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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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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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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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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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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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