Okay, maybe not that dramatic with the title.
At the beginning of this month my online gaming group and I did something a little bit crazy and it proved to be one of the most fun travel experiences of my life – we rented a cabin for a weekend and spent the entire time playing games with each other.
Now it’s hardly a new idea – I’ve seen other groups do the same thing for special occasions. Longtime fans of Order 66 will also note that this is generally the way that Sam Witwer and his group manage to get together and game themselves. But it was new to me and to the rest of the group. The idea was floated last fall and very quickly we all fell in love with the idea. And then we started tossing around ideas for weekends that everyone could make work and shockingly found one that everyone could do with minimal fuss. We set about finding a place central enough to all of us and found a very nice cabin for rent in Oklahoma. And despite Texas’s best efforts to stymie our get together with an ice storm, we managed to all make our way down there by the first day of our planned trip.
A little background on my group – masterminded by the inimitable DM Darren of d20 Radio fame, this iteration of the group has been playing through the Savage Worlds version of the Pathfinder classic Rise of the Runelords for a year and a half at this point. And despite knowing all of the people in our group for at least that long (and in some cases longer), I had never had the pleasure or chance to meet most of them for a variety of reasons, mostly the fact that we all lived in different states. (Hell, two of the guys work together and had never had the opportunity to meet each other prior to this trip.) And when I tell you that it felt good to shake their hands and give them all great big Wookiee hugs, I mean that it felt damn good.
By the time we got to the cabin and unpacked the rental van and started making dinner, our final member who drove down from Colorado instead of flying into Texas arrived and we spent the first night just enjoying talking to each other in the same room instead of through a Zoom window and sharing food and libations with each other while we geeked out about all the games we were looking forward to playing over the next few days. Furthermore, it wasn’t just the first time a lot of us met in person – it was the first time that one of the players had ever done any sort of roleplaying in-person! Our online game has been his only experience so far so we were also all real excited to get him his first taste of that.
And game we did – we started with a Goonies inspired session of Kids on Bikes and had fun tapping into our teenage selves. Then we got to live out our fantasy of being a crack squad of Mandalorians working for Bo-Katan Kryze in a game of Star Wars. I got a chance to take The Expanse RPG out for a spin and the crew learned of a mysterious and dangerous new biological weapon in the solar system. And then Sunday we got to play more narrative dice as an airship crew hunting for treasure with one of the GM’s homebrew diesel-punk settings and then wrapped up everything with some Savage Worlds where we got to embrace our inner monsters with an adventure in the Accursed setting. And through it all, we got to enjoy some absolutely phenomenal food and raise many a toast to each other.
And while the gaming was great, it was secondary to the fact that – “we’re really doing this.” It was similar to a convention, but even smaller and more intimate. We were able to be completely present in the moment without worrying about work or what was going on in each of our lives and just enjoy several days of being in each other’s company and getting to know each other on a more personal level. (And we’re already talking about attempting to do it again soon).
It’s an experience that I won’t soon forget and it’s something that I would recommend you try to do with your groups, especially if you’re like me and have six players in six different states. Hell, even if you have an in person group, getting away from the normal place where you host your games and getting to a place where you can shelve some of your day to day worries can provide a wonderful change in the momentum of your group.
Have any of you ever done this or something similar? What’s your favorite travel related gaming story. Let me know below.
Ben Erickson
