Welcome to the second installment of Guide for the Perplexed! Last time I introduced three of the largest RPGs that aren’t D&D, games with long enough histories and big enough communities that they’re easy to get into and find players. Now I’m going to talk about a different angle for finding games and finding players: The places you go to shop for games.

I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a lot easier to find games online; between DriveThruRPG and itch.io virtually every game imaginable is one click away (and the two publishers that don’t use these sites are huge and have their own). That said, the ‘friendly local gaming store’ can not only give you access to games, but also advice and even networking. Admittedly the reputation of the game store has been pretty negative for a lot of the hobby’s history; game stores were historically seen as unfriendly to women and minorities and the progenitor of many horror stories as a result. Luckily this is changing, and as even D&D itself is aiming to become more welcoming and accessible, few stores are going to stay in business without putting some effort into the ‘friendly’ part of the moniker.

There are other places to buy games besides a dedicated hobby store, namely bookstores. I’m lucky enough to have an independent used bookstore near me that has a few used RPGs pass through their shelves, and I’ll make some purchases there. Most bookstores that carry RPGs, though, are going to be large ones, the remaining chains like Barnes and Noble. Shopping for RPGs at a mass-market bookstore isn’t going to be the best experience, but if it’s all that’s near you, it still presents an opportunity to find a couple well-financed games that, thanks to either popularity or a popular license, you should be able to find nerds who want to play.

The Last Resort

I would not typically recommend that one go shopping for TTRPGs at Barnes and Noble. Even before you take into account the decline of the mass-market bookstore in the last, well, twenty years or so, large chains like Barnes and Noble were never really a great place to find roleplaying games because they didn’t interact with the distributors who normally sold them. There were always exceptions to this; the primarily but not exclusively British bookseller Waterstone’s is going to be one commonly mentioned in stories about discovering RPGs because it was historically better about actually stocking them.

In the direct issue of having access to RPGs, mass-market bookstores are in a much better position now because many of them have diversified into board games in an attempt to broaden their appeal. In this weird way, a large bookstore like Barnes and Noble is usually going to have a much better RPG selection than a smaller, more focused independent bookstore, once again because of the distributor issue (in my experience wandering in and out of dozens of bookstores across New England and the broader United States, this has held true). Better does not necessarily mean good, though.

So let’s stop talking in hypotheticals. I wandered into my local Barnes and Noble, a large-format store located opposite a local mall in Burlington, Massachusetts. The RPG section was a few shelves wide, though the vast majority of actual game manuals were D&D (and 2014 5e too, likely to be remaindered in the next month or so). There was also a large section of RPG-related books, including a bunch of ‘RPG guides’ (the vast majority of which are just D&D guides) and some non-fiction (I spotted a copy of Slaying the Dragon by Ben Riggs among a few other things). When it came to the non-D&D game manuals, the selection looked like this:

First, this is not well kept or curated. Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, Stu Horvath’s exploration of the influence of RPGs on pop culture, should have been shelved with the other non-fiction further up the stack. There are two Cthulhu sourcebooks that are orphans; it’s not clear if they’re supplements for Call of Cthulhu, a different Mythos system, or system agnostic. Then we have two games that actually have a range of supplements available: It doesn’t look like there’s a Pathfinder core book in the picture, but I believe there were a couple of other Pathfinder books on the D&D side so I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt there. The other is the Marvel Multiverse RPG. Now Pathfinder, the second best selling RPG in the world, is a version of D&D, specifically a fork of D&D 3.5e. Although Paizo has supported it well, there is nothing for someone looking for an alternative to D&D in Pathfinder unless they’re looking for the same basic game with more granularity and more options. The Marvel RPG is, at least, different.

The Marvel Multiverse Roleplaying Game is the latest in a series of licensed Marvel games. Some were bad, some were good, but all were ill-fated; if in the process of publishing a licensed game you lose that license, you’re done. Any stock you have left over after the license expires is destroyed, and you lose the right to publish the game ever again. This means that, for the most part, if a licensed game goes out of print, it stays there, and only in rare circumstances (like the 30th anniversary of WEG Star Wars and a recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Kickstarter) are there exceptions. Marvel eventually realized that this process doesn’t work, and brought the distribution, management, and funding of the official Marvel RPG inhouse: The Marvel Multiverse RPG is published by Marvel, who as a comics publisher doesn’t completely suck at this sort of thing. Where they do completely suck (and most of comics sucks here too) is digital distribution: Digital copies of the Marvel Multiverse RPG are stuck inside a proprietary content portal called Demiplane. Demiplane is an online content portal and D&D Beyond competitor for a number of titles, including several from Free League and Magpie Games; the problem with the Marvel Multiverse RPG in particular is that there’s nowhere else to buy a digital version of the game. As a result, Marvel Multiverse has a curiously high sales ranking on ICv2, no buzz, and lots of books in places like Barnes and Noble.

