High Plains Drafter
Was anybody else made uncomfortable by this one? I think it’s the way Gunslinger is looking right at you, desperate for some kind of connection. If you’ve ever been to a con, you’re familiar with that look. It’s the terror of the convention hall, where every poor schlub behind every over-branded counter just wants you to stop and talk: Take a flyer. Take a stress ball. Please! I’ve got customized chocolate bars!!
Last time we joined everyone’s favorite halfling pistolero on his quest for companionship, he was trying desperately to recruit randos. It doesn’t look like he’s moved on since then. It’s a pathetic sight, and one made all the worse by my unfortunate degree of familiarity with it. You see, I know that his mistake lies in the shotgun approach, for I too have tried it. Allow me illustrate with an example from my own sad history.
I was 12 years old, and I had just discovered Magic: The Gathering. My family had moved to a new state that summer, and my list of friends available for geeking out with was somewhere in the neighborhood of zero. I could read the tiny rule book insert over and over, and I could build and rebuild decks from my tiny collection of cards. If I was going to learn the secrets of this new occult wonder, however, I would have to find an opponent.
My sister turned me down flat. My father’s brothers beat the snot out of him in Monopoly when he was a kid, and he hasn’t touched games since. That left exactly one person for the job.
“OK then,” said my mom. “So I turn this one sideways, and then I make this one come out.”
“No, Mom! He costs two mana, a green and a generic. You need another land.”
Another turn passed.
“I turn this one, and this one sideways. Bears! Grrrr! They attack.”
“It’s called ‘tapping’ Mom. And they can’t attack. They have summoning sickness. I explained this to you.”
No matter how many games I wheedled out of her or how many times we went over the rules, nothing ever seemed to stick. It’s almost as if she didn’t really want to play (can you imagine that?). No doubt I was a conssumate Jake during these gaming sessions, but my larger point is that you can’t force other people to share an interest. It’s the same thinking that gives rise to the girlfriend/boyfriend gamer. Sharing your hobby with the people you love is great. There’s a slim chance that it’s going to be successful though.
Suppose that a friendly… what the hell lives in deserts? …A friendly death worm wanders by Gunslinger’s table and actually signs up. That partnership probably isn’t going to last long, and not just because of death worms’ propensity to do death worm things to lone halflings. When you’re out there recruiting, you can’t expect every newcomer to the hobby to instantly fall in love. I mean, just think about all the music lessons and intramural sports and random clubs you’ve tried over the course of your life. How many of them stuck? Just keep that in mind when you’re trying to bring fresh faces into a game. It’s not impossible, but it’s also important to go in with realistic expectations. If the newbie only sticks around for a session or two, it probably isn’t a rejection of you and all you love. Or at least, that’s what Gunslinger tells himself when he can’t sleep at night.
Question of the day then. Have you ever tried to recruit newcomers to the hobby? Did you manage to create a lifelong gamer, or was it more of a “try it once and never again” sort of thing? Let’s hear your tales down in the comments!
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On many an occasion me and my gaming buddies have tried to rope newbies into the realms of tabletop RPGs however it has been to almost no avail. Once we spent an entire night helping 12 new players learn DnD for a megadungeon oneshot, and many of them seemed to love it, but alas they never played again 🙁
It’s a bit leap to go from “that was a fun activity” to “this is my new hobby,” you know? It can still be frustrating though!
Ive found the best solution is to take a group who are already friends outside the hobby and introduce them to it all at once. Everybody has fun sitting around a table, eating pizza and chips, socializing, sharing anecdotes and having laughs at each others expense as the dice act as they do. Convincing a group to come back for a weekly or bi-weekly beer and pizza night where there are also dice is easier than convincing them to get serious about the hobby on day one.
Very true. But then the aspect of seriousness raises its ugly head. Suppose you are a proper hobbyist. You put time and effort into your game, and would like to see that effort reciprocated by the rest of you pals. Pizza night is a great start, but moving from that informal gathering to “serious gaming” is a hard transition to make. The death worm just wants to crack open a beer and hang out. Why all this pressure to write a detailed backstory?
