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Starting a Gaming Club I’m in the process of starting up a gaming club in Austin, Texas. For me, I’d like to start getting back into the swing of gaming once again with people in person, since I ran a lot of games online and am reminded that the experience in person is just a bit different. Part of it is there’s a major barrier to entry for a lot of people - time commitment, rules complexity, venues, and materials are all major considerations. That isn’t going to stop me from making a D&D gaming club with 50+ people though that involves a mix of new and old players! Intent of this Thread This is similar to the other threads that I’ve written over the years which are mostly just blog-style notes with room open for engagement and questions. Historically, they don’t get too much traction for people to participate, and that’s okay. Hopefully, people out there find these ramblings useful. At some point in the future I may compile this for more public use as well on an actual blog a la Alexandrian, Questing Beast, etc. Cultural History In the earliest versions of Dungeons and Dragons specifically (and probably some other games) there were very often gaming clubs that formed out of college groups and societies of wargamers who had met together already on a regular basis. The original versions of D&D advertised the game as being 4 to 50 people, which sounds crazy unless you consider that originally it was a club-based activity. Ben from the Youtube channel Questing Beast provides more insight on the rationale of this style of play: https://youtu.be/slBsxmHs070 When I was growing up in the 90s, I very often played with people who descended from this tradition. We’d meet at a game shop or at a sports bar or something in the back room, or someone’s house if it had enough table space, and we’d get together with anybody who was available and play with whoever wanted to run a game that day. If that game was in the same ruleset, we didn’t even really think twice about bringing characters from other games we had played elsewhere into the game to play. You saw the same people, but you also met new people on a regular basis as well - visitors from out of town, cousins and spouses and classmates and everybody who was just curious what was going on, and then was invited to sit down and play. A lot of them had no knowledge, just like me when I was a kid, but I was taught and picked it up through this manner as well, and it became a pretty important part of my childhood and adult life. As time went on, the complexity of the game and the age groups also began to change. Making a character (again, using D&D as an example) and explaining how a tabletop role playing game worked now was quite complex in the 2000s and 2010s era. Even in a more modern sense, newcomers will most frequently gravitate towards D&D 5th Edition, but trying to explain character creation, interacting with the game world, and the game rules themselves took hours. The “Session Zero” also started becoming more popular around this time frame as well, partly as a vetting process, but also because it really did take that long to walk someone through playing a game that they were likely committed to for weeks, months, or even years from the outset, an intimidating proposition, to say the least. A very specific image of tabletop RPGs began to form where you played with the exact same people at the same time every so often and it would be like that for as long as people tolerated one another and their lives allowed for it. Gaming Clubs in the Modern Era In a great post written in the Alexandrian, the observations are quite similar, and Justin Alexander makes a great analogy where playing tabletop RPGs in the modern era is very much like attempting to join a baseball league. There’s a set of special gear, rules, commitment with the same people over weeks of an activity that someone may have never done before. Older gaming club style play is closer to playing catch - much less gear required, and significantly less time commitment. You could play catch with anything you had on hand, and when everybody got bored, you went and did something else. Similarly, anybody could start a game of catch, and you could have as many people as you wanted, though it gets a little awkward the more you add at once. You can read the original post on the Alexandrian here: [https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1223/roleplaying-games/opening-your-game-table] Anyway, before the analogy gets too hairy, the main point is that a lot of people now are looking for league-style play but run into issues where both social structures and game rules stymie the effort. This causes some pretty heated debates and viewpoints to be formed, a lot of which I won’t go into here, but they’re out there in other threads and gaming communities and Youtube talking heads that make their bones off of Patreon and being strongly opinionated on such matters. Great entertainment and insight, but not directly relevant for the purposes of exploring creating a gaming club. So, since there are not too many resources going into detail about this topic, I’m going to run head first into the activity of designing, creating, and starting a gaming club in 2022 in my local community. Purpose of a Gaming Club - Gather people together in a community of shared play - Generate stories created by the players as a result of play - Get more games under the belt - Have a good time Future Discussions and Roadmap Taking the above considerations, not only do we need to know how gaming groups fail, but we need to understand how to design healthy structures for gaming groups to succeed - and by extension, gaming clubs. We’ll take an examination at the specific structures of play, choice of rulesets and how to scale them, how to develop a sustainable scheduling model, the dynamics of play with multiple referees, and of course, I will share personal anecdotes from running gaming groups at scale over the past several years and what I’m going to be doing in 2022. Of course, there will be other things that I will go into digressions over as is the way of things, but for now, this is a good start.
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Apr 26, 2022 18:39
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I'm really interested in this play style. It's wild to think that whole methods of game organization were basically forgotten.
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Apr 26, 2022 18:48
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This thread is very relevant to my interests. I've been reading Gary Alan Fine's Shared Fantasy, and he did a lot of his field work in exactly this kind of club. So it'll be interesting to see what better community management tools there are today to take care of a lot of toxic dynamics that existed back then (field notes taken in the late 70s. Also, he did a lot of field work in one of M. A. R. Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne groups, although I think nobody at the time knew he was (or was going to be?) a neo-Nazi).
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Apr 26, 2022 19:09
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I feel like I've heard rumors and descriptions of gaming clubs like this that are more common/still exist in the UK, but more focused on tabletop wargames like warhammer, historicals, etc. Often with a clubhouse or community space where shared resources like model terrain and gaming tables can be located. Pop down to the game club to get in a game of epic 40k with whoever happens to be around, or maybe organize a blood bowl league, or maybe just hang out and paint a mini and shoot the poo poo. IIRC Dave Arneson's RPG grew out of a similar style of gaming group, and that's how Gygax got involved to begin with. One of the aspects of that old-school style of play was the ability to sketch out and develop and iterate on new games - you write up your custom thing on some note cards, play with folks you're familiar with, get feedback, brainstorm, etc. Fax, are you thinking of doing stuff like developing/iterating on your megadungeon design by leveraging a gaming club as a resource?
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Apr 26, 2022 19:21
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Leperflesh posted:I feel like I've heard rumors and descriptions of gaming clubs like this that are more common/still exist in the UK, but more focused on tabletop wargames like warhammer, historicals, etc. Often with a clubhouse or community space where shared resources like model terrain and gaming tables can be located. Pop down to the game club to get in a game of epic 40k with whoever happens to be around, or maybe organize a blood bowl league, or maybe just hang out and paint a mini and shoot the poo poo. I recommend looking at the documentary Secrets of Blackmoor for referencing Dave Arneson’s crew and their style of play. They briefly mention Gary Gygax but since the focus is on the Blackmoor group and the precursors to it, it’s a great watch and has a lot of perspective. Castle Blackmoor still runs today, which speaks to the enduring legacy of Dave Arneson and also the kind of group that people seem like they truly are looking for.
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Apr 26, 2022 19:32
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Arneson and Gygax's groups were kind of smaller scale home groups. Keep in mind that they were wargamers, and those were so sparse on the ground that for board wargaming, Avalon Hill created a house organ whose significant attraction was the classifieds section to find opponents. The miniature wargamers were in a similar situation, made worse by just how much work their terrain was to set up, much less move. The Minneapolis group, still maybe a dozen at their biggest, was where Braunstein and Chainmail were kind of married into Blackmoor, and Gygax was drawn into it by Arneson essentially coming over to give him a personal demonstration. To have this kind of Gaming Group thing, you need a combination of sufficient membership and low barrier to entry which didn't really, in my opinion, take off until the TTRPG product of something like a board game but that could keep a big group of people busy sharing their imagined antics and settings came to market.
