Everyone has them whether they realise it or not. Whether it’s a specific order a player will use his dice or where everyone sits around the gaming table. What I’m curious about is what traditions you guys have for your game days.

Mine have always depended on location but the basic core traditions still follow through.

1. Drinks.

It has to be a glass bottle of one of Barr’s many flavours of juice. Preference will always be for Irn Bru or American Cream Soda but I can live with the occasional bottle of Limeade or Cola. Aside from the taste the bottle was always just the right size for the 3-4 hour weeknight gaming sessions we have so if we have an all day/night session multiple bottles are bought. I’ll never bump up the size to a 2 litre bottle though as it wouldn’t be right. It has to be the glass bottles.

2. Cadbury’s Animal Cookies.

This started off as a joke one day when one of the group started bringing them along for their own munchings but once we realised the GM accepted them as bribes we all started bringing out own boxes. Despite GM’s rotating and the bribes no longer working it has become a staple of the gaming session. The only problem is they are becoming increasingly hard to find without traveling great distances but gaming sessions aren’t the same without them so we still sacrifice in order to bring them along.

3. Dice.

I’m not at all superstitious about my dice. I’m not. Honest. But I have a set of green/black speckled dice with red numbering that only I will ever use. I also have a blue gem set of D6 that have the same restrictions on them. Why do I not let anyone else use them? Well it certainly isn’t because I think people will waste teh good rolls in them or that it will make them unlucky. It’s because they feel great in my hands and I’d rather folk borrow my crappy dice.

4. Table.

Given the choice I’ll never use one. I much prefer the casual nature of lounging on the sofa or the floor and using books etc as rolling surfaces for the dice. Sitting around the table has always been a very confrontational thing for me with your GM hiding behind a screen and the players sitting together at the other side of the table. Spread the players about and get comfy is my motto.

5. Post game takeaway.

We’ve never been one for bringing/ordering/cooking a pizza for our session as for several years we were not actually allowed food into the room we had hired for the gaming club. What that meant though was that a trip to the chip shop was always on the cards during the journey home. The smell of a greasy chip shop after a game always signaled the end to a good night and the one we chose smelled like no other. The Village Takeaway was the cheapest looking chip shop I’ve been to in almost all my years but my god the chips were great. There were nights where we had just finished banishing the undead from the swamps and headed there for an ashet pie supper only to find Ally McCoist and Paul Gascoigne had been out for a night on the tiles in the pub next door and had taken the last of the food. They would always cook us up a batch of fresh chips if that was the case but not getting your pie or sausage to go with them would put a downer on the night.

So what are your game day traditions?

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So this months Blog Carnival is about gaming goals and resolutions. Uncle Bear is hosting this month and even if your getting a little tired of resolution posts you should check out the rest of his site and I can get lost in there! Everyone seems to have had the same idea of posting up a top three/five list of what they aim to achieve so I’m going to try and be a little different.

I got into this blogging game because a: I like writing and b: I like gaming. I never thought for a second when the idea first popped into my head that I’d end up as part of the RPG Bloggers Network or that I’d meet so many like minded people. Were I to live in the USA I’d make a point of attending one of the larger Cons in an attempt to meet these aforementioned folk but life is not that easy. I’ll just stick to berating them on Twitter or finding some way to trek across the city and throw fruit at Games of State’s windows.

So how does this post fit into the carnival this month? Well I think 2009 is going to be a year of collaboration. Someone pointed me in the direction of a blog post last night that hit a chord. With the worldwide recession hitting us there are no startups really making it big with big money backers but there are plenty of people with shared interests getting together, watching each others backs and getting things done. The The RPG Bloggers Network is one example and the CMF Advertising Network is another. A group of people with the same idea working towards the same goal and it’s working. Look at how well the RPG Bloggers Network has been received and how quickly it’s grown. I see great things coming from those guys in 2009.

Over on the RPG Bloggers Network Google Group (We really need to come up with a quick and snazzy acronym for that) an idea has been floated about a network wide collaboration. The aim of which will end up with a campaign setting for anyone to use. The specifics are still being discussed between those interested and those that floated the original idea but I think it’s going to be huge. Not only do we get to give to the community with our every post and the network provides us with many readers but we will all be able to contribute to something that we can give back to the readers. I can’t wait to get stuck into that project.

Even if this does not go ahead I’m hoping to bring in another writer or two to give my own campaign settings a good kick and get them finished and written up.

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I’ve talked in the past about trying out a wiki as a way of recording campaign info as well as keeping the players in the loop and informed about the game. I’ve done a fare amount of looking around other peoples wiki’s and while some work perfectly there are far more wiki’s out there that are very hard to get into and find anything your looking for in them. It’s certainly an art form.

One of the other ways in which some GM’s keep in touch with players is using a mailing list. I have had experience with using one of these before with an Airsoft group I used to be part of and help organise. The one thing mailing lists have over other forms of online communication is that your pushing it onto your readers rather than relying on them coming to your site and reading whatever it was you posted to your wiki/forum/blog. Not everyone is web savy so you can’t guarantee that telling them to sign up to your blog’s RSS feed will work. Bombard them with the info. Where ever you record your campaigns you should also post the meat of the mailing list emails. In fact you could probably go one better and post most of the information and have it link to your wiki where it expands in it. This way you encourage the players to utilise the library of information you’ve collated but at the same time give them what they need as well as the option to read up a little more on it.

So what kind of things can you put in your newsletter? Well yet again the airsoft newsletter that I sent out provides a very good framework from which to start.

• Brief round up of the last game.
• Highlighting any problems from previous games and suggestions for fixing them.
• Brief run down of any site news or rules changes.
• Start organising the next game day.

Now you can see that right from the off it fits almost perfectly into a campaign update newsletter. In addition to this we could add plenty of information that would be useful to the players.

• Profiles on prominent NPC’s.
• Gossip and rumours from about town which may lead to the occasional side campaign if players show enough interest.
• Myths and Legends from around the region.
• Information on famous magical items in the region.
• Player written fiction.

All these things add to the gaming experience and if you can get your players more involved then no one loses.

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