Well, the serious gamer can always continue to enjoy pizza night, whereas the casual gamer wont necessarily want to do all the extra work. Past a certain point, the serious gamer may have to just suck it up and enjoy their pizza.
Its nice to be able to seriously go all out on your hobby, but if you really need everybody to put in that much effort, I question whether you aren’t overly invested in it. At the end of the day, the goal should be fun, so being upset about how you have to have chocolate syrup on your ice cream instead of caramel seems… foolish.
“Fun” isn’t a useful metric. If your fun requires in-depth RP and mine requires shouting out-of-character epithets at the monster…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/dignity
…we’re going to have a bad time at the table together. In other words, the ‘serious gamer’ can’t just enjoy pizza night.
I think that there’s a problem buried in the approach of, “No pressure! It’s just an informal gathering.” If you want the hobby to stick, you’re presenting it as a single night of Cards Against Humanity rather than an invitation to a club. Once that association is in there, it’s only natural for newcomers to treat it like a board game night: It doesn’t really matter if I come back.
I can’t help but wonder if there’s a better way to present things.
Yes, well not really but i have had similar scenarios or as i like to call it looking for players on the internet.
I can assure you 2/5 of campaigns don’t make it past the first month due to conflictions between players, the Gm’s, and the gm’s opinion of the campaign.
I’ve recruited players to play in campaigns, forum games and etc. A lot of people find it not suitable for them and i find that’s okay, I will turn to another medium to find my DND or pathfinder game. Online tabletop.
Playing online has it’s benefits and troubles, the first trouble/benefit is that if Jake wants to play a dragon ball z aasimar in a low fantasy game he can easily be given the boot within minutes of showing up with his char. Mostly because the reasoning is that the GM can find another char within minutes of losing the old one. It’s a benefit to the gm as he can easily nit pick his way through and find the exact players he wants for the time he wants to set, the campaign he has made, and the tone he has made for the players. The trouble is that as a player you will not have a choice as to whether Wade should run his low fantasy warhammer like game, and if you can’t make the time tough luck best to prowl back to reddit and look for another game.
The next is the luxury of sitting in your home, let me say it’s a great pleasure that I can sit in at my desk chomping away at snacks while not having to worry about anyone complaining about my snack habits Or suddenly running off to the bathroom and coming back without anyone noticing.
The disbenefit or well the trouble is that no one see’s your face, Johnny could be a 18 year old kid gming for a bunch of 25 year and 30 year olds. Great if your johnny, or anyone else that doesen’t care for seeing people’s faces. Not so much if your the person that loves face to face interaction. People scarcely if ever post their face on the internet for reasons regarding security and privacy. 😛
Lastly, THE POWER OF THE INTERNET!!!!!!!!
The internet is amazing tool if used correctly, roll20, fantasy grounds, map tools and more help online GM’s create wonderful campaigns online. Head over to R/battlemaps and you will see artists having dedicated patreons to making both online and offline maps for GM’s. Creating token packs that can be arranged together to create homebrew maps and more. Plus it’s easy to ‘obtain’ electronic copy’s of books.
Yet with all that power comes responsibility, GM’s are often required or at least seen as such to have made maps, images, and online hand outs for their players. Theater of the mind doesn’t quite work offline as it does online.
…..I feel like I got offtrack….
I think you might appreciate this one from my “Rejected Scripts” files:
TITLE: Astral Chat
TEXT: Seek out companions to aid thee in thy journeys. This is easier said than done.
PIC: The Astral Plane. Everyone is tethered to silver cords that go off screen. Gunslinger is talking to a trio of Uber nerd adventurers. All have big AFK signs over their heads. One has a chat window open that says “brb.”
DIALOGUE:
Gunslinger: “Thanks for having me, guys! I only just learned how to set up my silver cord and… Guys?