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Apr 26, 2022 19:34
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DalaranJ posted:I'm really interested in this play style. It's wild to think that whole methods of game organization were basically forgotten. The irony here is that a lot of people have claimed that they never really “got the style” of gameplay as it was being created, but the game design structures and identity existed in video games also since the first Multi-User Dungeons. EverQuest and Ultima Online very much followed this model of “here is the world, make of it what you like” and the structures of play carried forward into the modern era with some reinterpretations that also mimicked the evolution of tabletop RPGs (more story oriented, more superheroic, more mechanics and options). Examining what made some of the shared structures between early era MMORPGs and early era tabletop RPG gaming clubs work is definitely going to be in the thread somewhere!
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Apr 26, 2022 19:37
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Leperflesh posted:I feel like I've heard rumors and descriptions of gaming clubs like this that are more common/still exist in the UK, but more focused on tabletop wargames like warhammer, historicals, etc. Often with a clubhouse or community space where shared resources like model terrain and gaming tables can be located. Pop down to the game club to get in a game of epic 40k with whoever happens to be around, or maybe organize a blood bowl league, or maybe just hang out and paint a mini and shoot the poo poo. Can confirm these still exist for historicals as the one I'm in on Thursday has existed for at least 40 years, but was largely focussed on historicals for most of that. More recently, it's expanded to modern board games, which also work well within that model. They do occasionally do RPGs, but always as long term campaigns within fixed groups. I've never heard of one with a static "open-to-all-at-any-time" clubhouse, though. Space is expensive and nobody wants to hang around on the off-chance that someone else arrives wanting a game. The only time I've seen that happen is with free gaming rooms in FLGSes and playing CCGs.
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Apr 26, 2022 21:29
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My gaming club is like this, and we who started it have hard-committed to some principles: 1. An understanding of Geek Social Fallacies is necessary 2. When allowing new members, there needs to be a testing period. It's not enough you're pleasant when you win, we need to see how you behave when you lose, get absolutely loving destroyed, have a character die, etc. We've been lucky so far. Allegedly one of our members is an absolute rage machine, but he was told before he joined that any of that would result in his not coming back, and so far he has been absolutely getting loving tabled in Blood Bowl and taken it with a grin and a handshake post game. He actually gave one of our members a shitload of (recasted) warhammer figures he wasn't planning on using or painting after getting smashed like a thicket of rotten twigs in 40k.
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Apr 26, 2022 23:49
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hyphz posted:Can confirm these still exist for historicals as the one I'm in on Thursday has existed for at least 40 years, but was largely focussed on historicals for most of that. More recently, it's expanded to modern board games, which also work well within that model. They do occasionally do RPGs, but always as long term campaigns within fixed groups. I think it's more of a "we've got space in the village rec hall to store our terrain and we get to use the main room on thursdays from 5 to 10" kind of dedicated space, not "we own this building" kind of space.
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Apr 27, 2022 05:05
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1. Why Gaming Groups Fail First, it is important to understand the deeper mechanics of why a gaming group fails. This usually comes down to one of three categories: - Mismanaged expectations - Time and material issues - Lack of social and rules structure We’ll examine why each of these categories causes failure in the small gaming group, and how a larger format gaming club can provide some solutions for it. Mismanged Expectations For the most part this is one of the most common things that gets most small groups tied up and self-destruct. Someone wants to play but has experience running a game and so they feel like they need to take on the burden to run the game, or the tone and pace of the game is not to people’s satisfaction. This happens in almost every game, and there have been great books which go into helping align the social expectations of a group. In the case of a theoretical common gaming group, it will contain people from all walks of life and perceptions that some people may not necessarily agree with. The chance increases at scale, because people, especially those who identify as gamers of some sort, are highly opinionated about all manner of things. Some will pick a hill to fight to the bitter end about instead of attempting to compromise on the sake of social cohesion, or do so but remain deeply unhappy about it. This causes a high amount of friction and ends up splitting the group. Consider the old and extreme Chick Tract about Dungeons and Dragons with a character who dies, and it’s expected that if you die in the game, you die in real life. Some folks treat different topics around the gaming table in different ways and if there are no boundaries that are appropriately set people have a much more difficult time negotiating boundaries after they’ve been crossed. Take the example of a “rage player”, who gets very emotionally heated when things aren’t going their way, including tantrums. If they are made aware of boundaries in advance, either they will respect them, or rapidly find themselves excluded from group activities. The rest of the group may end up having misgivings about approaching it in such a cut and dry fashion, but ultimately serves for creating a more neutral community space that leads to positive outcomes. Time and Material What happens when a player or referee leaves, or the venue that people play at burns down, closes, or otherwise becomes unavailable? What happens when a game goes too long in between sessions and nobody remembers what happened? What happens if someone loses all their books and notes? Generally speaking, this is the thing that people struggle with the most in terms of scheduling and sometimes material needs to play. In the modern era, it kind of feels like that people “miss out” on a game and then too much has happened for them to keep up. Or, there is so much information regarding a game that has already been established that it requires too much work to dive into that information, to the point where it’s overwhelming - either rules, or just notes about a given game that have been running for a long time. I remember when I was growing up I played Dungeons and Dragons with my buddy on the curb of our small town suburb rolling dice and fiddling through an already old and beat up copy of the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide, making up monsters as we went and challenges. We’d also get together with whoever we could find and play during lunches at school, after school, and pull marathon gaming sessions on the weekends. We took advantage of every single moment of time and place and we didn’t have to wait for the stars to align to get playing - we just played with whoever we had, wherever we could, whenever we could. Lack of social and rules structure The last bit is really a thing that is a commentary on how games and gaming groups are designed these days. Because expectations and boundaries are often misaligned or missing and not reinforced through regular assessment, it is very often that the structure of play tends to feel somewhat shallow. This can be a mismanagement of social interactions - “if only my players would do X Y Z!” - but the rules of the game that is being played can hinder or outright sabotage the creative ability to play. How does this lead to gaming group failure? Death by a thousand minor inconveniences. Consider that human beings very often will take the easiest path even if it’s not the most enjoyable based on the structures placed in front of them and the ease of access for those things. If a shortcut is provided, often times it will be leveraged because it saves precious calories gleaned from Cheeto dust from being consumed by critical thinking. This causes what I consider to be a slow end to gaming groups because soon people start expecting others to put in the work to make the group what it is. Players start taking for granted the amount of work that the referees put in, or worse, lash out emotionally when things aren’t going their way because of a series of bad dice rolls, tactical errors, and so on. Certain games will have patterns in them that force people to latch on very strongly to the established patterns and structures and completely ignore any other form of engagement. Consider the classic player archetype of the “murder hobo”, or a player who has zero interest in doing anything other than getting as powerful as possible and beating up as many things as possible as a way to fulfill a very specific kind of power fantasy. There are some rules structures which very much promote it because of how much content is devoted to the act of something like combat, instead of something like problem solving in the world, solving mysteries, or navigating tense social situations. Here’s an example from D&D 5th edition. Someone who is a spellcaster, say a wizard, is deathly afraid of melee combat. Why? They are mechanically reinforced to have all kinds of different abilities, but melee combat is not one of them. They don’t have a specific power on their character sheet that tells them they are ‘good’ at hitting people with a weapon. This can be equated (falsely) to video game logic - if you are not explicitly granted permission to do something, you can’t do it. The key note here is that is the rules which encourage a very specific style of play as a result, and when the structure constrains the freedom of expression of the player or coerces them into thinking a certain way, very often players and referees develop certain habits without realizing it. Consider another example of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. That’s a very complex game with a lot going on but conflict resolution is quite simple. However, because it is a game that does have a lot of rules and a reputation for being fussy about those rules particularly around character building, very often players will find ways to poke holes in the rules because they are encouraged explicitly to meta-game in different ways. Introducing further new mechanics on top of that renders the game to be even more byzantine than its outset, which further reinforces a certain style of play that becomes rapidly exclusory and also quite exhausting. Learning from Failure By understanding the mechanisms of failure for a gaming group we can figure out ways to mitigate them, but they don’t necessarily make a gaming group fun. You could go the opposite way for the three big categories and have a gaming group with a set of bylaws that lay out exactly the kinds of expectations, time, material, location, and an endless amount of social and rules etiquette to follow. Starts to sound more like a job at that point, and also, very exclusory. However, not all is doom and gloom, so by removing ourselves from negative experiences and examining the mechanisms which cause the groups to fail, we can hopefully learn and move on instead of repeating the same pattern. In the next few posts we’ll examine some mitigation techniques for these common failure points in gaming groups. Here’s a hint: these things can be resolved by scaling approaches up from a singular group to a gaming club.
