"So, you all meet in a pub, when this old guy..."

Sorry I haven't posted in ages. The problem with agreeing with what the other person says is that it doesn't leave much room for comment.

Anyway, it looks like my next game is going to be another D&D campaign. For this one, I've been looking into creating an entirely new setting, and one of the elements that I wanted to get rid of was the generic pub, especially as a launching ground for adventures.

So, I've set up the major culture of the setting with a social taboo against eating in front of strangers. It is considered common to do so (except in the military, but that's life for the enlisted grunt). Instead of the standard in with a single common room, villages would have boarding houses, where small groups would rent a large room, and both dine and sleep there, in the company of their friends. (I'm reasonably sure that the eating thing was more or less how things worked in the days of the Roman Empire, but I may well be wrong about that. It doesn't really matter.)

There are three problems with this, derived from the role of the inn in the standard campaign:

1) The inn was often used as a starting point for adventures, a recruiting ground for mercenaries, and so forth. Removing the common room removes the usefulness of this approach.

2) The common room was the best place to look for rumours and gossip in the village. Without the common room, again we lose out.

3) The inn also provided a safe haven and a few regular NPCs, which could be used to ground the game. To a certain extent, this can be lost as well, since PCs will dine alone.

Naturally, each of these problems can be solved quite easily, by ensuring that there are marketplaces and fora in which to gather rumours and information, arranging for alternative sources for adventure hooks, and ensuring that there are familiar NPCs. Still, just one more thing for me to worry about.