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I was just wondering like, yesterday, how this was going so it's cool to get an update. Are you finding that your players are still treating it like a traditional RPG, by which I mean: inhabiting the gamespace with characters that come alive through RP? Speculating about what's to come, discussing plot twists, collaborating to solve a crisis? Are you getting lots of feedback, or are the players just low-key satisfied with how stuff is going?
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Jul 15, 2022 23:03
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Leperflesh posted:I was just wondering like, yesterday, how this was going so it's cool to get an update. There is no “plot” to twist so it is the joy of exploration and discovery that fuels gameplay. Lots of them are newer but they all have contributed novel solutions already because they’re not really bound by the rules due how lightweight said rules are - just enough framework to give an easy to understand game language on how to do things. Collaboration is also something they have been taking to well, but the online contingent is more solo and duo play which lends to a very different kind of play scale and engagement. There was one mention very early on where someone didn’t like how their dwarf with 1 hit point died in combat because the group of three initiated with a pack of goblins, but I believe this is only temporary frustration and a check that this system doesn’t pull punches at all, and neither am I in orchestrating these encounters as they randomly occur.
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Jul 16, 2022 18:10
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Were you ever able to recruit more DMs?
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Mar 9, 2023 05:20
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Nah, that club never quite reached a critical mass and nobody wanted to actually take ownership of scheduling time beyond the first couple of sessions, so that whole thing fell by the wayside. In order for a gaming club to work for this style of open table gaming, it needs to have a network of people willing to make time and space for each other already as well as have enough motivation to actually put events on the calendar. If you have exclusively passive people inside of a given group, then you’re in the same box as any other gaming group that struggles with scheduling. For the new year I am expanding the scope with a new group who we all have this kind of relationship dynamic already. Different people are willing to put general social events on the calendar, rotate hosting duties (for venues, that is), and there are many people who are actively excited to play. Some folks from the previous group may end up filtering into that one. Also, adding some more structures to play via play aids will be useful even for more rules light and procedural heavy games like Old School Essentials. Remembering things like encounter distance and time tracking in the dungeon and wilderness will be of use since the scope will be adjusted from purely a megadungeon to also include the wilderness outside and a few settlements and other points of interest to go explore. At the end of the day you can’t force any group or individual to be an active participant, and there are a rather high amount of people who feel disempowered to do so even if you explicitly state that the game is ready for them to latch onto. I believe that other gaming clubs in the past have worked because of a truly consistent physical commons and stable scheduling, as well as proactive group members. However, with modern distractions and the geographic challenges, it becomes a much harder sell to get such a group off the ground.
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Mar 9, 2023 05:40
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aldantefax posted:there are a rather high amount of people who feel disempowered to do so even if you explicitly state that the game is ready for them to latch onto This sounds scarily like me.. is there any reason for this or solution?
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Mar 9, 2023 17:24
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You can't force people to do anything and it's just luck of the draw. Some crowds also are self-selective of the kind of people who are in the pattern of "show up receive game". Keeping in mind that this more old school club style is not familiar to a lot of folks, you see basically the same problem that you would when negotiating with a referee when the next game is going to be. You could engineer a more quality response from the player group by having a referee publish their schedule and have people vote at the end of a session when they would like to play next, but this also excludes anybody that wasn't at that session from the voting process. It's also a broader philosophical and mindset based thing where at the end of the day, adults have a lot of adulting to do - participating in a gaming club is often low on that priority list when there are other professional and social responsibilities. The cultural history of a gaming club also had to do with how people were utilizing their time when there weren't nearly as many things to compete for it. Gaming clubs had predictable places, predictable rhythms, and a generally predictable audience that had a mix of proactive and reactive players. Ergo, you would want to make sure that you find and empower club members who want to put some "skin in the game", as it were, to actually overcome that social hurdle that a lot of more passive folks tend to struggle with. Once people are actulaly at the table and the rhythms of the gaming club have been more firmly established, then you're generally in a good position there.
