I was running a skypirates games this semester, but it kind of fell apart due to players changing due to sports, joining late, and internships, and a character death. The core of the game had left. So we rebooted with another game that I felt was more what the group wanted. I think everyone had a good time and when we wrapped up the final fight last week the players told me how awesome that was. I think trying to shoehorn them back into the skypirates would not have worked as well.

I just can’t say that there is a big problem with gamers here. The last con I went to has a mix of nationalities and yes there were a lot of chubby folk, but it wasn’t a majority. Funnily enough, the local shop ran out of coke during the convention, but a lot of gamers could also be found in the bar. In my current group, my GM runs everyday, another plays a lot of rugby and the other players seem to be naturally thin.

Though I have found that many (if not most) gamers I’ve met are in professions that involve sitting at computers all day, such as programmers, web designers, writers and so on.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_obe-health-obesity

I just want to see my friends stay healthy and strong, and my point is that tabletop RPGs are not bound to these unhealthy habits at all. In fact, LARPs that have a lot of physical activity are a great way to promote exercise and gaming in one activity. I’d love to see a LARP that also promotes a healthy diet by havign rules regarding what kind of food is available. Vegetable stews and soups would be in greater abundance than fatty foods with lots of meat in order to better represent how rare it was to have something like roasted lamb or other such dishes before modern farming made it easy to acquire meat.

There could very well be a cultural difference here too. Would you say that the average tabletop gamer is overweight in Ireland? Not just overweight, but obese? To me it seems that many gamers tend to be obese here in the U.S.