No power, now what?

This past weekend just before the gaming group arrived at my house for a rousing session we lost power. Ok, since we game with pencil and paper no big deal right?

Wrong.

My group is slowly becoming more and more electronic in nature. Myself and one other player keep our characters on the laptops we have at the table, the GM keeps his campaign information on his. We have campaign notes on Google Docs, use dice rollers both on and off line, access the SRD (we’re still playing D&D 3.5), routinely perform Google searches for relevant facts and information, the list goes on and on.

Without power, there’s no Internet, no printing of information if needed and after a couple of hours, no laptops. Gaming would grind to a halt.

Now, I know that if you’re using a computer for gaming you’ve got a backup of that material somewhere (you do have a backup don’t you?) but that really doesn’t help if you have no power so I would recommend that you include in your “disaster planning” at least the following:

1. A hard copy of your character sheet
2. A hard copy of campaign notes and information
3. The rule books for your gaming system
4. Dice!
5. Cell phone numbers/corded phone – most wireless phones do not work without power

I know that’s not a complete list but you get the idea. I also know you can’t plan for everything in this life but taking a couple of minutes to print out a character sheet at each level was something I hadn’t really thought about. Of course after I dealt with the questions from my kids on why they couldn’t play the Wii anymore and realizing that game time was a mere two hours away my thought process changed.

Luckily the power did come back on (about 15 minutes before the first arrival) so the power outage didn’t impact the session but it did cause me to start thinking about my own disaster planning.

Do you have back ups in place? Do you have a contingency plan for an event like this? Please share.

May your dice roll well.