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Mar 9, 2023 21:10
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I’m giving a brief note into this thread regarding an interesting series of encounters in the past few months regarding the topic. Previously, there was a conversation about here a gaming club (that is, multiple groups meeting together at scale) does require a common location (be that physical or digital) in order for people to gather and do the main gaming activities, and after two separate attempts to identify a place and gather people to start up a gaming club or open table, the largest reality is that there are a few things about this concept which need some revisiting: - Club members need some structure in order to be encouraged to engage with each other (ie. “Club night is Sunday, we’re playing D&D”) - Club members need a buy-in and or recognition of being in the club (a badge or rank, or a buy-in with a game artifact like a character sheet or league standing) - A specific place to gather on a consistent basis. This is an amendment to the original observations which eschewed consistency - having only one person be consistent over the course of several months does not provide for an effective club - A core group of proactive people in the club. This might have been the missing component in not just gaming clubs, but social clubs in general. If there is only a single person trying to get things going and everybody else is passive or reactive, it places a large burden on that single person and typically leads to overinvestment of resources into making the thing happen. Having multiple people that see the value in the structure of a club and want to make things happen proactively is key, just like getting a crowd together needs a hypebeast to back up the face of the project. As a case study, a local gastropub in Austin has been successfully running a gaming club that is over 100 people strong with a large volunteer referee crew. They have the sponsorship of the business itself and one of the business partners runs the gaming club, but they didn’t originally anticipate that the idea would grow rapidly to become what it is a few years later, which are 22-week campaigns in a shared D&D homebrew setting with volunteer DMs and a regular player base that pays to play at $5 a session, food and drink optional. This case study expands upon the more humble origins of gaming clubs by having a business provide direct support to it that already had people coming to it. The concepts are more or less what is noted above, the most important of which are consistency and the core group of proactive people. It is lucrative as well and a cornerstone of that business - the players who come in on what would historically be slow restaurant and bar nights do come in and are likely to order food and drink while playing for about 3 hours. DMs are comped a meal and drink and have their run of terrain and minis as well as featured spotlight sessions where their groups get access to beefed up game rooms as play continues. More importantly, they get a reasonably sticky group of players to show up week after week and backup players for when people can’t make it. Most gaming clubs don’t operationalize how they get this certain ‘critical mass’ of people before they’re off to the races. Wizards of the Coast’s content teams want to study this and figure out how this can apply back into their larger organized play, which provides people places to play across gaming stores, but don’t create a ‘club atmosphere’ (the ethics of the business aside, the desire to encourage more clubs is a laudable one). I believe that if one wanted to seek scaling up a club, these things are doable but requires the right chemistry of proactive people and a consistent place to gather. Really, building a gaming club is building a community, and building a community is no easy task - the microcosm of which is the singular gaming group.
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Jun 7, 2023 05:28
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Recently, I have signed up for and am one of the participating referees for a homebrew organized play at a gaming focused bar. They're running D&D 5th Edition in a custom setting with approximately 60 players and 9 referees. Approximately, since apparently this number has been fluctuating both for player and referees both. Some additional interesting bits from it because it's changed since July, when I first had come across it: - Players pay a fee for play. Currently, it's a monthly fee that composes of entry to the game plus a free guest pass (kind of a cover charge) for if they're going to visit the bar during normal hours (previously they were doing some kind of pay to play per session deal) - Referees are given a shift meal and drink - in terms of support, they also have an internal Discord to talk and plot among themselves and a multi-cohort clinic/workshop to spar out ideas or develop their storytelling craft on the weekends - Players are arranged into static tables for a 13-week season in a shared narrative and setting. Each table gets one 'spotlight' session that impacts decisions and the meta-narrative among the other tables - Periodically, there are events that all play groups must deal with. An example is a behemoth monster of some kind where everybody is participating at once using a giant Jenga tower to pull pieces out of it, and if the tower falls over, someone dies / big event happens. Having a player entry fee as well as a robust support network for the referees creates a strong incentive to want to keep participating inside of the club activity. To wit, this place has been running a cohort of closer to 100 players successfully on Monday nights, and this is a new cohort that is starting fresh on Tuesdays. The math seems to work out that the bar actually will lose money if they aren't running these bar-hosted club paid events, which is very interesting. From an analysis perspective, this has all the common threads of gaming club components that make it succeed - somewhat amusingly, most to all of those elements were there in my earlier attempts but not the same scaling out of referees and some kind of more material player buy-in. Further takeaways: - Referees really benefit from having other referees to help each other out. It reinforces their club participation in a much more emotionally fulfilling way rather than just 'dealing with' a table of players (some or all of them assigned to them with no prior interaction except the start of the season) - Players of all skill levels and all play styles are encountered. As people who are paying to play there is a certain level of self-selection taking place - which is, only people who can afford the membership can join. This does change the people who I end up engaging with, and folks at my table are all completely okay with it and seem significantly more invested in the experience (other referees report similar energy at their tables) - The presence of safety tools is mandatory. This is something that I do by default now at my tables but it's a requirement for all referees to have at least one safety tool such as X-Card, Lines/Veils, etc. that they brief their table on. There are also hard limits set by the bar staff for what are hopefully obvious reasons. The bar made an intentional decision to not start until they had a waitlist of about 60 people to begin the season. Their general math was worked out as such since they spend time to reconfigure the bar to accommodate tabletop RPG tables and also to break even on sales. The advertising campaign for it probably ran for a couple of months, which I'm sure played a role in getting the players required. Obviously, this is not a trivial undertaking to build a club of that size, but working with a venue in a way that directly benefits all parties involved is important. I do remember growing up that as the times changed, the bar we used to play in changed ownership and then the new owners kind of told us to screw off and find a new spot since they weren't making enough money on us gaggle of kids and adults.
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Aug 17, 2023 05:55
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aldantefax posted:Players of all skill levels and all play styles are encountered. aldantefax posted:As people who are paying to play there is a certain level of self-selection taking place - which is, only people who can afford the membership can join. This does change the people who I end up engaging with, and folks at my table are all completely okay with it and seem significantly more invested in the experience (other referees report similar energy at their tables)
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Aug 17, 2023 06:59
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The interesting thing is that a lot of the players (I would ballpark at least 25% of them) are paying and also brand new to D&D. I have someone at my table who has never played it before but they didn't quite know how to "break into the hobby" as it were despite being surrounded by friends who want to play, so creating this structure and giving people a way to focus and buy in actually helps out a lot. There is also an argument that the people who are paying in to the experience are less likely to do the kind of behavior that would get them universally reviled by sixty people and banned from play from possibly all tables and the establishment - they might find it's not for them, sure, but not in a way that is disruptive and dangerous. I really like the idea of introducing a safety tool front and center. There could be more thought introduced in support for newer referees who aren't actually used to those concepts (we are talking D&D, here, it's not exactly a game that promotes safety tools unless Wizards of the Coast is selling D&D brand X-Cards) but the main thing is that there's someone operationally behind the scenes working on making sure the collaboration tools run smoothly and then a story coordinator that is responsible for the actual content, announcements during play, and of course the meta-narrative pacing. The original anticipated turnout was thought to be much higher, but since we had a reduction in head count for both referees and players the season was adjusted to still be 13 weeks but with less referees there are now more "all hands" sessions, where each table is dealing with surges of stuff happening that are interrupting whatever they have going on. This works out well for play since it also provides a good bookend for advancement, the first such event following the spotlight session I ran this week that tees up the opposition quite well. Given that this place has successfully run a large cohort through an extended multi-season campaign already, starting this other cohort that I'm a part of represents some new opportunities for remastering content and streamlining stuff a bit. I recognize that as one of the people who has grown up and played D&D especially on all sides of the screen as well as all editions of play (not to mention all the other experimental nonsense I have gotten into over the years) this puts me face to face with what could be considered the 'new generation' of referees, all of which have actually been quite pleasant to engage with and have new, fresh ideas. I think it's definitely a key thing to have multiple people capable of orchestrating games as a referee (in the case of a tabletop RPG) or as part of planning a season of play, like a league. There's a fascinating book I've been meaning to read called "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" that actually touches on this greater idea of the sense of community and clubs (in that case, the idea of a recreational sports league) where I think there may be opportunities and takeaways from other gaming clubs that can present some novel connections.
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Aug 18, 2023 23:29
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I'm in my third year of running a Dungeons and Dragons Club at the public Middle School where I'm working as an English instructor. The first year the club was started by another teacher, and I just dropped by to see what was going on after I heard about it on morning announcements. The teacher in question didn't really have any clue about the game and wasn't overly interested in learning. They were mostly playing host for another student who wanted to run a game. When the club got way more interest than the student was able to handle, I volunteered to DM a second group. Ironically, the kid who started the club was a bit of a "That Guy" DM who spent more time arguing with his players than actually playing, so my group and those from his group who wanted to keep going were the only survivors, hence why I ended up taking over the club the next year.  It's probably worth noting that I kept the club as the "Dungeons and Dragons" club for branding purposes. This is a very rural and poor community. The nearest LGS is almost an hour away, so if their parents aren't already into Tabletop games, they've got no way to engage with the hobby, but if they're interested then that'll be the one they know about thanks to Stranger Things, the recent movie, and general cultural osmosis. The local Wal-Mart has a starter game and you can get RPG dice sets from there or the Gamestop, but good luck finding a PHB, let alone anything outside the D&D Brand. At the start of this year (and last year) I pitched them options outside D&D, but only a few showed any interest (mostly in World of Darkness) while most were set on sticking to the one they'd heard about. Last year interest was fairly overwhelming. Almost 20 kids showed up to the first meeting, and virtually none of them had ever played the game before, so multiple groups wasn't really an option. This problem ended up self-mitigating to some degree because a lot of kids who showed initial interest were not committed to showing up to a weekly club, or their parents weren't interested in allowing them to do an after school activity, or other various thing. I still had 10+ once the first couple weeks of attrition claimed kids. This number stayed relatively consistent, but the children, funnily enough, did not. Which brings me to my first big challenge: consistency of attendance. Pre-Teens are notoriously flighty creatures, and Zoomer Preteens aren't exactly known for their attention spans. Add in socio-economic issues and you have a recipe for kids who will show up one week raring to go, vanish for 2-3 weeks in the middle of a battle without warning or explanation, then reappear wanting to continue play like nothing happened. This was so bad last year I actually had to cancel a couple of meetings. So many kids skipped out that the encounter we were in the exact middle of would have turned into a TPK, or a climatic moment in the story would have been missed. To counter that problem this year, I'm instituting a similar policy to the sports teams. Joining the D&D club is a commitment, and if you're not willing to be there every week, you're not going to play. Excused absences are allowed, but you need to warn me in advance, not just silently fail to show up. Consistent no-showing will result in being permanently barred from play. This year interest has still been large, somewhere around 15 students, and again they are almost all new to the game. The good news is my making it clear that I expected consistency from the start has led to consistency in the kids showing up for the "Session 0" meetings where we are making characters. Sadly, my returning kids aren't interested in DMing and want to remain players, so the first challenging is managing an exceptionally large group. Playing a very rules-lite version of the game is, of course, a given in order to keep things moving, especially in combat. Spell Prep, for example, is basically run along the lines of "Everyone is a Sorc." Making everyone prep specific spells from their list is too much book-keeping, especially because game sessions are only allowed to be between 60-90 minutes and because most of these kids are so green and likely to make mistakes when tracking everything on their sheet. One of my most crucial tools last year was a timer. We've all had groups that get bogged down in decision making and debating merits of different plans or puzzle solutions, and when that group is 15 large it can be total chaos. If the kids want to ask me anything I require raised hands and silence from anyone not speaking to me, not unlike in the classroom, and once they start to form a few plans of action I'll set a timer for them to come to a final decision. It worked well as a motivator last year, though I'll have to be vigilant for that possibly causing kids to check out if a few "plan makers" dominate the party's direction. Character creation is on-going (we're starting at level 1 for simplicity due to the number of new players but I want to get everyone to level 3 pretty quickly), and I'll be finalizing my ideas for a campaign once I know what I'm working with. I like to tailor where and what the story focuses on based on the party while also leaving flexibility to change things based on ideas the party floats, which worked great last year. So far, I can say that the majority of the party are Dragonborn or Drow (plus a few other non-Drow Elves), and the bulk of the party in terms of class is four Druids, three Rangers and three Sorcerers. Nobody is playing a Fighter, Monk, Barbarian or Paladin, so it's going to be a fragile group in terms of overall HP and AC. I have some ideas on how to deal with that if it becomes a problem. We should be able to finish character creation next week and play our first session the week after. Hopefully this will all go well.
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Aug 22, 2023 17:14
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I can't imagine running modern d20 fantasy for fifteen players at once. I know it was a common way to play the older editions, but even B/X bogs down when a combat involves more than a dozen characters, let alone a dozen player characters.
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Aug 22, 2023 18:40
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I wonder if there's any possibility of pulling in an additional member of staff to run a parallel group? Honestly with so little time per session, at 15 players you'll have some kids who only get to say or do one thing per session, and maybe some who do nothing at all. Even with a streamlined game system that isn't D&D I'd be worried about engagement at that group size with such short sessions.
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Aug 22, 2023 18:49
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Leperflesh posted:I wonder if there's any possibility of pulling in an additional member of staff to run a parallel group? Honestly with so little time per session, at 15 players you'll have some kids who only get to say or do one thing per session, and maybe some who do nothing at all. Even with a streamlined game system that isn't D&D I'd be worried about engagement at that group size with such short sessions. I will say that we managed a group of 10 pretty well last year. Combat tended to drag, but I learned a few tricks to pick up the pace over the course of the year and I never had any complaints. One thing that was successful was to have less formalized turn-based combat using the full rules suite and more "cinematic" combat where the players would make attack roles and use spells to deal with a quick tussle without going through initiative. Giving them more opportunities to use their skills, even for things that more experienced groups might not bother with, can also help them feel engaged. Putting a large emphasis on roleplaying, even if the kids weren't able to "do" much on any given day, helped kids "contribute" through both in-character reactions to events, and one thing that I saw a lot of was one character wanting to step up, hesitating, and the group sort of "brainstorming" with that player to refine their idea before the actual action happened. It was a very cool, hyper-collabortive story-telling energy that you never see with more mature players who get very protective of their individual character and agency over them.
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Aug 22, 2023 22:05
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Accessibility is definitely a key thing that you touch on that I’ve been thinking about recently. Particularly for D&D in its most recent format, there is a lot that goes on that is hard to keep track of and scale for all ages. The brand power is undeniably large and part of the desire to play is the desire to associate with an activity that other folks are participating in - doing stuff that strays from it causes some of that disconnect.
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Aug 23, 2023 14:33
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aldantefax posted:Accessibility is definitely a key thing that you touch on that I’ve been thinking about recently. Particularly for D&D in its most recent format, there is a lot that goes on that is hard to keep track of and scale for all ages. The good news is that a lot of the popular conceptions of D&D are decoupled from the nitty gritty of the actual rules. The kids know what they've seen in media, on the internet, or in their parent's games, and its doesn't take a ton of work to comport the basics of the rules to those while leaving a lot on the cutting room floor. This has helped me a lot while trying to run large groups the last two years. The basics of the combat system remain highly intuitive and in-line with the depictions they see in media or online. Anything that isn't just gets left on the cutting room floor, or we improvise something. Skills are also very intuitive once the kids have the vocabulary to recognize what they are meant to represent. In execution its a lot of "Can my character do X?" and then me saying "You can try. Give me an X check." It doesn't take long for them to be looking and their skills or spells and evolving to "Can I use X to do Y?" Unlike with most groups where I like to say "Yes, but" with these I can't be afraid to just say "No," but I always make sure that I give them a reason so they can understand their limits within the context of the D&D world, rather than within the context of the rules. As long as they're getting to roll the dice, use their spells and take their actions in a way that's copacetic to their imagination of the game and there is consistency to how the simplified version of the rules operates, they're happy and the game moves along despite the size of the herd I'm wrangling. If there's one tricky bit, it's spells. I bought a large collection of Spell Card decks to help with that. I tend to be extremely liberal with their interpretation of what the spell does, excepting actual damage.
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Aug 23, 2023 20:06
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I visited the closest game store today and discovered there's no way to reserve a table there for a weekly meeting. They won't rent out anything smaller than a private room. The attached bar even has a sign saying they won't give you a table unless you show up with a group of people already assembled, so there's no possibility of grabbing a space there and playing with whoever shows up. The game store I played at in grad school let you reserve tables for weekly play, but they went out of business a few years ago. They did a lot of things that were good for the hobby but not particularly profitable, like giving most of their shelf space to indie and non 5e RPGs. I suspect they were kept afloat solely by in-person Magic, and when that disappeared for several years they went under.
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Aug 28, 2023 18:54
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Game stores, just like a lot of other places, tend to be for-profit businesses. One of the game stores in town I know has a lot of table space (they took over a bar that went under and expanded their kitchen, bar, and table space) but it is very popular and during prime time it comes down to reserving a small table. The place I'm currently participating in does a $5 per person for a reserved table as a cover charge. Libraries, community centers, schools, and so on are potentially good places to rent out if you can actually get people together to throw in for a room. That implies that you're going to actually have a group already, which is probably a key thing to point out that a gaming club is hard to start alone. Finding a regular meeting location is key, yes, but finding a core group is probably more important before looking for a location. There are a lot of games that could theoretically be played anywhere with table space, and online play is another option (though I think when I originally posted this topic however many years back, it focused on matters of offline play first and foremost). --- Online gaming communities that I've seen or been a part of seem to form smaller clubs, cliques, groups, and what have you, but it is rare that they follow any kind of framework where a club itself is successfully formed and longer lasting. Perhaps it's due to the diverging nature of interests and notifications that being online cause - on one hand, people only meet for club activities and don't socialize much outside of that; on the other hand, people socialize outside of club activities and don't participate in the activities themselves. I'm seeing the second form of this right now in the current club thing I'm doing. We have about 10 tables with 60 players or so total and no tables are actually socializing with one another. This was an original 'selling point' for this paid gaming club where the D&D campaign would be in a shared world and people could trade information and resources - however, information quality is pretty abysmal, and resource trading is nonexistent. Players don't interact with other players outside of their table, and referees also have difficulty with coordinating. This is after 4 weeks of play and several weeks prior to that of orientation. Part of this is one person, the lead storyteller, is effectively writing checks he's having a hard time cashing. There were offers of certain things like a physical quest board, ranking boards, that sort of thing to give players more tactile and meaty things to, shared dungeons with content that people were supposed to have, basically a content delivery schedule that hasn't been honored and referees are scrambling to make heads or tails of a lot of it. For a lot of referees, this is a pretty major stress point. For me, I make the most of it but have to do some smoke and mirrors to steer things into the meta-narrative one way or another when something is supposed to be happening that I learned about maybe 30 minutes before game time (or figure out how to retroactively make a thing happen because of a misunderstanding of key plot points). --- It's my belief that generally speaking, a club definitely benefits from a triad of things: social, practice, and performance, and a balance of all three of those things. You have a lot more socializing and not a lot of practice, performance will tend to suffer. You focus on just the performance, people start getting disconnected and burned out. Social here is pretty self explanatory. Practice is the work of the craft for everybody, something that I don't really see in a lot of clubs (though my experience certainly does not have the full spectrum of it by far). People aren't doing character building or expedition planning sessions or conversations among multiple groups in this D&D game right now. They have no real structure to do so, though I could think of quite a few good reasons why it would be good to band together to chat. Performance is the actual main activity, where it's go time and everybody has their game face on. This need not necessarily be competitive in nature, but it does represent a different mindset. If I were to take the more traditional gaming club example of a recreational athletics club, there would almost certainly be some amount of practice and performance. The social bit usually happens after practice and matches in a league, people might go out to drink pizza and eat beer. Lots of clubs and leagues tend to be successful in this way. The same could be true of role playing games as well or any other non competitive gaming club too!
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Aug 30, 2023 06:15
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You could scramble the teams and force people to play at new tables with new DMs, but
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Aug 30, 2023 18:43
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Actually the whole situation sounds like the reverse of every "living world" I've ever participated in. Usually the guy at the top is very enthusiastic about the shared world and keeping everyone on-script, while the co-GMs are more interested in doing their own thing than putting in the grunt work of writing/reading play reports and updating setting documents.
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Aug 30, 2023 22:51
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mellonbread posted:You could scramble the teams and force people to play at new tables with new DMs, but What we did as a DMs was meet together on our own volition to talk about what's been going on at our respective tables and take notes about opportunities, grievances, and ideas (some which are more feasible than others) for this. There's a general sense that nobody has a full picture of what's going on and the expectation itself of it being more improvisational when there are deliverables that the lead storyteller is saying they're supposed to make but are behind schedule on is a major issue. This is an interesting thing because co-DMs in this case have a branching point to just do their own thing, sign off completely (which some did very early on, and we suspect this is part of the reason why) or attempt to self-remediate when it's clear that no short term solution is actually available. The different needs of referees are not being met by what was promised from the storytelling side, this causes a disconnect between tables, and now it's going to be a much harder thing to repair that instead of taking a few extra weeks to do more groundwork and planning. I'm one of the more (possibly most) experienced referees in the group so I end up being consulted for more information on craft more than anything else, and it was also part of my own self-remediation that kicked it to say "hey, I'm not getting what I need but I'm making the most of what's going on, but now my table of players (that are paying money to be there) are bringing valid feedback points about the game that I need to surface upwards". I don't think there is any ill intent with things, but in the classic schema of passion projects, the burnout at the lead storyteller level is pretty real and that's rolling downhill. I had previously offered to provide assistance and also sought clarification, but those were rebuffed - now it seems like that it's coming to a head and before it blows up, I got in front of that. There's a meeting scheduled for tomorrow and whoever can make it with the logistics person (someone who is remote that is doing some of the digital tooling and one of the owners of the bar that has been behind the scenes) and the lead storyteller to see what can be done, something I won't be around for probably but will be interested to hear about. At the end of the day, I'm most invested in making direct connections as an individual in a larger club format, and I don't have a lot of interest in trying to take over someone else's sinking ship, if that's what they want to continue doing without course correction.
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Aug 31, 2023 01:37
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 06:20 |
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The realities of doing a gaming club at a for-profit establishment, of course, have now begun to show themselves in a bit of a greater detail. I'm a big fan of "structure as an accessibility tool". Providing tools and processes for games to run at scale in a shared milieu like in the current undergoing case study shows that what is on the surface and what was perhaps previously billed is actually more artifice than anything else. Because it's also partly a business venture, there is a challenge to balance the needs of the club format in the context of the for-profit space while also not actually providing meaningful structure to people volunteering to run content (which itself is not delivered timely, and will likely continue to not be delivered timely). Any type of collaborative attempt was strongly cautioned against due to a prior history of players and referees becoming enslaved to the canonical content. This leads to a bit of a disconnect here. Referees, most of whom are not well versed in improvisational style play, are asking for and offering to develop more structured content using their own time and resources because they feel they need it and want more consistency. The storytellers and business logistics side does not really have much interest in it and dismisses most of this not due to vetting people who are offering it, but because "it hasn't worked well in the past", so they're responding to a past incident with an arbitrary decision. This is all well and good for me, since I lean heavily into improvisational style storytelling and my players are having a good time, but at the same time I recognize both from the meeting with other referees and the resulting 'response meeting' that there will be some fallout for this. I'm not sure it's necessarily worth my energy to attempt to guide other referees in this specific craft skill of preparation, and given the situation, I think I'll probably just ride this out until it's time to hit the ol' dusty trail. --- The byproduct of being in a gaming club (however rocky its logistics might be) is that one of the projected end states are "people go hang out with a subset of people in the club and form their own clubs and groups". I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, nor should a gaming club be seeing as a kind of monolithic immortal social construct. In reflection on this, I would say that a gaming club conceptually is probably good for maybe one month to beyond once it finds its sea legs for whatever cohort it's playing in. A club's scale implies that there will be many folks who will come and go and be active - or not - and there will be peaks and valleys for club activity. Planning for the obsolescence of a gaming club is perhaps something that is worth thinking about. Perhaps it might be too much overhead or not worthwhile to design at the beginning, but it's still worth thinking about with respect to the members of the club and also its purpose as well.
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Sep 5, 2023 04:52
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