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100% GMing
Treasure Tables is dedicated to game masters, offering GMing advice and ideas and a community of GMs helping each other run great games since 2005. I'm Martin Ralya, and I've been GMing since 1989 and writing for the RPG industry since 2004.
Have You Ever Run a Game Outdoors?
Sat. October 21, 2006
I’ve run a solo session or two in the park, and played some Twilight: 2000 on a friend’s back porch, but I generally don’t run games outdoors (I’d much rather lurk in the basement, closer to the soda and snacks).
The fresh air was nice, but wind was a problem — character sheets kept blowing away. With a patio table and a few weights, that problem could easily have been solved.
If you tied the location to the game somehow, I could see an outdoor session being pretty cool. Playing at night in the woods would be fun for a horror game, being on the balcony of a tall building would be inspiring for a city-based supers campaign, and so forth.
Have you run the occasional session outdoors? Do you run outdoor games regularly? What do you like and dislike about it?
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13 Responses to “Have You Ever Run a Game Outdoors?”
There’s a reason vampires are so popular among the RPG crowd. And that reason is ‘#$%@ sunlight.’
The wind would also be a huge problem for me…
Short Answer: If you want to roleplay outdoors play a LARP.
Long Answer: I love to camp. My wife and I try to take the kids on a couple of trips every year. Whenever I have brought some gaming stuff for trips where we planned group trips with my gamer friends we either never got a chance to play, or the environment made it difficult to play.
You think that the setting would encourage better roleplaying, but it is actually a distraction. Someone has to keep the campfire going, the wind blows paper around, bug bites annoy the players, you can’t find a decent place to roll dice, etc. Even if you move the game into a tent it can be difficult to game once you start to need more light.
I once brought clipboards (a handy tool for any gamer) but that only helped a little bit. Plus you can only bring gaming stuff if you are car camping. I wouldn’t even attempt to bring gaming stuff when we are backpacking.
Still, maybe if I bought a bigger A-frame style tent and a decent lighting system an outside game would work. But at that point why bother to go camping?
Just my personal experiences with this matter. I’d love to know if anyone has pulled this off.
P.S. Now if you rent a cabin that can be a great gaming experience. But obviously you are no longer outdoors.
Ran queen of the demonweb under a tarp in the middle of a rainstorms once, the campground was flooded under a few inches of water so no one was sleeping and the cold, darkness, wet and roar of the burning propane stove that had been lit for warmth added to the game. I also managed to pace the game so that when the players ran into a monsterous spider I could point out it looked a lot like the inch long one crawling on my buddies shoulder at the time.
His paniced screams are still one of fondest memories of gameing.
Many of the games I’ve run for my kids have been outdoors on nice days, at our patio table. It helps a lot when the kids are feeling active - I can give them the option of waiving a die roll by performing a physical feat in the yard.
“Okay, you can roll a d20 and try to beat a 17 to dodge that arrow trap, or you can give me three perfect cartwheels in a row. Which will it be?”
For a game for play in the outdoors (for example, while hiking), check out Stephan O’Sullivan’s Sherpa.
I considered playing Dogs in the Vinyard out on the deck this summer, but one of the players had allergy issues so we didn’t. Most of the games I play would be tricky outside because of lack of table space. Wind certainly can be a problem, but that’s a problem we sometimes have to deal with inside also (in the summer, with fans going). One funny one was when we were playing in my room when I was in high school. The GM sat in front of the window. Everytime he stood up, a tornado would blow across the table. He never accepted that perhaps he was a bit on the large side…
Frank
Every summer our club has a picnic, and we run a session of the club Buffy campaign at a local park picnic shelter. Despite the obligatory jokes about gamers not recognizing the sun, we always have a great time.
Back in the seventies, one of the places I learned to play D&D was on Boy Scouts weekends. It wasn’t outdoors (the wind being the main problem in outdoors situation) but in a cabin during winter campouts. Typically by 8:00pm all the day’s activities were done and by then a group would gather around one of the cabin tables and play a game.
Ironically nearly 20 years later I used the same site and cabins for the NERO LARP chapter I ran.
The East Coast Story Games crew just had a big rent a cabin in the wilderness for a weekend Con, called Camp Nerdly.
Last spring we played a few of our D&D games outside under the carport and barbequed up dinner– lots of burgers and brats. It was a lot of fun, though the sun and wind did distract slightly from the game. It was a lot of fun as a change of pace… but really, with table, chairs, dice, and characters, it was a normal session moved 30′.
On the other hand, Will’s Vampire game was set in our hometown. Before one session, he drove us out to the bluffs and pointed down at the river. “The werewolves are fording the river there,” (point, move around)… “what do you do?” I think he intended it to last a bit longer, but we hadn’t dressed for it, so we headed back to his place and continued. It was very handy for reminding us how dark it can be at night…
Last, I’m reminded of the Nighttime Animals Save the World, which is made for strolling with your kids and roleplaying.
My gaming group plays in a single-building college campus that closes at 10PM.
When we have a game that goes over the alloted time we usually end up in the smoker’s area near the student cafe to finish up our session.
Last time we took it outside, the players were trying to take down a demon and were visited by a “Texas-sized” roach that decided to participate!
Man, you folks know your outdoor gaming!
Sherpa and Nighttime both made me think of an RPG a friend and I designed as kids — also designed to be played while hiking. (We never finished it.) Cool.
And playing at night, in a rainstorm, under a tarp/tent? That would rock.
Outdoor playing can be cool, barring wind, rain, etc adversaries.
If you’ve got a pavilion it’s great. I quite frankly like to play in a garage with the door open when possible. Lots of room, people get a little disassociated from the normalcy of life due to an unfamiliar setting, you can throw up some decorations or something to set a different mood, plus you get that fresh outdoor air.
I’ve held a camping/gaming weekend once and found it to be a lot of fun. The wind did pose a challenge, but we eliminted that with clip boards (as mentioned above. But I can’t think of anything greater that overlooking a pond, from a screen tent on a nice day and playing a game with a group of friends and later talking about the game, or adding to it around a camp fire.
[...] In the comments to Have You Ever Run a Game Outdoors, Frank Filz and Scott M. linked up two RPGs with a twist. [...]