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Apr 27, 2022 05:21
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Leperflesh posted:Fax, are you thinking of doing stuff like developing/iterating on your megadungeon design by leveraging a gaming club as a resource? Sure. The gaming club I’m working on forming will feature the Megastrata as its home setting but in a different rules engine - in my case, Old School Essentials - with a healthy amount of emergent or procedural generation taking place behind the scenes. As more play happens and more of the game world is revealed to players, there will be many opportunities to innovate core rule structures that impact the club and the game rules themselves.
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Apr 27, 2022 05:41
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aldantefax posted:First, it is important to understand the deeper mechanics of why a gaming group fails. This usually comes down to one of three categories: I think a better definition of "failure" is needed here. The assumption seems to be that a gaming group fails if it breaks up, but any and all of these conditions can exist in a gaming group without it breaking up - for any number of reasons. I'm pretty sure people in gaming chats online have seen that skeleton GIF with "if it sucks hit da bricks" on it posted multiple times and there's usually resistance to that. Suppose a group of people who are so meek and/or desperate that they will never break the group up no matter how bad a time they're having because the alternative is staring alone at the walls and contemplating death. If the only criteria for "not failing" is "not breaking up", this group is incredibly successful. That does not seem a good standard to work to! quote:I remember when I was growing up I played Dungeons and Dragons with my buddy on the curb of our small town suburb rolling dice and fiddling through an already old and beat up copy of the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide, making up monsters as we went and challenges. We’d also get together with whoever we could find and play during lunches at school, after school, and pull marathon gaming sessions on the weekends. We took advantage of every single moment of time and place and we didn’t have to wait for the stars to align to get playing - we just played with whoever we had, wherever we could, whenever we could. Comparisons to anything that happened in childhood have to be taken with a huge pinch of salt. It's the old OSR fallacy that if you set up play like you did when you were a kid, it will feel that way again. But it's only new once, and adult standards are different. quote:Here’s an example from D&D 5th edition. Someone who is a spellcaster, say a wizard, is deathly afraid of melee combat. Why? They are mechanically reinforced to have all kinds of different abilities, but melee combat is not one of them. They don’t have a specific power on their character sheet that tells them they are ‘good’ at hitting people with a weapon. This can be equated (falsely) to video game logic - if you are not explicitly granted permission to do something, you can’t do it. The key note here is that is the rules which encourage a very specific style of play as a result, and when the structure constrains the freedom of expression of the player or coerces them into thinking a certain way, very often players and referees develop certain habits without realizing it. I'm not sure how this is an example of lack of structure. It's a very clear structure that's trying to balance that PC out. Whether or not it succeeds in the case of 5e is another matter, but certainly in PF2e casters should be scared of getting into melee. I was a bit sad to see this because the effects of a lack of actual structure, "tyranny of structurelessness", are a frequent problem in gaming groups.
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Apr 27, 2022 11:09
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Valid observations. We can define failure as a group that is no longer maintaining cohesion to have enjoyment in the activity of the gaming as a whole and they’re going through the motions. Projecting fallacies of broader identity groups is fine, but for me, I remember quite well and can recount the many times where growing up I did fill as many gaps of time as possible with playing games instead of the drudgery of public school and chores. So, you can poo poo on a fond memory as is the prerogative of a forums poster, but the experiences of the individual do not map universally, and all perceptions ought to be viewed with a measure of skepticism. Lastly, structures of play which guide behavior in highly specific ways that run counter to the group enjoyment, or structures which lack certain support to sustain the enjoyment, or a lack of structure at all - the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ - all can fall under this specific category. However, using loaded phrases as noted above is not the point of these explorations, since I’m more concerned with how we can use this knowledge to move forward and establish a gaming club.
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Apr 27, 2022 14:19
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I certainly wasn't intending to poo poo on any fond memories. The point was only that what provided group enjoyment as a child is not necessarily what will do so as an adult. While I accept that the word "tyranny" makes the phrase fairly loaded, the article with that title and the principle have a good point: that it is very difficult to create a group that does something and that actually has no structure, the only difference is if the structure is explicit or not.
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Apr 27, 2022 15:02
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The more public group that Fine analyzes in Shared Fantasy actually did have various types of extremely toxic people, and some toxic dynamics generally, but managed to persevere, although it changed with time. The biggest change they went through was because the club was publicized and people were essentially using them as a babysitting service for their teens, which made a lot of the old guard leave. Meanwhile, Fine singles out at least one person who was actively disruptive to the point where people found ways of not playing with him or playing around him, and who went as far as to physically accost other players, without destroying the club. It also has a chapter called "Game Structure" which is in fact about the social structure of the gaming group, rather than having much to do with the rules.
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Apr 27, 2022 17:28
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The hard thing in my experience is not getting rid of obvious bad actors, but managing players (or GMs) who bring the group down in less bombastic fashion. I'm talking about the guy who clearly does not enjoy the game and spends every session essentially doing nothing, but continues showing up week after week. It creates an increasing impression that the group is a place of last resort for people who have "nowhere else to go", which in turn reduces investment on the part of the other players and GMs. It's tough to kick people out who "didn't do anything wrong", the common response I've seen is the rest of the group schedules around them instead to ensure they don't show up.
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Apr 27, 2022 17:54
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We're kinda jumping the gun with offerings about how to mitigate these failure modes, given Fax has already foreshadowed that a large group can have mitigating options not available to the "standard" table. Specifically, there is less need to try to accommodate the bored, apathetic, distracted, or simply misfitting players at a table to which they are ill-suited when it's far easier to both replace them from the ready pool, and maybe find a different table within the pool to which they are better suited. I anticipate commentary about distribution of authority, reinforcement of community norms, and more. This thread is about gaming clubs; it's not "yet another thread to hotly debate what the problems are with RPGs." I interpret Fax's reminiscence about curbside gaming was intended to exemplify the attraction of drop-in, ubiquitously available gaming, or perhaps a spirit of experimentation with loosly- or dis-connected bite-sized narratives; rather than some desire to have a game club emulate a 1990s 12-year-old's style of roleplay in whatever particulars might be labeled as immature or problematic somehow (and those presumptions are themselves unnecessary).
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Apr 27, 2022 22:05
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To be clear, I keep referring to the club in Shared Fantasy because it was a "big" club, multiple tables, multiple referees, long-term, etc, so I think lessons from it are going to be relevant to what's being proposed here.
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Apr 27, 2022 23:27
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I'm also referring to a scenario with multiple tables and a shared pool of players. After enough "bad games" the GMs respond by handpicking the players they actually like and leaving to form their own smaller groups. Which is great for those people, since they now have regular games with people they like to play with. But it's not good for the overall health of the larger group.
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Apr 27, 2022 23:45
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mellonbread posted:I'm also referring to a scenario with multiple tables and a shared pool of players. After enough "bad games" the GMs respond by handpicking the players they actually like and leaving to form their own smaller groups. Which is great for those people, since they now have regular games with people they like to play with. But it's not good for the overall health of the larger group. Ah, the charter school method.
