How far would You go to entertain other players?
Personally trying to learn Martial Arts - including combat with weapons.
(~5 years of training done, getting involved for much more).
Among other uses (mind's quiet, protection, health & general fitness, ...), for Roleplaying a character properly.
I think being healthy and having functional, real-world hobbies brings more to any game. I don't want the people I game with to be dungeon nerds that never see the light of day. I want them to be self-motivated, harding-working, goal-oriented people that I can share a hobby with.
That aside... I thought this thread was going to be more for what have you done directly to make a game better. Bring in character art, create a map, build a 3-D structure for minis, find mood-setting music, build a world bestiary, or other things like that.
I've made quite a bit of props that I felt added to the game. When I'm playing, I try to build fully fleshed out backgrounds. There are definitely a lot of things you can do.
I find "experts" to be particularly annoying to game with when they can't keep the fact that they're experts to themselves. Notably, foreign history majors tend to be really really bad at dealing with settings similar-but-not-equal to one they're experts on because they'll do/say something that would prompt a specific reaction in the real setting, yet the DM, who isn't remotely an expert in that culture and is just trying to run a game, doesn't respond "properly" (surprise!). Military and Martial Artists are also kinda bad about this, they sometimes expect tactics and physical acts to work in a system that really doesn't follow the same rules as the real world.
Not that all people of these groups are bad about it, and people from other professions can be equally bad. Point is, you shouldn't try to use personal expertise in something other than gaming to influence gaming.
Craftsmen on the other hand ... nothing (except maybe an actual castle), beats playing in civil war era tunnels converted into a tavern/dungeon by a group of brewers, blacksmiths, masons, leatherworkers, carpenters, weavers, etc. the Arts enrich everything.
Zathris wrote: