NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tav_Behemoth" data-source="post: 2554984" data-attributes="member: 18017">I agree that this approach is a good way to sell RPG rules -- and I mourn the demise of the plan to introduce kids to roleplaying with the Pokemon RPG, and then follow it up with a series of age-appropriate rules tied to popular franchises for each peer group, culminating in D&D. But one of the problems is that RPG rules are intrinsically a do-it-yourself kit and thus not the best product to appeal to new players. Which is more likely to get kids into Britpop: a book on how to play guitar, or concert tickets? To draw out this analogy, concerts offer the immediate experience of live music, show you how you might do it yourself (you'll need someone to learn guitar, someone else on drums...), and are a self-supporting commercial enterprise, not a marketing expense that has to be paid for out of a music publisher's budget (or an industry-wide consortium*).Gaming conventions can fill this role, and should do a better job of being inviting to newbies. Peter Adkinson is doing some great outreach for So Cal, like inviting school groups and running TV advertising for events that appeal to kids like Pokemon CCG and electronic games. You and I don't have those resources--but if you're involved with a convention or a game day, why not make sure that there's at least one RPG event designed specifically for new players or kids?The cash tournaments Tinner mentioned could also do this. (I'm not sure if they have the same everyone-can-win appeal as poker, since D&D is a more complex strategic game that's not as dependent on luck and moxie; but they might be a good way to draw in people who've already mastered the ruleset & tactics through computer games like NwN or ToEE).And Otherworld Excursions is designed to achieve this as well. There might not be masses of people who know that they want to play Call of Cthulu--maybe the complexity doesn't appeal to them, or they have a negative stereotype about gamers, or they tried RPGs and were turned off by a bad early experience. But you can't deny that Lovecraft has been an enormously popular cult author for over 50 years. Some of the people who read him in high school are now in a position where they might not have the time to learn how to play a new game, prepare a session, and get their equally-busy friends to all be in the same place at the same time. But they might be in a position where adventure travel is a good fit for their budget and their schedule.As a "roleplaying concert", Otherworlds can offer such people a weekend in which they explore the weird, crumbling ruins of an abandoned naval installation, spend the night in a castle/luxury hotel that's supposed to be haunted, and use their imaginations to uncover the eldrich Lovecraftian horrors all around them. The number of people who become CoC players as a direct result of this experience will never be very large -- each weekend excursion can only accomodate six players, and most of them will probably already be John Tynes fans. But it's my hope that having things like this to point to will be very helpful in getting outsiders excited about what gaming is and can be.* Check out <a href="http://www.nationalgamesweek.net/" target="_blank">National Games Week</a>, whose "mission is to illustrate, to people throughout the world, that games are positive, social entertainment"; note the link about how to participate by hosting games.</blockquote>

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