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Apr 28, 2022 00:08
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Good side conversation that is being explored right now. I’ll have some more thoughts on it in a little bit, as it’s been a bit busy over here. I should also add that as noted above when context is taken into consideration, the inversions of the three failure categories can also themselves cause failure. The rate at which a group of any fails is also something to consider - on a long enough time frame, most groups will eventually fail, mostly due to time and material, but not always. There are the very rare groups which are the nuclear groups of people who have known each other forever and like what they like and they are deep homies. Put a camera in front of them and you have something that approaches Critical Role and actual play podcasts emulating a performative thing which in itself is considered good fun for those involved. Whether or not the cast is photogenic or there is sufficient equipment to draw a crowd (and if that’s even a worthwhile pursuit) is also an emergent form of material and expectation challenges. Anyway, more ruminations a bit later.
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Apr 28, 2022 04:36
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One thing that has tripped me up a bit as I read this is your framing of one of the issues as "lack of... structure" when I think what you mean is, at least some of the time, something more like "the wrong structure." Your example of the dnd 5e wizard is exactly this - there's certainly structure there and sometimes it's ok, but in other games that structure drives disengagement, or unfun experiences, or samey reversion to charsheet rules-first gaming. A corollary of your point, or restatement perhaps, would be that rules matter. GURPS (generic! universal!) drives towards a certain kind of play, a certain kind of game, a certain kind of story; Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine an entirely different kind. You literally cannot play either game in the other system.
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Apr 28, 2022 07:46
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Do you have a guaranteed space for this endeavor? Because I’ve been thinking about open table type gaming recently and the thing that has consistently stymied me is location. I met my current CoC group at an open gaming night at a local comic shop, but that night has been on hiatus since the pandemic started. The owner had a kid last year and doesn’t want to have ANY in-person events until they can get vaccinated. Some people aren’t going to be comfortable with indoor gaming right now, some places won’t have outdoor areas, some places may want a guaranteed amount of people to cover the amount of table space used.
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Apr 28, 2022 13:01
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2. Enter the Gaming Club Now that we have examined a non-exhaustive list of the broad categories of group failure, we can take a look at how we can solve these things through creating and maintaining a gaming club. As this is going to be a bit too abstract for me to articulate without an applied example, I will offer the gaming club I am designing as a case study and describe it in greater detail. Addressing Failure Points by Scaling It seems almost ironic to think that throwing more people at these failure points for smaller groups can work, and has worked before - as previously noted, old iterations of Dungeons and Dragons as well as other adjacent games like tabletop miniatures games and board games fit the “club” model more than a small group. In spite of this, it does admirably and has overall a higher chance at maintaining cohesion than a smaller gaming group for a longer period of time. Rather than going point by point as a rebuttal of the mechanisms which fail, we can just jump straight to how to define both the parameters and the structure of a gaming club and let people draw associations in how directly and indirectly these things address the failure points. Defining the Club and Parameters Let us define a gaming club as follows: “A medium to large group of organized people that dynamically create events around a primary game or genre of games on demand.” Generally speaking, gaming clubs have more people than there is capacity to host at any one given point in time, with a large range of schedules, skillsets, and walks of life. Clubs typically have a sort of hierarchy, in that there are those who are capable to host or referee the games in question. I would say that it needs to be a medium to large group because most smaller groups (say, up to 8 people or so) will likely encounter the problems mentioned in Why Gaming Groups Fail, mostly because everybody tries to be in every gaming session for fear of missing out on the action. For organization, most gaming clubs ought to be inclusive but there may be membership requirements by association: (be related to somebody already in the club, share the same space as people in the club, or be directly invited via an outside club event). Clubs can be closed, open, or semi-open as a result. The most common would likely be semi-open as discussed. Since clubs are likely to have a large amount of members by their design and intent, there also needs to be a way for members to communicate with one another, schedule events, and have spaces to gather at. Of course, someone capable of hosting such events is needed as well, be it a business or people who offer their private spaces for play. With a high amount of members in the club, the general agreement is a default activity that everybody has a chance to participate in. This is considered to be the core of why the club exists. There may be other activities that can be done instead, but in absence of those alternatives, people are in the club to gather and do the specific activity. In a gaming club, that’s usually something like a traditional game, but of course, there can be all kinds of other clubs that are beyond the scope of this thread. For the gaming club I’m designing, I can define it thus: “I want to run Old School Essentials with a megadungeon called the Megastrata, a 100-level dungeon crawl that is generated procedurally. This club to be semi-open: it will be advertised to multiple cohorts and have people be invited in as long as they have interest. Prospective members can decide whether or not they want to continue doing club activities at will, but they’re invited to the club by just being told it exists and to message me if they’d like details. Members organize and schedule game events and notify a referee when and where they want to play. There will be multiple time slots and venues in order to get the broadest amount of activity time and frequency as scheduling allows. All members play in the same setting and the actions of players cause consequences that other players may need to deal with.” That’s a long winded way of saying: I want to run a megadungeon and get a shitload of people to play in the same megadungeon like an MMORPG. I was going to write more on this but I think writing out in greater detail what the parameters are of the gaming club I'm designing will help to highlight some of the nuances that I'm considering and open up discussion for blind spots and I wanted to get some content up into the thread. 
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Apr 29, 2022 23:46
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As a side bar, a gaming club in the modern era looks suspiciously close to the “West Marches” style of play which has been co-opted by many groups following Ben Robbins’ series of posts on how it worked. In it, Ben did discuss that there were some challenges to running it that I believe can be mitigated with more thoughtful structures in how games are scheduled. I’ll go into very shortly about how I plan to approach rules engine selection, canvassing for players, organizing games, and then thoughts on outcomes (noting that the gaming club has not officially launched yet, that’ll be next month).
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Apr 30, 2022 02:58
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Fax's Gaming Club As stated, I'm planning to start an in-person gaming club in Austin, Texas. Austin is known for having a decent gaming scene with lots of new players as well as players who are new to D&D but may have a lot of video game experience, and as people start re-evaluating their risk profiles, there is both demand and desire to get to a table and chuck some dice. Onboarding This will be a semi-open gaming club. Meaning, that the referees (currently, just me) need to introduce a member into the club so that they can start playing. A "ready sheet" is provided here for reference to send to prospective players: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ATUGAG5_yYawAs68HLOY1LvNqK3ZXP8VbVSTlRDGSsw/edit?usp=sharing This is a pretty short document which lists the general approaches of the game and what players can expect. It also defines a default activity that players will engage in when it's time to meet, which is: delve into the megadungeon. In the coming weeks I will actually work on preparing a short video that serves as an introduction to the game and its concepts since webcams are good and microphones do a reasonable job in a quiet environment to splice into a two minute power point with the face of a brown Adonis like myself talking at the camera. On-Demand Scheduling It is also made clear at the get go that players will have the onus put on them to self-organize. This means that they will need to identify other players somehow, get their schedules lined up, and then find a referee willing to run the game at a time slot that works for everybody. To make this easier, referees will have a guide in how to post their availability using an online service like Doodle or YouCanBook.Me (which I use in my day job, and you can create one free availability thing synced to a calendar per user). The idea though is to make sure that all referees (if there should be more in the future) are able to use this and players have access to it. Information Management Players are responsible for managing all of their information, and I mean all of it. That means that there are no fancy printed out battle maps of the dungeon grid by grid for players to consume and pore over at their leisure. They are on their own to track the information and also remember that they spiked this door in the Vampire Ranch because there was a dancing zombie behind that door and they were going to come back to it later. The referees have a pretty important job to maintain information behind the scenes to be discovered and be a true "dungeon master" in this case and also model changes over time, but it is intentionally not visible to the players. Players are on their own to explore the world around them and are encouraged to be curious and ask questions and manage that information somehow. This creates a problem - players love the paperwork of combat ability tracking and how badass they are, but sometimes they don't care too much about the game world. My theory is that it's because of the kind of games they have been introduced to and the structures they have been put in, so to encourage the structure of information management and giving ownership of it to the players, I have an idea. The Exploration Codex This is an important physical artifact that players will have access to - the Exploration Codex. In order for the game to have information meaningfully documented, players will be required to log in and log out of sessions with their core stats. They can also use it to track information they would like to have in the public record, whatever that means - they could write down notes, interesting quotes, doodles, poems, maps, or literally anything they find useful or entertaining into the public record - it is intended to be the property of all members of the gaming club. For redundancy, the Codex will be kept in the hands of the head referee and digital backups will be taken at the end of every session for any pages that are updated. Why a physical, shared artifact? If you're savvy to OSR type games you know that there are books out there which are explicitly in-fiction, player-facing tomes for people to think about and dig into. Hot Springs Island is one such module that has a referee book and a player book which is modeled as a lost journal that the players find washed ashore. It is full of misinformation and true information from a recently deceased adventurer, and their lessons are paid forward to the lucky players. There are also books on exotic fantasy plants and animals treated as if they were written by a mad wizard which is bi-directional - referees can take and use the colorful prose to create devious plots and monsters, and players can use it as a reference for encountering said phenomena. Similarly, there was the concept of the "unfinished map", which someone started before the players even begin a single session, but the idea still stands. This was mentioned in Ben Robbins' West Marches game and then players got immediately inspired by it and sought to make their own. The important thing about most of these above examples are that they are in their most powerful iteration when they are in a physical form. For me, it is important to have some kind of tactile item that players can bond over. Most players have their own systems for tracking their characters and notes, which is usually their phones in the modern era, but some folks like using binders, note cards, and so on. This is all well and good, but it's unlikely that the same players will play in every game, so that means their information is kept to them and not passed along. Shared physical items, in other words, serve as a kind of glue for the larger gaming club. This isn't limited to tabletop RPGs - terrain and miniatures are materials that can be shared, as are dice, and so physical items are definitely important to share and bond over with most types of gaming clubs - but for our purposes, we're talking about this from an information management perspective. This was a major issue for Megastrata 2020-2021, which was digital. Information was spread all over the place - DIscord, Google Docs, and random conversations. I tried to start centralizing the information in Google Docs, but the complaint was that it was too hard to search and completely obfuscated by the sheer amount of information generated during play. When you add the complexity of the actual game itself (GURPS Dungeon Fantasy) and a changing set of rules (the Mystery System), it became too byzantine for introducing new players. A physical shared artifact means that there is something provided that is aesthetically pleasing that develops as the game develops, even if players barely engage with it. Just having a logbook of play that people can inspect will start people asking questions. How do I know this? I've used it before in other games and modeled after the very old style of play that I grew up with. Being able to keep track of what happened in a shared way and at least know who you're playing with can sometimes be tricky. Having something that everybody writes into also creates a very specific ritual of going into "gametime mode" even if you don't explicitly start playing theme music or whatever. It's a very clear cue that you're transitioning from the real world to the game world and beginning play. A physical artifact is very powerful as a focus tool in this regard and immediately understandable. This also provides an opportunity for some players to step forward and feel useful, because not everybody will be interested to track details during play, but some players are. By having this be a physical artifact, you know who is taking notes and what is important to them, and that can be a signal for other players to help and collaborate. Which, being very facetious here: what a concept, players engaging with the game and each other instead of their character sheets at monsters, right? Sidebar: Other physical artifacts I would like to be able to give players a way to reliably delegate roles, the two most common being Caller and Tracker. The Caller is the prototype for the party leader but is really the speaker of the party to the referee. They are the ones who, by whatever means the group sees fit, determines how to proceed by calling the actions the group takes. The Tracker is a hybrid role of mapper and just general note taker, and very likely the one who will be holding the Exploration Codex. Just as useful as it is for someone to have a physical item that shows "I am taking the notes over here", having another physical item that shows "This is your party leader" is another great cue to provide with your players and also can change dynamically. In other words, physical artifacts provide structure just as all the other tools that are being considered are. At some point I would love to be able to do things like give out participation tokens and trophies for players that go above and beyond and do something that has a major impact on the game as well - I love the idea of getting custom art commissioned of characters that have overcome all the odds (or didn't) and managed to get to retirement and have them enter sort of a "Hall of Legends" type gallery. It doesn't have to be too many things but just enough to keep the experience special and a shared memory that leads to storytelling from club members. Sidebar II: Digital artifacts I do still want to be able to have people to access the Codex on their own terms and as such will attempt to track it digitally in a public record like a Google Photos Album, Imgur, or something similar. This will be "read-only" but always available so that everybody is working from the same public information that they uncover through play. In the event of an online gaming club, I would also do the same thing as the above proposed Exploration Codex, but have it be digital. A sample can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N0ndhSwAFlWwXoRML-zu-c_3DStCn8uf2EedDeiMPQg/edit?usp=sharing This would be set up as the de facto way to track the basics of information, but it has some shortcomings - namely, a Google Doc is far less flexible and accessible (technology is ironic like this) than a basic paper notebook. You can't easily doodle or create a map in Google Docs, or on a computer in general unless you had a drawing tablet, or you drew out a map on a piece of paper, took a picture, and then uploaded it to the document. Selecting A Rules Engine (Warning: long digression coming) In order to make the game more broadly accessible for what I'm doing, I decided to get a game with less rules while still maintaining a fairly familiar feeling for players from a broader pop culture sense. I wanted a game that was more focused on exploration and problem solving than it was about combat, but I also wanted to have it be in a setting that was pretty much a megadungeon. In past experiences, I have run most editions of contemporary D&D starting from AD&D 2e to the modern era, and one of the largest hurdles that I have seen by far is introducing new players to the rules complexity of something that we enthusiasts might take for granted, such as D&D 5e, widely regarded as the most elegant of the modern editions of Dungeons and Dragons. Similarly, I have tried a multitude of other systems and read through other systems such as GURPS Dungeon Fantasy (which was the rules engine for Megastrata 2020), Dungeon World (of which I wrote at great length in its heyday), as well as looked at other OSR-type engines like Adventure Conquerer King System, Worlds Without Number, Wolves of God, Godbound, and other such games. As a disclaimer, I don't endorse some of these games, and in fact I am throwing my copy of ACKS into the recycling because the authors are shitbags, and given Adam Koebel's historic performance at also being a shitbag, I don't really recommend Dungeon World either even though I did gush about it. However, I put them in this preface for selecting a rules engine because I have waded through a whole mess of good and bad and learned lessons from all of them. One thing that stood out to me was being reminded of what I personally liked about D&D growing up and that it wasn't about trying to create mechanically obnoxious characters, but engaging with the world and its inhabitants as someone with agency in that world through actions, words, and deeds done. The best stories and most groan-worthy stories did not really deal with how characters at the table were so mechanically ridiculous they were doing something or other, it was the reason why they fought or a funny improvised interaction with the game world that led to a several hours long argument about horses falling into rivers. So, I wanted to go back to the basics and strip out a lot of the cruft and reset expectations. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy was a great exercise in getting everybody out of their comfort zone. Very few people had a deep well of GURPS experience to draw from and the remainder were coming in with a different perspective on games. However, it did cause major hangups by the fact that GURPS is so rules heavy that it can cause people to hyper-fixate on details when really the rules are there to support the world being a sort of reality simulator more than a story engine designed to propel forward narratives about interpersonal drama. However, it did serve quite well when all was running smoothly, it just took a lot of work to get there and then brain worms set in and caused that game to begin winding down. I actually came across the Rules Cyclopedia version of D&D and got quite fond of it several years prior and began having pipe dreams about running games in that. I was like, "This is the poo poo right here that I do like." However, I shelved it to run a lot of D&D 5e because it has been and still remains as one of the most popular things people want to play, and I don't have to fight the system itself that much, but players are engineered to focus more on combat and their character builds. I wanted to de-program out of players, but I felt that PBTA was too lightweight for what I wanted. I don't remember when I started thumbing through Old School Essentials, but I appreciated its approach to page layout as well as reminded that games did not have to have reams of abilities for characters explicitly stated in order for someone with a sword to use it in a hundred different ways. It did feature structures for things that I wanted players to do (which GURPS Dungeon Fantasy also did but in a much more long-winded way) - it had rules for travel and exploration and explicit rules for managing dungeon exploration, something that I very much enjoyed as a player crawling through a random dungeon in the days of yore. All of the above eventually had me think on this and settle finally on Old School Essentials as the game of choice, because it was familiar enough but also promoted improvising and judging at the table while also having an appropriate structure for megadungeon play. I feel confident that I can help people generate a character in OSE in five to fifteen minutes per group and then play begins as they start thinking about what equipment to buy. Compared to D&D 5e where walking through character creation and explaining all the mechanics are sending people into a spiral for definitions, like "what is a proficiency bonus" and "what's the difference between a druid and a barbarian", that process took at least an hour. Anyway, I picked Old School Essentials also because it's got the best GM screen on the market. If you don't believe me, go find one at your local gaming store and just marvel at it. OSE will be useful as the gaming club's go-to system because it has rules structures for exploring the dungeon, has connectors and hooks for extending the system, but also has nuance in simplicity if you understand the design theory behind it. I'll refer again back to Questing Beast's video on the "Lost Key of Old D&D", where it really was engineered to be run at scale. The game prompts the structures to be thoroughly explored and populated at scale, and thus, I chose it and also chose the scale of play based on it. --- As I move out of the pre-launch phase and get into the launch window for the game, I have specific events that I would like to go ahead and fulfill to begin filling in the blanks for play as well as a few other challenges that I'll need to address. Namely, venues, time management (both game time management and calendar management), as well as preparing the game to scale referees. I'll likely take another few posts to articulate in greater detail some of the things about why I picked some of these approaches and tools in greater depth and how I plan to execute on them like the scheduling management tools, but this is a good stopping point before I hit another post with 20 thousand characters.