SCROLLOVER: They really ought to upgrade to astral projection, greater. It’s faster, AND it comes packaged with HBO.
I’d love to figure out a way to put Gunslinger into a proper online gaming strip, but I’ve yet to figure out the setup. I guess I’ll have to hang out with Magus and Wizard in the last comic (read: back to the drawing board).
I imagine that Street Samurai could help him out in that regard, though being a low tech-ish guy, I wouldn’t be surprised if he shot the screen with an actual bullet or something.
Tried for several years to get my wife into gaming. Suggested I could teach her chess. Refusals all around. Then she left me. Found a new guy who she let teach her chess. Immediatly became a full on gamer. What the fuuuuuuu? After beating everyone else she knew at chess she finally decided she was ready to play chess against me. She was not ready. So I guess at least theres that. But very sad that my wife is only a gamer wife for someone else. They even invited me to dm a game for them.
I suggest you do the mature thing: Accept the offer. Kill her character in the first combat. Put on your sunglasses and moonwalk out of there.
I don’t think I’ve ever successfuly introduced anyone to TTRPGs – even when I get people to try it, I never see the spark of enthusiasm/obsession I expect, even if they do stick around for more than one session.
Speaking of, however, my friend is about to attempt to introduce his girlfriend to the game by having her join in on a campaign we’re playing. It’s a good thing she’s willing to try it, because otherwise he’d just disappear for the entire duration of her visit. If anyone has any advice for easing people into the game, I’d love to hear it.
Said campaign is using the PF2E playtest system, with a bunch of homebrew stuff to patch some holes up.
Well, there are a few things you could do. Ideally, try to see what character she would like to play, in broad terms, then translate this into an actual character she can simply pick up and play.
Basically, makes sure she isn’t bogged down by the rules as much as you can. Pathfinder is often called Mathfinder for a reason, and while (from my understanding) PF2E is a bit better in that respect, it’s still quite a beast to tackle for a new player.
Print a cheat sheet she can check when she’s not sure what she can do. Something like the different actions she can do in combat – attack, block, move, etc. If she’s playing a spellcasting type, maybe put her most interesting spells here too. Heck, a while ago on the D&D subreddit, someone posted a reference chart they made for their girlfriend – you can do something similar.
And, of course, try to find the balance between making her engaged in the story and part of the game, and putting the spotlight on her when she might not be comfortable with it.
My brother’s wife wasn’t much into gaming but didn’t want to be left out of the social time, so what ended up working for her was to come up with something she could create physically that she could then give to the player of her choice to grant them an in-game bonus, and her ‘character’ was pretty much an NPC; it was around but mostly peripheral. If she wanted to actually play she could jump in and play, but that mostly was purely non-combat dialogue. If she wanted to jump into combat situation, she’d do it by handing over a miniature she’d painted or a sketch she’d created of the foe, or she’d create a “mysterious potion” (random drink) and whichever player was willing to drink it (she was pretty funny and clever with what all concoctions she created) would get a bonus and help the group out.
So she was invested, and influenced things, but she didn’t have to deal with an actual character-sheet or anything like that.
It was supposed to just be an ‘at-first’ method so she could watch/listen and figure out how the game worked, sort of pre-playing-prep, but she liked it a lot better than actually playing, the one time she tried that, so it became the de facto “playstyle” for her.
Anyhow.
Having that fall-back option for involvement without playing (she could wander off altogether and play on her phone if she got bored) worked well for her. She felt included without feeling pressured, if that makes sense.
So, I don’t know what the girlfriend in your case likes to do, but if you can find out her other talents and incorporate them somehow, it would be a fallback for you in case she doesn’t turn out to be interested in playing the classic way.
Plus, you’ll win MEGA points for inquiring and going to such lengths to include her. Even if it doesn’t work out, your fallout is going to be pretty miniscule.
When I say “girlfriend/boyfriend gamer,” it should be understood not as some sort of pejorative directed at the girlfriend/boyfriend. Trying to introduce your significant other into your bowling league / spin class / Pokemon Go club is only going to work if they’re actually interested. Same deal with TRPGs. If they’re there because they love you and want to spend time with you, that’s all well and good. People are allowed to participate in hobbies at different levels of “seriousness,” after all. However, that sort of motivation tends to be more disruptive at the tabletop than in other pastimes. A relatively small group of people have to put in a lot of work to make this newcomer feel accepted into an ongoing campaign. There’s character development to be done, the growing pains of the learning curve, and a necessary decrease in narrative attention for more established characters. If you’re interested in being included in the social activity of the game rather than the game itself, I think a hybrid solution like yours is preferable to bringing in a full-fledged PC.
In other words, if you’re bringing your partner into the hobby, I suggest bringing them in to organized play, a convention, or a series of one shots. See if they actually enjoy gaming before inflicting a (possibly unwanted) commitment on them. Campaigns take a lot of hard work to sustain, and throwing them into the deep end can be a burden on the group, girlfriend/boyfriend included.
In my case, I’m thinking of a short-lived relationship in which a buddy’s significant other was getting a bit jealous of his time. So with many a, “No honey, you’re going to love D&D!” he decided to bring her in. (Note that this was his decision more than hers.) She played on her phone for the duration, and made no attempt to engage with the rest of us. It was clear she wanted to be in his company rather than in the game. So despite his best intentions, we wound up in a situation that wasn’t fair to us players, my buddy, or ultimately even the girlfriend. That’s what I’m warning against here.
Reminds me of a topic that might be one you could cover: Reflavoring. Sure nobody wants the gunslinger when he’s a black powder spanish conquistador type but what if he was a specialized mage who dealt in making blasting runes and a crossbow like device that turned them into tiny explosions?
It’s something that is sort of overlooked in Pathfinder especially, people seem reluctant to ever say something is something else even if the mechanics would be the exact same. Plus it sort of places some restrictions around because whenever you say ‘My character is a bard, he studies music alongside with magic so all his spells happen with a bit of music’ they imagine the bard class. When in reality you’re a wizard whose bonded wand is a conducting baton and a collection of instruments. Or how you can’t say you’re a thief unless you’re a rogue, or how spellsword means either magus or eldritch knight.
Or just totally changing the flavortext of a class. Wizard? He’s an engineer carrying a backpack full of misc devices. Barbarian? No she’s a respected knight who goes into a focused trance when stressed.
I have noted ‘reflavoring’ in my notes. Be it so noted.
When I got back into tabletops RPGs, I tried to find some players among people I knew. Most weren’t interested, some had no free time. It took quite a bit of time, but I managed to get together a group of three people (plus me, four total) and play. A few months later, someone from my group brought one of his friend, making the group four player and a DM – perfect!
Then, shortly after that, one of the other player’s girlfriend got interested in the game, and two of the people I initially had contacted who didn’t have time now were done with whatever was holding them up and were available to play. Suddenly, I have seven players. Woops.
Thankfully, one of my players is also a DM. So we’re going to finish the current campaign with five players (we were close to the end anyway), and start two other ones, with two different systems, and split the players between those two, leaving them to pick which campaign they want to be in.
To be fair though, that’s a problem I love to have. Better this than the opposite.
True that! I ran into problems with my friends about 10+ people all wanting to game together. We envisioned some massive world-hopping shenanigans with rotating GMs, Sliders/Doctor Who-style setting changes, and an episodic structure: “You game with Abby’s group this week, I’ll game with Bob’s group.” It never quite took off, though I’d still love to try something similar one day.
I’ve tried to get some of my friends into different variants of tabletop, some I just tried to introduce to the system, others I’ve tried running games with. Usually I can get them to sorta understand the mechanics and shizz, but they tend to crumple a bit more once they’re in a game.
One that I remembered was when I taught my Ex how to play 5E. Helped her with mechanics and such. Figuring that she understood how to use her character and what to roll when, I tried to run a game for her and a couple of my other friends. The trouble was the social aspect of it, as it turns out; there was just something nerve racking for her to play a fantasy character among a group in front of a group of strangers.
