Anyway, I have been complimented on my culinary skills quite often. At least none of my geeks friends can ever say they go hungry at my house on game night.

flashhearts last blog post..Reconfiguring AD&D

flashhearts last blog post..Reconfiguring AD&D

There are strong chances that I’ll have to start doing buisness travels over the US and Europe soon, expect me to post about it and ask the Chatty Minions to meet in restaurants (and maybe some pick up games)

The Chatty DM D&D Roadshow,,, I feel a runaway idea just left the station…

When I played in Australia we would have roast potatoes (put them on before you start), wine (Australian) and beer, and people would bring bread and humus. In Japan I played on skype, so my partner and I made the roast potatoes (but no humus in rural Japan).

Now sadly I am in a group that plays at a pub. The pub food is absolutely awful. So I buy Japanese takeaway from itsu (at the very branch where that Russian chap was poisoned) and eat it at work before I go. Then it’s just English pints from 6pm, and things go downhill fast…

flashhearts last blog post..The world of “Compromise and Conceit”

Since I’m off subject anyways, I’d also like to say I dig your anti-spam filter. If someone who reads your blog can’t figure out what these are, it definitely has to be a bot. And if I ever get denied to post for not recognizing it, I hope someone shoots me in the head.

With my other, amazingly serious group, I find that those early to the session get to join me for a supermarket drive. The lucky few get to pick out favorite snacks that should last through the day, into the night, and beyond. This used to be followed with copious amounts of alcohol. However, that has been cut down on since our paladin spent an entire game in the bathroom praying to the porcelain god, so to speak.

My Orlando group used to eat a mishmash of whatever people brought. The other drow (*cough*) used to cook stuff and bring it over. I would bring over break n’bake macadamia nut cookies (because those were the DMs favorite and it is important to make the DM your bitch! – yes, you can quote me on that). Nothing like cookies straight from the oven, even if they are break n’bake.

Our old cleric (of Celestial Bee fame), used to bring Oreos and milk for us.

Not sure what the new group is going to be like… finding out on Monday!

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Sometimes, someone will offer to cook a great, home-cooked dinner for us all. And we always enjoy it.

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We’ve been playing with this group in this setup for a few years, and decided early on against pizza every week.

So our arrangement is to rotate cooking duties between households (the group consists of 3 couples and one single guy, and each of the couples has a student [and thus far less money available], so we felt it was pretty fair even to the single guy).

The game is almost always at our apartment, and out gaming table (dining room table) is approximately 2 feet from the kitchen. So the cooking couple cooks while we continue to play, and they remain involved.

Once food is ready, we break from gaming and eat, in the living room so that the dining table can keep the D&D stuff set up.

For meals, we had smokies and potato salad yesterday, for a simpler one, but we’ve had everything from chicken/pasta salads to honey mustard chicken to ribs to spaghetti to chicken a la king. Nothing too complex, but always pretty good.

Which is impressive, because we have a few dietary restrictions around, too. We have a vegetarian, one guy who is allergic to pretty much all nuts except for peanuts, and a few things people just really dislike (peppers and mushrooms, but we used to have a guy that hated cheese). All of those are pretty easy to plan around, though. You just cook those things separately, and everyone adds them to taste.

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For snacks, everyone is left to their own devices. We live about 50 feet away from a 7-11, and we don’t own a coffee machine, so it is common to do a Sev run before a game. We’ll grab chips, drinks, slurpees, and coffee for who wants. We will occasionally run to Safeway (grocery store across the street) for candy and jube jubes. And a couple of the players will occasionally bring weird-ass Japanese snacks (some are good, some… are just weird).

We have a quiet rule about too much sugary snacks, though. For a while we played in the living room on our very comfy couches and coffee table, and we had a significant problem with people eating too much sugar, being hyper for a little, but then sugar crashing and falling asleep on the comfy couches.

As such, the most common snacks tend to be salty/savoury snacks, though the sugary ones and caffeinated drinks are always around a bit to keep energy up.

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Back when I first started gaming (2001-ish), we played at another friend’s place. There were anything from 6-12 people there at once, so we split up into groups, and there was never all that much in the way of formal extended campaigns, as we tended to switch directions a lot.

Anyways, when there, we played on Saturdays and ordered pizza. The place we ordered from has cheap large pizzas that get cheaper the more you order, so having 12 players was a great thing.

It was a pain to get orders from everyone, though… until we discovered the greatest pizza combination from them.

You see, like everywhere else, they have bacon as a topping.

Unlike everywhere else, they also have Canadian bacon as a topping.

So our order usually went as follows (all large pizzas, one per person usually, as we were all young and had high metabolism [well, not me, but I did martial arts in those days so I still stayed pretty fit]):
- Bacon and (Canadian) bacon.
- Bacon ‘n’ bacon.
- Bacon ‘n’ bacon.
- Bacon ‘n’ bacon.
- Bacon ‘n’ bacon.
- Bacon ‘n’ bacon.
- Bacon ‘n’ bacon.
- Cheese.
- Bacon ‘n’ bacon.
- Bacon ‘n’ bacon.
- And ten 2-litres of Coke.

Yeah, those were the days.

We do still get pizza (and order an sandwich for lactose man) every now and again. (And Costco pizza is very good as well as inexpensive but we also order in from this place called “Big Slice”.) At some point I started cooking for the group with we played at my house. It started innocently enough when I decided to get one of those roasted chickens from the store, shred it up and set it out with a bunch of fixens and tortillas for the guys to assemble soft tacos. But after watching too many episodes of Good Eats, and the Food Network in general, I started getting fancy with Asian noodle soup pouches, mini meatloaf muffins and broiled talapia or salmon. (The Albertson’s near me always has a great price on talapia fillets.) My chilli was also a hit but I’ve since decided to forgo any recipe that involves beans…

At any game somebody may or may not bring cookie dough which we bake up during the break we usually take about half way through our session. Though angel food cake topped with macerated berries and Reddi Whip has become quite popular since you don’t need to wait for it to bake. (Macerated just means you coat them with sugar/splenda and let them sit for a little while.)

Regardless of whether we order out or cook in, the host usually does the actual paying. People will usually chip in but we often chalk it up to “food karma”. Where the host will get covered for dinner at a later time by somebody who forgot to bring cash that night.

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It’s fun to see how diverse these habits are.

And a big warm hello and welcome to commenters that appeared recently: Roger, Daniel, Ravyn, happyturtle, Virgil, David, Mea and Brett! (Sorry if I skipped anyone, it used to be a lot easier when I had one new reader per month!)

I must say that happyturtle’s suggestion is just plain brilliant. This is a perfect mix of social activities (shopping, cooking, eating, gaming). I wish we had the time to do something like this.

Thanks for the comments!

Almost no one has cash, we be poor So who can’t pay has to do the work of ordering as picking said food stuffs.

One of our members works at a grocery store so she can get us lots of cheap snacks. But like i said, we’re too cheap to do this often.

Drinks receive even less attention than food (I usually end up with a glass of water for the whole evening)

We have long ago established that D D&D (Drunk Dungeons and Dragons) is a bad idea…. We don’t do that anymore.