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Apr 30, 2022 04:53
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Canvassing for Players One extra thing to note about how I'm working on this gaming club is where I'm looking for players. Essentially, I'm looking at social media where I already know a bunch of folks locally and have engaged with some local gamers already. I have a go to list of a handful of people but opened it up to my wider social and para-social network in Facebook and Facebook Groups, as well as put up an attractive looking post on Instagram with the same kind of copy. You can find that post here: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cc0fbjLOR-F/ I actually got no meaningful responses from Instagram (which is probably because that's more of a consumption platform) but I got a great deal of responses from Facebook and Facebook Groups specifically. There is a "Casual Dungeons and Dragons" group for Austin which immediately had some people take to it, and surprisingly, a lot of them are lurkers who are curious but were intimidated by the other kinds of things people were posting looking for games and such. The positioning of a game that is generally pretty easy to teach, has minimal commitment, as well as scheduled on demand while being a blast to play has proven to be an effective tool at generating interest. Since we have interested players at a scale of about 12 to 20 people, this is a great start, and I expect that there will be players who will join and leave over time. The first main event that I'll want to go ahead and do is a meet and greet for players to mill around and say hello to everybody else, before starting up a Facebook Group for specifically people to coordinate. I say Facebook Group because, to be honest, Discord and other programs don't quite cut the mustard or they cost money (like Meetup). I use Discord every day but Facebook Groups has proven to be more effective at organizing events, especially. Since everybody also contacted me through Facebook Groups, then it also makes sense to continue to engage with them on that front -- for now. I might end up switching to an email list, but the idea is accessibility for communication. Discord just isn't most people's bag.
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Apr 30, 2022 05:02
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Right, I'm good for now. Have a good weekend folks, and I'll check back in here when I'm on the can or what not and shitpost.
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Apr 30, 2022 05:03
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3. Gaming Clubs and Gaming Groups Comparison Since we have a test case example for a gaming club, we can see the primary things for a gaming club is the scale of people and the higher availability of games. This is generally true, but there are also things to consider that gaming clubs have in their design identity versus gaming groups: - A gaming club can be designed to be more resilient to changes in time and material - A gaming club is self-selecting with a wider player base: whether or not this for good or ill, club members who do not comply with large social demands will likely be passively or actively excluded from the group - Gaming clubs also have a certain more formalized structure even if it remains a casual endeavor, and as such recalibrates most member expectations in a way that smaller groups may find to be impractical I feel that the above points are mostly self-explanatory, but it is key to note that unless the gaming club is designed or re-designed to have more sustainable structures inside of it, then you run into the exact same problems as a smaller gaming group, though the scale of people involved can compound the level of "yikes" that occurs when something goes south. Drama loves company, after all. The details I had elaborated on when designing the gaming club for Austin generally takes these things into account, and looking at other gaming clubs like the original West Marches club, the Blackmoor club, and so on, there are a few key things that are kept in mind to ensure their long term success: - A structure of play is designed that empowers all members of the club, with priority given for self-organization. That is, it empowers people to get out there and get those games in, otherwise they won't happen. Referees no longer have to do the groan-inducing act of herding cats while also trying to prepare content for a game, only to have scheduling torpedo the best laid plans for weeks at a time. - Players especially no longer need to be reliable in a long form way. Because the type of play expects players to drop in and out, there is a concept of a "backup call list" to help fill seats at the table when someone can't make it on a session to session basis. - The rules engine used for the main activity of the gaming club should promote club style play. This is I think a very key thing that I don't think modern rules engines don't have that very much in tabletop RPGs, but they do mostly fine in tabletop minis games by providing sample structures for organized play. Writing more on this later...
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Apr 30, 2022 17:01
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What do you plan to do about newbies to the club playing with experienced people? I understand that everyone goes back to "town" at the end of the previous schedule so you don't have a problem with inserting new people into the geography of the game, but how does mixing the newly rolled characters with a player who has a level 8 character equal any kind of balance? Are you going to suggest that the referees scale the dungeon to the party composition at the time? How does that work with if the older guys go back to places they've already been and monsters/rooms they've skipped? Also sorta around this, how are you going to fight the type of one and done players who come into an existing experienced group as a newb, get ignored cause they're not upfront or engaged enough and then don't come back? That happens a lot in an existing gaming group, but I think it'd be more profound in a club like this.
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Apr 30, 2022 17:45
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Interested to see how forcing the players to make their own maps goes. I tried it with my own megadungeon and eventually abandoned it because the players all hated it. Out of a rotating cast of about twenty, not a single one wanted to spend the entire session taking careful notes and repeatedly clarifying the geometry of every room. There were a few who did so out of a sense of obligation, but they weren't always present (perhaps because they disliked being saddled with a chore nobody else wanted). I suspect the player organized scheduling will resolve itself into a facsimile of regularly scheduled sessions, since the limiting reactant is what timeslots the DM can actually make. If the players can make twenty different times and the DM can make three, you've got three potential times. You could "unlock" additional timeslots by recruiting more DMs, but that requires convincing people to put in the effort to run games in a shared setting where they don't have total creative control. How do you plan to recruit more DMs?
