EN World RPG Book Club for June

[bento]

Cross-site marketing might help.

Perhaps contact the publisher a few days beforehand that they've been picked. See if any online retailers can sell it as a small discount? Something to get them to raise the visiblity and offer an incentive to sell more copies.

Maybe get the author to participate? Have them talk about the genesis of the book and some of the things they were striving to accomplish. I really like when we're discussing a book here and the author pops in and gives more "behind-the-curtain" on the process of what made it and what ended on the cutting room floor.

Get Morrus to make it a sticky thread? I forgot about it for a couple of weeks as other threads have buried it. If it were more visibile I'd probably have followed through.

That's all I got. Sorry I dropped the ball and didn't pick up the book.

 

[I'm A Banana]

All really dynamite ideas, Bento. I didn't even SEE this thread 'till today, and I'm definately interested in doing the ENWBC. Contacting the writer and the publisher just to let them know this is going on may bring attention to it a bit more. Maybe participants should link to the most recent thread in their sigs, too? It'd be a little extra-sweet if there was a logo or some cheap gif we could use to proclaim it.

Also maybe a good idea to provide a link to where you can pick up the book in the OP.

That said, this is the same month that 4e began, so I guess I wouldn't have expected a whole lot of convo even if we had all those things. 4e is so shiny and new for the forums here!

 

[Crothian]

I new 4e I was coming down the tracks like a run away train. But I didn't want to sit on the idea.

If I do go the contacting writer and publisher route I might just go with someone I know. I know from experience that random e-mails from people on line to publishers usually go unanswered. I might also chat someone up at Origins if I can find something good there.

Sticky threads do get ignored. I've seen cases were even the mods themselves ask questions that are answered in a sticky thread. Maybe if it becomes popular enough we can do that. But I also doubt that this would get stickied just to save it.

any ideas on what we can do next? I was thinking something relatively new that I find at Origins, but I'm more then happy to take suggestions. At some point as this starts to go well I do hope to get someone different each month to pick something.

 

[bento]

I'd pick something that people might already have an opinion about an earlier version, but that's been updated or radically changed. Here are some suggestions:

D20 World of Darkness
New versions of Traveller or Shadowrun
Pirate's Guide to Freeport


These are all updates and people might have tried the earlier versions, but haven't taken the opportunity to try the new stuff.

 

[Crothian]

s20 WoD has a 50 dollar price tag. I think people would be a little gunshy about that. It's hard enough getting people to participate so I'm trying to not have cost be too much of a factor.

Traveler would be good but it might be hard to get them to comment here. Mongoose just hang out on the boards like they used to. It is a good choice as is the new Freeport.

 

[Crothian]

I'm not seeing anything that's jumping out at me this con.

 

[scholar]

dammit... stuff kept coming up in june... I did enjoy og quite a bit, and may put it together for a few one shots(since I seem stuck with one shot gaming over the summer being in boston)

and recomendations for future book clubs... when I bought og I did a perusal of IPR and also picked up covert generation(kids fighting the evil that is generation x) and fast lane( a quirky little game that uses a roulette wheel as the core mechanic)

ps, I do favor stickying... but that's just because I forgot to book mark it, and a couple of times( like today) I had to go digging through pages of enworld to find the thread

 

[Crothian]

I'm going to put a link in my sig to them. Tomorrow we will start the July one.

 

[bento]

Another idea about book clubs in general...

The moderator should probably prepare a set of questions to be discussed.

I once ran a book club for faculty at a university, and I always used discussion topics found on the publisher's web site or in the back of the book. This helped start the discussion, and keep things moving when a topic was exhausted.

For our book club I could imagine a set of general questions like:

* What did you like about the setting / core mechanics?
* What did you dislike, or find hard to implement?
* Do you think the game addressed a common problem we find in RPGs?
* What do you think were the main design goals the author had in mind?
* Was he/she able to reach their goals or fall short?
* Would this be the kind of game you would play?
* Does it lend itself to short pick-up games, or long-running campaign?
* Gamist, Narrativist or Simulationist?

Every four or five days the moderator throws out a new topic and we post on that. The thread will go in different directions and hopefully spawn new side topic discussions.

 

[Crothian]

Great idea!!