It’s an aspect that I myself often overlook and forget about sometime; dnd is a social game. It’s not like a video game or regular RPG where you can sit back and relax behind a screen. Even online games tend to have voices or at least a very active play-by-post, and for some people that level of interaction with people can be paralyzing. Even when ostentially evergobr else is doing it too, some people just aren’t comfortable with doing dnd.
Are you describing stage fright, or do you think it’s some other kind of phenomenon?
I think I’ve been recruited TO far more hobbies than I’ve done recruiting FOR. I usually take the approach that if someone is interested in something, they will seek it out.
Proselytizing, whether it’s for religion or hobbies, seems like a lot of effort for very little return. Better IMO to wait for someone to express an interest first and then expend most of your energy showing them the best of what you have to offer.
Reverse psychology, eh? It just might work…
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/villains/images/4/4d/The_Cartmanland_Song.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20151216043953
Well I can’t say all by myself I’ve gotten anyone into the hobby. Back in my high school days we had a group of friends. Some of us were into Anime, some into books, some into creative writing, some into MTG, some into video games, and some into roleplaying games. As the group wasn’t particularly large and added and lost small numbers of people as the three years passed (for the obvious reason), it just worked out as a matter of doing things as a group almost everyone wound up more or less dragged into the hobbies they hadn’t originally had. (Maybe the books and the video games less so because those are more solo activities.)
I doubt the originally uninterested people stuck with the hobby of tabletop games in the long run, but we at least got them interested enough to have some kind of tabletop game going on during lunch breaks for a solid part of one year and on weekends at least every other week for two years. So it was enough of a success for our purposes. Which at this point kind of impresses me since we did not stick to any particular system for very long. And most of them were completely homebrewed systems.
As a note, our longest running game was a TFOS game where we were playing characters based on ourselves. And that mostly came to an end because the way that system “levels up” really isn’t balanced for long campaigns and we wound up too strong for the game to really make sense anymore.
And I did later wind up getting a girlfriend into reading books who had previously absolutely no interest in them.
After a quick Google, I’ve got to confess that I’m intrigued by this Tear Film & Ocular Surface Society RPG.
lol.
You had me there for a second. I even had to put TFOS RPG into google to make sure the game wasn’t far more obscure than I thought.
I once did an introduction session for soemone on Boardgame\RPG\Geek. She was very active on the forums, had tons of games at home, but never played an RPG. So I asked her if it was OK for me to do a session with her. As her handle was a Star Trek inspired one, I made her a Star Trek character, took two of my friends with me, drove 1,5 hours (which is quit far in The Netherlands) and had a very good session, with her, her SO, and my two friends. She even did a session report on this on the Geek: https://rpggeek.com/article/6281906#6281906
My reply is the one from Clydwich.
And she did go on to play (lots of) RPGs.
Ha, I almost forgot the most important one (for me) I (and my friends) did.
We were part of a game club (mostly wargames, but some RPGs) and there was this girl coming to one of the evenings, because she was interested in RPGs. So she joined our group, which was playing Call of Cthulhu that night, and had just started with the session.
My character was a lady doctor, and the GM made it clear that one of the leads that we had to the mystery was a man, who was quite smitten with me. So this girl (playing a male PI) was the first to remark: Well, go there and do your womenly thing, to weasel the info out of him. S I did, and eventually had to punch the guy in the face, as he became a bit too friendly (which was played up by the GM, who set next to me, by putting his arm around me). But we solved the mystery, and she came to the next session, and we eventually hooked up, and she is still playing RPGs, and now GMing, after more then twentyfive years together. So I alwyas say that I met my wife when I was a she, and she was a he.
I think that’s the most intriguing part for me. Here was a person who already expressed an interest. That’s an important psychological hurdle to overcome. You aren’t indulging a friend’s interest, but trying to find one of your own. Those seem to be the folks that stick around.