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Apr 30, 2022 19:07
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Mustache Ride posted:What do you plan to do about newbies to the club playing with experienced people? I understand that everyone goes back to "town" at the end of the previous schedule so you don't have a problem with inserting new people into the geography of the game, but how does mixing the newly rolled characters with a player who has a level 8 character equal any kind of balance? Are you going to suggest that the referees scale the dungeon to the party composition at the time? How does that work with if the older guys go back to places they've already been and monsters/rooms they've skipped? Generally speaking there is no expectation to balance encounters relative to party level. The encounters are determined by depth in the Megastrata, and encountering things in an easier environment and power leveling a newbie is just as valid as giving them a glowing sword they had lying around - note that this is a somewhat rare thing to have but it could happen. If players are organizing and bringing along newer or more experienced players, then by the nature of the club they would be more willing to introduce players. If someone doesn’t want to participate in a given session because they feel it’s beneath them or they’re too green, then being open about this is going to be the thing that helps the most. Similarly, everybody starts at the bottom. Not only do megadungeons change as monsters and traps and locations change and repopulate, but characters all start from the same pool. Those that develop a gently caress you got mine mentality and close ranks around the others are free to do so, but it will likely end up as an edge case to troubleshoot. Similarly, players of all power and experience levels are useful in solving unconventional problems, because it is the player solving those problems through their character, not the other way around in this rules engine. The power band similarly is much different compared to other editions of D&D. Everybody is pretty mortal and still needs to worry about hit point and resource management. Being able to prepare for a journey carefully and know when to fight and run is not represented on a character sheet. Spells, similarly, are not the magic bullet to solve all problems. They offer one form of solution at great resource expenditure. Mortality is a big deal, as is resurrection. It also makes certain monsters a lot scarier. Nobody wants to gently caress with a vampire or wight, since they drain levels. Similarly, dealing with poison is a big deal too, because poison in this version will kill you on a failed save. Modern expectations will quickly be recalibrated, and similarly, it will be much easier to get back into the game as well.
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Apr 30, 2022 21:19
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mellonbread posted:Interested to see how forcing the players to make their own maps goes. I tried it with my own megadungeon and eventually abandoned it because the players all hated it. Out of a rotating cast of about twenty, not a single one wanted to spend the entire session taking careful notes and repeatedly clarifying the geometry of every room. There were a few who did so out of a sense of obligation, but they weren't always present (perhaps because they disliked being saddled with a chore nobody else wanted). Asking to see who has interest to run behind the screen, and then talking with them, but in terms of formal structure for recruitment I don’t have one. Mostly it will be to get a sense of how someone runs the game by how they engage with people during play. Unless there were exceptional circumstances I’d want such a person to play in the game first to get a feel for it.
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Apr 30, 2022 21:21
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Thinking about more for the DMs for recruiting, I also think it's important to discuss club organizer and referee mentality, which comes down to: You can't guarantee that people will have a good time, but you can set up the structures and support having a good time. The Angry DM actually just put up a blog post series that talk about their own open gaming table. If you can tolerate the writing style, it has a few good gems on the topic as well, so quite timely. This is somewhat beyond the scope of starting a gaming club but also relevant because if you think that it's some kind of lovely thankless job that is supposed to perform at a certain level and to make every experience as fun as possible, that's a direct course for burnout. Most modern era DMs follow this kind of perspective though and it gets them in trouble one way or another. Gaming club referees, then, should promote emergent gameplay by setting up situations and being objective folks that can talk through what happens in the game world, rather than sandbagging or holding the experience to a high ideal to drive a narrative forward (again, this is in the context of the kind of gaming club I'm working on, since Adventurer's League and RPGA run opposite to this for organized play). I'd probably need to spend time with other potential referees and write up guidelines for play for them so that they can create those situations more readily, with some modified guidance from various sources to help keep things running smoothly. I will work more on some additional gaming club notes as I continue to dive deeper into designing the onboarding mechanisms and scheduling as referenced.
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May 2, 2022 20:16
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aldantefax posted:We’d also get together with whoever we could find and play during lunches at school, after school, and pull marathon gaming sessions on the weekends. We took advantage of every single moment of time and place and we didn’t have to wait for the stars to align to get playing - we just played with whoever we had, wherever we could, whenever we could. Holy crap I’m just beaming in memory of doing this through grades 7 and 8 making up rules wholesale as we progressed, heedless of reality or established structure. I don’t know if I could fit a gaming club in my life, let alone organize one, but that ad hoc “let’s just game!” without scheduling hassles was magical. Thanks for helping me revisit it.
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May 9, 2022 01:08
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In terms of gaming clubs, we ought to discuss scheduling in finer detail and what “schedule on-demand” versus “regular scheduled” might mean in greater detail and how to design play to account for both. In a gaming club of the type I’m focusing on (that is, a tabletop RPG club) players are expected and encouraged to schedule games on demand with whoever they may wish to invite to the game. The key here is to say (within reason and energy limits) “yes” to those schedule requests as long as they meet the time boundaries of a referee, which is generally the kingpin of making the whole thing work. In general, modern gameplay for adults lasts for about two to four hours for me. I think the sweet spot for most people is around three hours before they start getting a little antsy and attention starts to wane. As a result, we can create a structure for scheduling on demand where games run for generally three to four hours in a fairly predictable way. Players can, due to game or real world constraints, choose to end sooner than that. Compare this to what most gaming groups (club or otherwise) run into, which is the “game of the week” where people show up expecting to do some kind of play, but that might not necessarily be sustainable over a long period of time. This allows for different kinds of play such as longer form story arcs and adventure-style play. When moving to on-demand, I put the following structures into how players schedule on-demand: - Players should be able to schedule in advance - that is, one to two weeks out. One person is responsible for doing the scheduling. - Only one player and one referee is required to play, but that player can take as many characters as they like into a session. The soft cap is still six players. - Players can advertise for scheduling in a shared environment - often times, this will be in a Facebook group (for offline play) or on Discord and via an online booking service (for online play). - Play includes all activities from character creation (speedy) to town and inventory management as well as dungeon exploration and wrap-up. Players can opt to do some things outside of play time From the referee standpoint, this allows for enough time to populate and/or repopulate the dungeon. In order to make character creation easier, having a large stack of pregenerated characters to hand out for people is what I eventually plan to have, in addition to blank character sheets for people to use. The following considerations for “on-demand play” have the following referee workflow: - Ensure that dungeon levels are generated either randomly, intentionally, or both (random but certain zones in a dungeon can be fixed in some way, like special rooms or special blocks of a dungeon) - A prepared list of faction notes and ideas for when players encounter intelligent creatures in the dungeon - which, can be often - Random encounter lists relative to the zone of the dungeon they are in Generally speaking, the expectation is that play will be emergent and the referee will react and describe while the players interact and explore. Because there is no overarching narrative, this is perhaps the key point that most gaming clubs attempt to stick onto but sometimes get hung up on. In the Alexandrian, a case study of Caverns of Thracia involve multiple points of ingress to the dungeon as well as factions and a static map to explore and map over the course of time. Random encounter tables, meanwhile, can and should evolve over time to reflect the changing nature of the dungeon. In order to cut down on preparation time, it is important to create a lot of these structures as modular. Faction motivations and details can change based on how players and other dungeon population interact, and they should. Even traversing known ground, there are things which will be different, evidence of the passing of time initiated by the players or otherwise. All this to say that the structures of this style of play lend well to “play to find out what happens”, which is itself not new but codified in modern systems like Apocalypse World and its derivatives. I’d like to redefine it for the purposes of scheduling in order to prepare “emergent structures” to support this style of play. During play, the referee’s expectations for note taking should be fairly lightweight given the increased demand to react to player agency. Johnn Four, who is another engineer type as well as game master coach with courses like Wizard of Adventure and such, has a tool called Campaign Logger which provides a handy way to electronically capture “moments” that should be referenced and added to the referee notes. What might this look like during play? My notes from an online session run look like as follows: —- - Raid license and rappeling license (Zone 7-9) - Players descend to Zone 10: Old Warrens - Deadfall diagram and burnt chest - Destroyed a door by crowbar in diagram room - 1 stirge (classic) - hostile - 8 goblins - hostile. 1 character dies, party escapes. Triskelon tattoo, tooth necklace —- This is admittedly a session that did not go so long in terms of exploration, but it did last for about 3 hours. Feedback was also recorded post-session in private along with some administrative reminders of play (keeping in mind that modern player expectations may expect longer character lifespan). From here there are a few hooks that players can ruminate on, because even though one character died and other characters survived, knowledge is persistent. Compared to “regularly scheduled” play, the structures of on-demand scheduling also mean that the information persistence need not be fully synced between players. There have been many times where players in other games have forgotten week to week (or longer) what has happened even if they take notes (rare indeed that is). You could run the same style of game with regularly scheduled play, but this also removes a certain level of agency for players as well and changes the mindset of the game. Fully aware that by this point I’ve gone into a long digression and ramble about two intertwined topics, this kind of scheduling dynamic gets to that certain “agency” where they play when they want to, instead of showing up to a session that feels more like a chore at certain points. Regenerative and emergent gameplay, however, is encouraged but has no specific guidelines placed into game rules to elaborate on why things like random encounters and such are a good idea. Many years of misinterpretation have thus caused such mechanics taken in a vacuum are vilified and categorically rejected, even though they have a certain level of fun in their own right - as long as they are handled with care.
