So You Want To Have a Theme Game Night

The few weeks around Halloween are the time of year when most themed gaming parties happen.  They can either be a great success or a real disaster.  It usually hinges on decisions made in the days and weeks before the party occurs.

Over the years I have hosted and participated in many of these kinds of events some of which were great and worth repeating and others which are best forgotten.  I am going to provide some tips on what I have found to work and mistakes I have made and seen made.  The tips will mostly be focused around Halloween events, but many can be used in themed events year round.

Theme

Make sure that the theme of the event is broad.  The last thing you want to do is have a theme that is too narrow.   For example a trick or treat party where all that is played is trick taking card games.  I went to one a few years ago it was an all day party, but the with there being so few trick taking games with a horror theme that people became bored playing the same few games over and over again and the party devolved into an all card game event.

The broader your theme the more options present themselves and the greater a chance you will have a party to remember.  If the party above had made their theme horror games there would have been lots of games available that would have fit more of the likes of the people attending the party.  The party would have been remembered as a fun time instead of being a dud.

Decoration

Everyone loves decorations but make sure that they do not make it difficult to play the games.  The first year I ran a special Halloween adventure for my RPG group I wanted to do it by candlelight.  I thought that is would be great to have mood lighting for my horror story.  Unfortunately, it would seem that you need a lot of candles to be able to see character sheets and rulebooks than I thought.  We muddled through the adventure, but the lighting became more of an annoyance than a mood setter.  What I should have done was have a stronger central light above a gaming table and have all of the other lights in the house turned out.  It would have been better in setting the mood and allowed us to play the game trouble free.

It is always great to have mood music is possible as well.  People enjoy having the music of the holiday played in the background and with the many portable devices available today it is easy to bring anywhere.  You just need to make sure the volume is not too loud and that you have enough of a variety that the same song is not repeating over and over.  Sitting through Jingle Bells fifty times in a row can put anybody into a murderous rage.

When placing decorations up at a location that is not your own, make sure that you get the permission of the owners of the location and that the decorations do not leave marks.  The last thing that you want to do is lose the location to future events because of damage that could have been avoided being done.

Refreshments

If you regularly provide refreshments at your party try to make sure to have a special holiday treat such as a special snack or drink that is themed to the holiday.  It will make the event that much more memorable to those that attend and something that they look forward to in years to come. 

If you are like me and do not regularly provide refreshments at your event, then consider providing something special for the party.  I would give out pieces of candy to players instead of experience points for defeating monsters during my Halloween adventures.  The players could also turn them in to be able to reroll dice or eat them as they wanted.  At board game events I have seen candy rewards given to winners of games as well.

Special Notes for Role Playing Games

One thing to make sure that you do is provide an adventure complete with pre-generated characters for the players to use.  As in most horror movies, you want to be able to kill off as many of the characters as possible.  Players tend to get upset if characters that they are personally invested in are killed too casually.  I would create more pre-generated characters than there were players in order to give the players more options and let them do the final outfitting of the characters before the adventure.  The players are more willing to do stupid things with characters that they are only going to use once so more fun can be had by all.

Give your players something to do if they are killed off before the end of the adventure.  You do not want to have players sitting around and doing nothing while the others are still playing.  What I usually do is have the players that get eliminated early on rejoin the game playing monsters.  That way they can still play in the game and it changes the dynamic of the game into a competition between the players as to who will win the adventure.

There are a lot of different thing that you can do to make your holiday themed game parties more fun.  The things that I mentioned above are just a few of the things that I have seen and go wrong or right.  However there are no right or wrong ways to do things, just make sure that everyone has the opportunity to have fun.