Publishing and distribution of RPG material has become a whole lot easier in the recent years, especially because of the Internet. Though this is in many ways great for roleplayers, it has some downsides. Where have all the good rpg stores gone?
When I was growing up there was one store here in Reykjavik, Iceland, that specialized in roleplaying goods. How I loved going there and I could spend hours just browsing through shelves stacked with different roleplaying books and chatting to other roleplayers.
The store served as much as a community center as it was a store. Later, the store added collectible card games, then comics, then some more and every time the roleplaying department got smaller and smaller.
Today, you can only find limited collection of books for sale in this otherwise great store, and from what I hear most Icelandic roleplayers buy their books online. I must admit, this saddens me, because I feel that a good rpg store supports its community just as much as the community supports it. And that is something that this store here in Iceland has always done, e.g. offering roleplayers a place to play and sponsoring roleplaying conventions.
What makes a good rpg store?
Whenever I go abroad I hunt for stores that sell roleplaying books. I am an avid collector of books, to my wife’s great dismay. I love to enter a store and the first thing that greats me is the smell of rpg books, new and old, and a clerk wearing faded Star Wars t-shirt that has probably been washed a few times to often and was a great fit all these years ago. There’s just some homely feeling to it.
What I like the most and actively seek out when I visit these store is to discover something new. Be it a new miniature for D&D, an old hard-to-find module or even a new system I haven’t heard about, I don’t care. For me it’s about the discovery. Having knowledgeable clerks who are eager to spread the roleplaying gospel also makes a huge difference, but just spending an hour (with my wife playfully rolling her eyes and making fun of her nerd husband) browsing through shelves of roleplaying books can easily make my day. Yes, I’m simple like that.
Compleat Strategist
But where have they gone?
There are still few around. Though many stores I’ve visited recently have become more like the one here in Iceland, i.e. becoming more like the Forbidden Planet stores – stores that offer plethora of gaming and nerd products, but not excelling nor specializing in one genre – there are a few hidden gems out there.
The Compleat Strategist in New York is fantastic. If you have time to spare while visiting Manhattan, make sure you pay them a visit. You will find stacks upon stacks of both old and new roleplaying games, be it commercial high-sellers or obscure, not-as-known games, the Compleat Strategist has it all.
If you’re in London I can recommend a visit to the Orc’s Nest. There you can also find a huge array of different games and some of the most obscure games I’ve ever seen I found there. As with the Compleat Strategist, make sure you’ve got time on your hands.
Grumble, grumble…
For most parts though, from what I’ve learned from speaking to players both here in Iceland and online, many are buying roleplay books online nowadays, often directly from publishers. As much as I love the Internet, I sometimes feel a bit a saddened by this fact.
I always feel nostalgic entering a good rpg store and perhaps that’s just my problem, I guess that if these stores are getting fewer and further apart, it simply means that the buyer behavior is changing. And the stores need to adapt.
It still bothers me though, entering a store that states that it’s selling rpgs and the only games you find are D&D and Pathfinder, with a book or two from other systems and the clerks don’t know much about these games, other than D&D and Pathfinder seem to sell well.
Anyway…
I’ll continue searching for good rpg stores when I’m abroad, treasuring every find. I like to support these stores, because I believe that they play a huge part in spreading the word. I hope you do too.
The profit model of RPGs does not lend itself well to sustainable games stores. Each individual RPG (except D&D and Pathfinder) generally doesn’t bring in a regularly visiting customer – one corebook and your imagination is all you really need. So self space devoted to RPGs, versus collectible card games and miniatures, is as close to dead space as it’s posssible to be. I’d hazard that in this time of “euro”board-game renaissance, even boardgames turn over more than RPGs.
I’m blessed with an excellent local store, the Games Shop in Aldershot. This shop was once Esdevium games, a business which realised there was more profit in distribution than retail and sold off the storefront. (Now Esdevium is part of Asmodee.)
Now it owes its continued existence to Magic Madhouse, an on-line CCG retailer and reseller. But it works hard to advocate gaming in all its forms. So it’s a social hub and gaming venue for games of all types. I play there once a week, and it runs regular “try an RPG” events alongside miniature wargaming and CCG days.
Orcs Nest (through no fault of theirs, they’ve been in a tiny location for decades) can’t offer the same efforts to promote the hobby. I think those stores that will survive will become more like game cafes…
Good points!
I believe that a good RPG store brings something more to the fold than just shelves dedicated to RPGs. It has community, clerks that are die hard fans/gamers and know what they’re talking about, hands-on face-2-face experience etc. It has an added value that buying online can’t offer. It can also be a game cafe, I really like that idea. But in order to survive, especially since it’s almost always cheaper to buy RPGs online and have them delivered to your door, the RPG stores need to offer something that Drivethrurpg, Amazon and all those online vendors don’t have.
Yeah I think “being a cafe” was my short hand for the gamer/fan staff culture that you describe. For example, I mentioned to a member of staff that we were going to playtest the new L5R RPG beta, and he loaned me the dice that he’d already modded for the game, before even playing it himself…
I have the very same sad feelings and always search the web for stores before going to places, hoping to find such gems as you mentioned. But, alas, I haven’t been successful so far – not in Miami, nor Daytona. Not in Atlanta or in San Francisco. Certainly nowhere in Germany. There is a shop in Cologne though, Brave New World, that is at least worth the visit. But than again NEXUS just blew me away for what they do for the community. A dream of mine would be to run the ultimate game store. It wouldn’t need to be for provit. But the initial investment puts me off…
Nexus is doing a great job. 🙂
I was looking for some articles about the disappearance of RPG stores and what you says fits the description of what I experienced in France. In Paris, we had a lot of RPG stores in a same district. But now, well… A lot of them closed, one was replaced by another…
There was one big store with actually two shops : one for board games and card games, the other for RPG and miniature games. Then, the one with board games closed and RPG shelves in the other one became full of them. In the end, RPG shelves were reduced to little more than four shelves at the back of the store.
On the plus side, we can find some RPG in certain book stores now, but that’s not the same thing… Gone are the places to meet other players, internet plays that part too now. You can find people to play on forums or social networks.
Hi, Darkbaron and thank you for your comment
Yes, the internet is the place to be now. I miss the old gaming stores and meeting other roleplayers there, speaking to the staff. After all, roleplaying is a social activity and buying roleplaying books used to be as well. Now, it’s more of an ecommerce thing than anything else.