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May 27, 2022 03:49
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Identifying Spaces for a Gaming Club Historically most people would think of a gaming club as somewhere that meets at a fixed location whenever convenient to do so - either regularly on schedule or on demand as mentioned previously. However, in my past experiences we would have a tendency to play ad-hoc wherever we happened to be: - At a friend’s house on the weekend - On the street - At school during lunch, library/open time, or after class - At a gaming store - At a restaurant/sports bar - Having a picnic or camping - On a long road trip somewhere The idea that a club needs to have a static place is something that I believe might be romanticized. Yes, it makes things a lot easier, and there are many places which may be quite conducive to play including regular spots, but times and places change. An example of this would be the gaming store. Growing up when I had met up with the club to play we would go to the gaming store, but it eventually closed down. In one aspect, this would mean that everybody goes their separate ways and does whatever they might wish. However, as young delinquents with a pocket full of dice and spiral notebooks in our bags full of bad ideas, we took to doing all the other things instead. Identifying a space for a tabletop RPG club are necessarily different from a minis/wargaming club or boardgame club, to be sure. The more lightweight aspect of a tabletop RPG means that there’s significantly less reliance on terrain and miniatures if you get used to handling those ad-hoc. Some genres of tabletop RPG like a lot of the ones you see coming from Japan and being localized by wonderful people are referred to as “table-talk” instead for this reason, since you didn’t need a whole lot to play and you could chuck dice and write on character sheets at a family restaurant or coffee shop or similar. A few guidelines on spaces: - Consent and permission. You should talk well in advance with whoever is the host of the space and give them an idea of who you are and what you do as an organizer and a club. If they give permission, they can take it away, doubly so for private venues as well like someone’s house. - Consider signage. For open gaming clubs it definitely is recommended to provide a way for curious onlookers a method to get more information. Hanging up a flyer somewhere is great, or in the modern era social media tends to work (though not necessarily as dynamically as a flyer, which catches passers-by more easily in the spaces you intend to play in) - Have multiple spaces. This is really a coverage thing. You want to be able to have multiple spaces that can host instead of just a default space. You may favor one space over another, sure, but have a plan B so you can still get your gaming in. - Be creative and respectful with the spaces you’re in. Of course there are spaces which are ideal for play, but also ones which may be accidentally inspiring, like trying to use salt and pepper shakers at a restaurant as mobile terrain while people pick dice to use in place of miniatures for an impromptu tactical combat. Similarly, make sure you take care of the space and leave it in excellent condition. No garbage, clean and bus your own plates, and just be respectful of a space, particularly a shared one, at all times. It does help to have someone who can vouch for you for a space, but there are other spaces that can suffice as well. I’ll write more on this a little later, but I’d be interested to hear about spaces that other people have used to get some gaming in for this kind of play.
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May 28, 2022 02:16
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Schools, community centers/rec hall type places, and libraries immediately come to mind. My sister gamed at a local university's student union for years, even though she didn't attend that uni. And many cities and towns have a recreation center or senior center that is available to anyone who signs up, sometimes with a small fee or sometimes a large fee, often with specific hours and rules. And while libraries need to be quiet spaces, some of them have meeting rooms/study rooms available to be reserved. In all of these cases, it's necessary to know the rules, usually you need to reserve well in advance, you have a limited amount of time, and you may have to deal with a certain amount of "woops the time slots we wanted next week are all taken, now what" so your fallback idea is good. Senior centers are mostly for seniors, obviously, but some have rooms and facilities that are available to anyone. For example, here's my local senior center's signup page: https://www.cityofconcord.org/442/Senior-Center---Room-Rental I would also say, don't discount the option to meet outdoors, in a park or similar. Bring a clean picnic type tablecloth for use on outdoor picnic tables to keep the bird crap off your stuff, and if you need lots of paper sheets etc., bring lots of paperweights. Obviously weather can spoil your day, and some climates just aren't suitable for this much of the year. Lastly, commercial meeting rooms might be within your budget. I did some searching and this was one of the cheapest ones I found in my area: https://evenues.com/meeting-space/private-office-Lafayette/30405 $20/hr might be way too much for a game group to use on a regular basis, but maybe it'd be an option as a fallback.
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May 28, 2022 06:43
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It's been a few months and the gaming club I've been running has gotten into more or less full swing. Generally speaking, taking the time to scope everything in advance has proven to do quite well and I decided to have both online and offline groups interact freely (though, most offline players will prefer exclusively offline play). I merged the cohorts into Discord where things are relatively quiet but people can see when games are scheduled. So far, we're averaging about four games a month, which is pretty good, all things considered. Some characters have died, others have almost died, so we're getting into the right kind of mindset and cadence for the rules and also the setting as well. A persistent game world to explore is certainly paying off since it does not require as much orchestration live, relying instead on dynamic interactions and random/placed encounters to develop the game as time goes on. One thing that I personally perhaps struggle with is effective advertising, since while we get passers-by who like to ask questions but don't want to interrupt, there's no way to get them more information easily via a sign or landing page - the campaign docs mostly suffice but I could stand to do a better job of it or create a micro-site for the game since I have a personal site already up on Squarespace. Flyers have also been talked about as well but I just keep forgetting to print them out, since I'm a rather forgetful person (and may likely forget to print out flyers even after writing this out). The inclusion of central information tracking is generally proving to be quite useful for players. They are adapting to the roles of a mapper, caller, and also a note taker using the community adventure logs online and offline both (though, there is not a good way to reconcile notes from both groups). Information fragmentation is now much more a byproduct and interesting hurdle for players to handle and I make no attempt to correct (though I have to fight the urge from time to time especially when I hear something that I know is different). I am also being a bit careful about how I'm orchestrating feature creep - I would love to introduce more and more mechanics over time or propose other things that do have ramifications in the game world in some way. This is really more of an excuse to get players to engage in more meaningful ways than just at the table - this happens more often dynamically online, particularly in prior iterations of this gaming club because everybody was funneled through the same Discord chats, but chats very often wandered from channel to channel and were so frequent that players who were not "all in" for engagement often got frustrated and felt excluded by other players, though I admit that this is likely a failure of setting up proper permission controls for discussion. Since the game structure itself is pretty easy and most if not all of the content itself can be generated dynamically on-demand I am pretty confident I could run the game in almost any locale as long as I had access to some pen and paper. Particularly with the ruleset in question now that I've acclimated to it I can make calls on the fly for the components which really make a lot of difference, such as encounter distance, timekeeping, and combat phase resolution. This also opens up the playing field, so to speak, so I can run games in more physical locations as well. Documenting player growth and onboarding is something that I should probably start doing more of as there is still some organic interest from the original threads started online and elsewhere. More on that whenever I remember to gather my spoons to write about it.
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Jul 15, 2022 22:37
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