The other games on this shelf are a somewhat random bunch, but they’re all there for interesting reasons. The Expanse is another high-profile licensed game, the sort of which is the most common fodder for stores like Barnes and Noble. Fantasy Age next to it is by the same publisher, Green Ronin, and they actually use similar underlying mechanics. I don’t know that having both of those on the shelf is connected, but I’d bet it is. Blackbirds is also curious. Blackbirds is an offshoot of Zweihander, itself a retroclone of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Blackbirds took the Zweihander rules which stripped out the WFRP setting and pasted in its own setting, which…both Zweihander and WFRP have their merits and I said so while comparing them, but after a few years and more exposure to WFRP I tend to prefer the original. But! The reason Blackbirds is here is that it was published by Andrews McMeel Universal, a company best known for publishing newspaper comics (their biggest book titles are collections of The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes) which dipped its toe into RPG publishing thanks to the (self) marketing skills of Zweihander designer Dan Fox. They’ve since divested the whole thing, but the shelf isn’t that big and it’s not like they have other titles they’re waiting to put there, so there it stays.

In short, the reason you see the games you do at big bookstores is mostly corporate. That doesn’t mean the games are bad: Blackbirds has pretty good reviews, and I don’t actually have any quarrel against the AGE system or the two books on offer there. Marvel is one of those games that would have never been designed without the license, so keep that in mind if you want something other than specifically Marvel. It’s not bad, it’s just not particularly inventive or innovative. You get a lot of weird corporate backstories at Barnes and Noble, but if you were actually interested by the description on the back of one of these, you could take it home and probably have fun. I know it sounds like I’m not really selling it, and I’m not. Barnes and Noble can be an interesting place to find RPGs, but not a particularly good one. Although a large bookstore may be your best place to start if you’re far outside a major city, what you really want is a dedicated game or hobby store.

The Platonic Ideal

A good gaming store is a great place to find RPGs. You’re going to find better gaming stores in bigger cities but you don’t need to be in that big a city: I’ve been to phenomenal gaming stores in Pittsburgh (Phantom of the Attic and Games Unlimited) and Burlington Vermont (Quarterstaff Games). That said, the bigger the city, the better stores it can support, and that’s why there are a number of fantastic ones in San Francisco and New York (The Compleat Strategist is a treasure trove). Pound for pound, though, and I know I’m biased, the best game store I’ve ever been in is my friendly local game store: Pandemonium Books and Games in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Pandemonium has such a wide game selection that they carry games by Cannibal Halfling contributors. They don’t just have indie RPGs, they have a PbtA and FitD shelf, and zine bins located strategically around the entire RPG section, not just one somewhere in the corner.

Beyond the selection are the events. Most of the store’s events are going to be trading card-based, given how much more revenue TCGs generate. Even considering that, though, they have board game nights, book clubs, jigsaw puzzle competitions, and yeah, the one I care most about, RPG nights. Several D&D groups, sure, but Thursdays have Indie RPG events as well: in September I see both Pirate Borg and Scum and Villainy.

Events are going to be a key part of how a game store connects to a community because, while a prerequisite, being able to buy a game will not actually help you play a game. The fact that there’s a local Indie RPG Club that meets at Pandemonium is almost as important as the fact that Pandemonium does a great job stocking so many Indie RPGs. And outside of sanctioned events, informal groups and meetups are key too. Pandemonium has, semi-hidden in their downstairs play area, a great bulletin board:

It’s not only having these postings (and you gravitated to that Indie TTRPG Book Club posting just like I did), but also just having the number of people that are in this play area and use this space that help make Pandemonium a pillar of the community. I personally play a lot online and since the pandemic my in-person gaming network has diminished. That said, even knowing that stuff like this is here makes me more likely to strike out and try to build up that network again.

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So what makes a game store a better place to buy than an online portal? Well, besides not having to wait for shipping, you’re going to be able to interact with like-minded folks who have experience with games and can help you find what you’re looking for. Beyond that, you can actually play games there; you’re not going to have the same selection as you would at, say, a con, but even one or two indie nights a month are one or two opportunities to try games that you may not normally be able to check out with your regular group. And if you don’t have a regular group, game store events and bulletin boards can both help you put one together.

The game store has been around almost as long as the hobby itself, but thanks to both the explosion of players finding RPGs through online media like actual play and the realities of the COVID pandemic, there’s a large portion of the hobby that doesn’t necessarily see physical places as central to their play. I’d like to encourage everyone to investigate them again: RPGs could be a strong component of finding a good ‘third place’. If you’re lucky enough to have one nearby, gaming cafes which have space for roleplaying games and RPG events could also fill this role as well as game stores themselves. The point is to use your hobby as an avenue to socialize with other gamers, see new perspectives, and get some game recommendations to boot.

Of course, physical spaces are not and will never be the be-all and end-all of RPG social groups. Next time on Guide for the Perplexed, I’ll be going into online spaces a bit: old ones, new ones, and how to build your own. Until then, stay safe, play some games, and maybe make a trek to explore your own friendly local game store. You may be glad you did.

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