So at last it starts to happen. Gunslinger is becoming a Blorg. I knew it was a matter of time. He should have tried https://www.lfg.co/. That is page to find rpg groups, right?
wtf is a blorg?
There is this game called Stellaris, it is a 4X/Grand Strategy game set in space. The Blorg is a whole race of repugnant, solitary and venerable, very long lived, fungoids. They were in a serie of videos about the game made by the developers and the people kinda liked them.
Here is a image of a Blorg in all his glory:
https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/images/a/ab/Fungoid_massive_12.png
The best resume of Blorg’s psychology, culture and diplomacy:
https://forumcontent.paradoxplaza.com/public/279016/chill%20zone.jpg
All Hail Blorg, the videos where everything started:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqRhPbyFDQWiWmLRwlEDOgU6B54nEP-os
And the Blorg Cinematic Universe:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqRhPbyFDQWiqLURvsxHyAFxchxsFkMkN
And why so many links? Just for people to click them and become enthralled, enjoy it 🙂
Your story of getting into Magic kinda hit me in the feels, since my mom also became my first opponent. Only she kinda kicked my butt with an unforeseen combo of Regenerate and Sengir Vampire. >.> But the little things that parents do to humor their kids.
And in a kind of unironic twist, I was looking at Halfling Gunslinger for a game a month or so back. Too bad it fell through. Was going to use the Halfling racial option for adding to your Acrobatic Dodge to reach a high AC. The character’s catchphrase was going to be “Lead don’t care how big you are.”
Here’s to moms everywhere. Thanks for putting up with our weird hobbies!
Also of note, I know nothing else about my next gunslinger except that he’s already got a theme song. Dude might have paladin levels….
Why does Gunslinger have so much trouble finding a party, anyway? I mean, even Fighter has a party.
Why does the coyote never catch the road runner?
Well, there’s actually this theory: http://www.cracked.com/blog/fan-theory-wile-e.-coyote-has-inexhaustible-clone-army
Fighter is Coyote? Illuminati confirmed: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/send-in-the-clones
I have always found that what people expect from RPGs, based on anecdotal knowledge, is seldom what they see, and experience at a gaming table, especially with crunshy systems, like D&D and all its ofshoots, and copies. We tell about all the adventures we have, and the awesome fights and stuff, but what they see and hear is lots of aritmathic, obscure tatical talk and decisions, and dicerolling, with very little narative. So their expectations are not met by the percieved reality. Only after some time spend with the arithmatic, and dicerolling do you get the narative feel of what is happening at the table. And by that time quite a lot of people have already left.
So when we (my wife and me, and knowadays also my kids) try to introduce people into roleplaying, we mostly do that with rules lite systems (or systems that are appropriate or merged with the setting), that rely on social interaction and ROLE playing, instead of combat oriented systems and ROLL playing. That way the expectation of those people is often more in line with the experience they get at the table.
I have a theory that games are linguistic in nature. You have to learn to “speak” the game before it begins making sense. More complicated languages are harder to pick up, but they offer better “poetry” once you’re fluent. I might have to write a paper on the concept one day….
I’ve actually had surprisingly good luck recruiting people for stuff. I have a good network of potential candidates, and asking the question “Hey, do you know anyone who might be interested?” of current players has worked out pretty well. Not all of them have devoted their lives to the hobby as a result, but I had one friend who played like two sessions before that campaign folded who was willing to join my own small little me-DMing campaign.
My main experience is in preparing new players for joining an ongoing campaign. First you have to assess their system knowledge (have they played Pathfinder before, or similar TTRPGs or nothing at all?). Then I give a basic “don’t worry, you don’t have to remember all of this” briefing of the rules regarding things like attack rolls, saving throws and attribute scores, leaving the actual details of combat lesson for the table. Then I go over the core components of character building (race, class, feats, attributes), and help them find a class that feels right for them using my patented three-category class system: Magic, Martial and Mixed. (Also Utility, but not really.) Figuring out how much magic they want to do (and what kind) helps us narrow down a class, and then we assemble the character together, making sure that the new player is making decisions, and that I am simply telling them ways mechanically that such things can be done, and making sure that I give them options to choose from. Overall, it’s worked out pretty great!
