Great gaming can happen almost anywhere, just like great sex. But just like sex, it helps to set the mood.
If you have a designated gaming area in your house, put up some gaming-related art. It doesn’t have to be wall-to-wall Conan posters, just a couple of carefully chosen pieces that make you think of gaming. (Having shelves full of gaming books around helps too!)
Even if you play somewhere else, like in a college lounge or at your local gaming store, you can bring things with you to achieve the same effect. Toys are a great option. Playing Star Wars? Put Darth Vader in front of your GMing screen, and set a TIE fighter at the other end of the table. Voila! Instant ambience.
This will help get everyone at the table in the mood to game, and there’s a good chance it will help everyone stay focused, too. (Unless they spend all their time playing with the toys, of course!)
I have a “little people” (or something like that) castle front with a working drawbridge and two towers with trap doors that serves as a DM screen for my home games.
Art and toys do add to the “aura”. When we saw toy pteradons we knew we needed them for our current game (characters use them as air transportation). We’ve even used a section of the movie Dinotopia, to show what a rush it would be to fly on one of these things. (I’m not DM for it, but we shared the clip anyway!)
One of the fun things our GM did last session was make a player do “on the fly” art. One character knew what a creature was and the others didn’t. So he had to do a quick sketch, for better for for worse – that’s what the other characters understand the creature to look like now. It added perfectly to the ambiance because a rough sketch was all the character knew of this creature.
Troy: Any chance of a picture? Your screen setup sounds like a fun one.
Avlor: I love the on-the-fly art idea — even for a non-artistic player, that would be a lot of fun to play out!
I’ll see what I can do. I’m often all thumbs when it comes to digital photography.