Japanese RPG books look really great, but they tend to be monocolor (the one I flipped through was all maroonish-red and white inside) and on fairly cheap paper. But the illustrations are wonderful. I also like anime, so...

 

[Nighthawk]

Sort of a wasteland. There are quite a few gamers around here, as I've found out, but VERY little networking, and NO game stores. If you want anything within a month of its release, you have to travel out of town to get it.

This is mostly true of my area as well. We have a gaming store in the valley but it is not what it once was, not by any means (times are tough these days for many gaming stores in general, I think).

There are a fair amount of gamers in the region as well, but they apparently are not into any sort of consistent interaction. Fractionalized gaming is what an acquaintance of mine once called it.

It's definitely hit or miss here, with miss being the most common result.

 

[tarchon]

Temperate gamer steppe

 

[Chupacabra]

I live just north of Austin, Texas and it's definitely gamer-friendly. While FLGS are not exactly falling off the trees like ripe fruit here, the ones that do exist are pretty dedicated to servicing our hobby.

That said, the community of the Greater Austin area itself is a pretty darn fertile ground for gaming. You have a good mix of college students, techies (with high disposable incomes), bohemians, creative types, and folks in the computer gaming industry. My current game group had three employees of Electronic Arts in it at one time or another, and each of them was involved in CRPG support.

 

[jimstama]

I live in a Gamer Wasteland. Very few people know RPG's and the book shops only carry the starard WotC core books. Everything I need to buy is on the net and it takes ages to arrive and I pay dearly for shipping. But ha, who's complaining thank god for the internet and websites likes these.

I live in Malaysia by the way...

 

[Ice man]

Definitely gamer wasteland! Grande Prairie is in northern Alberta, Canada, has a population of @30,000 red necks and 12 gamers! No competent game store in town, a used book store where you can special order and a coles book store which has PH, DMG and MM available and lastly a toy store which carries some warhammer stuff. Gaming convention...what's that?? nearest city is edmonton but its a 4 1/2 hour drive...it has 1 very decent gaming store and 4-5 not so decent.