Actually, as it happens, I’m in recruitment season right now, trying to fill in some gaps from players who moved on. Already have three potentials – one person who was at another Pathfinder campaign, one who has done other RPGs with current players and one newbie who I previously recruited but who had to drop out due to scheduling. So far, so good!
This is an interesting study in contrasts for me. Compare your experience to Regimango’s above, who gives the example of introducing 12 new players for a megadungeon one-shot. Those guys never came back to play again, even though they enjoyed the game. That leads me to think that it’s a cultural thing, where one new person being in the company of multiple long-time players makes a difference in the way they experience the game. It looks more like a long-term hobby and less like a thing to try once and forget.
Maybe an intuitive understanding of this principle is the reason people like to introduce their significant others into games, even if those significant others aren’t particularly interested. It’s got a better chance to stick when it’s an ongoing campaign with established social ties.
It probably also helps that I put a lot of time into one-on-one preparation, so the new player comes in with a decent idea of what to expect and an okay idea of what’s going on story- and other character-wise. Since I build the character with them, they don’t have the off-putting experience of being thrown headfirst into the SRD and coming back with something utterly sub-optimal, but they are also attached to their character more than if it was a pre-gen or something I made without their input.
And, again, some of it is probably luck.
I’ve tried several times, and for a portion I’ve succeeded. One group I’m running a game for is a bunch of buddies from high school and one person I introduced(also a friend from back in high school) is now my favorite GM!
Well hey, you must be doing something right. 🙂
Late to the party, but I felt, that after lurking (and binging) for months, I finally have to contribute.
Most of my gaming groups were brought together by me, out of people who had zero contact with RPGs before.
I started with an adult friend of my family and was instantly hooked. So I tried to get people to play with me and of the first five or so I played with three of them for about 20 years.
Later I started working at a youth center and it became part of my job to get people to try out stuff (e.g. RPGs).
And today I raised a lot of nerds, who even took on the mantle of GM, so I can sometimes even play characters in their games.
Oh, and I get paid for it 😀
Yes, I count myself lucky
Welcome to the comments! Glad to have you. 😀
Now that right there is an accomplishment. In a Roll20 world where people add and drop all the time, getting to sit in for long-running adventures with a group of close friends is the dream for a lot of folks. Any tips for keeping the group going that long?
No, not really…
I guess I was lucky to find some nerds right from the start, that we had other common interests and that there wasn’t much options for playing beside this group – at least not that anyone knew of. None of us got ever into playing in stores or clubs, there just isn’t (or wasn’t) the network here.
It’s weird to me that Roll20 is so often treated as a substitute for in-person gaming. It’s almost its own genre, with difference affordances than IRL gaming. Whisper mechanics and dynamic lighting, for example, don’t work in the same way when you’re at the table. I mean, if you guys have stayed together that long, the setup must be doing something right.
I scout new players from tabletop gamers, ’cause it’s easier to interest in tabletop roleplaying those people that already like tabletop. It also helps that I use GURPS: this system can be as simple or complex as I want it to, so first I hit novices with lite version, then add more books as they learn.
As some have wrote here too, in my experience, trying to get people in blocks or that know others who also play or want to play goes a long way in getting them in. Similarly, popularity of the system also helps wonders.
I am pretty much the walking encyclopedia for the entire community of a game system in my native language so I have also tried to get dozens of people on it, but i have been mildly successful on it, and when i achieved it it was mainly for the reasons above on the first paragraph.
Finding which kind of help for new players i can create that keeps and attracts people in has been one of my issues, coupled with my own personal low CHA. Creating a big guide online with any possible question has helped in keeping people in, but not in attracting, but on the other side, i have yet to make a concise reference sheet or some kind of advertisement/summary page.