RPG campaigns are social as well as gaming events. Sometimes the GM’s social desires interfere with setting up a campaign. But at the other extreme, people can meet their future spouses via RPGs.
This column stems from a conversation I had with a couple college students about a potential D&D campaign. We’ll call the major participant “Bob”. (While I’m not an official member of the club, I often attend to have people playtest my board and card games, and at some point I might playtest my very simple boardgame-like RPG.)
Bob wanted to run a D&D campaign at a regular club meeting. His friend was already running a Dystopia Rising campaign at the Thursday meeting (club met three days a week). Bob wanted to make that campaign end so that he could run his, apparently because he couldn’t otherwise find enough players. So I said, why not pick a different day, and some players might play in both campaigns? It turned out that he felt he had to run the campaign on the same day as the Dystopia Rising campaign. Okay I said, why not find a different room that’s open on Thursday? Or recruit players from the video game club at the same college, where people also play Magic: the Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh but meet on Monday and Wednesday? The other student, who was a vice president of the club, was going along with my suggestions. But it turned out Bob (who was the president) wanted to play with people he already knew.
So Bob was ready to mess with the GM and players to try to kill off the other campaign (or at least, that’s what he said, and he is a wild sort of fellow). I told Bob I’d not be inclined to play D&D with a GM who was willing to screw with his friends to this extent, because I’d expect him to screw with the players. GM’s who run games to amuse themselves (rather than entertain the players) don’t interest me.
Bob wants to entice players to “press the red button,” which will result in something bad happening. (You know, the switch labeled “Danger,” that some yahoo will nonetheless try.) But when I described the whole style of button-pushing, lever-pulling D&D to him, he got excited.
I first saw teens playing this style late in the evening at a Diplomacy convention 35 or so years ago. The GM presents players with a series of switches. When the switch is activated, more often than not something good happens, but sometimes something bad. Because the good outweighs the bad, the characters activate the switch. Some players refuse to pull the lever, but a great many will, just to see what happens, as long as they know it’s more likely to reward than harm. Think of the original Deck of Many Things, the same kind of thing in concentrated and exaggerated form. Smart people would find a really low-level character and let that character pick from the deck.
Back to Bob. The two problems were that he had to play on Thursday and he wasn’t willing to try to recruit players he didn’t know. In the end, Bob didn’t run a campaign at all.
Most of the RPG campaigns I know of hereabouts are played at a game shop or in a classroom (or public area) on a college campus. Clearly there are many others that are hosted at somebody’s house, frequently the GM’s. I did that for many years when I wasn’t hosting boardgame playtests. We tried to get several people to GM so that no one was stuck with the job (I view people who prefer GMing to playing with great suspicion!), and the hosting would be passed around as well.
There are many ways to recruit players. I’ve used notices posted at game shops, and more recently Meetup.com. You can talk with gamers in any game meeting.
I don’t see a reason to be reluctant to recruit people you don’t know. Through the years, many of my friends have been RPGers. I met my wife that way while living in London researching my doctoral dissertation. I was contacted (through a game shop notice) by someone from University of London who wanted to learn how to play D&D. But before we could meet at the start of the next term, he was "sent down" (flunked out to a lower level university not in London)! A friend of his then wrote to me, and I went down to U. London to teach four people. In the end, I married one; another married my wife's best friend; the other two married one another, although they were just friends at the time; and we're all still married to one another 40 years later. That’s the social power of RPGs.
This article was contributed by Lewis Pulsipher (lewpuls) as part of EN World's Columnist (ENWC) program. We are always on the lookout for freelance columnists! If you have a pitch, please contact us!
Picture courtesy of Pixabay.
This column stems from a conversation I had with a couple college students about a potential D&D campaign. We’ll call the major participant “Bob”. (While I’m not an official member of the club, I often attend to have people playtest my board and card games, and at some point I might playtest my very simple boardgame-like RPG.)
Bob wanted to run a D&D campaign at a regular club meeting. His friend was already running a Dystopia Rising campaign at the Thursday meeting (club met three days a week). Bob wanted to make that campaign end so that he could run his, apparently because he couldn’t otherwise find enough players. So I said, why not pick a different day, and some players might play in both campaigns? It turned out that he felt he had to run the campaign on the same day as the Dystopia Rising campaign. Okay I said, why not find a different room that’s open on Thursday? Or recruit players from the video game club at the same college, where people also play Magic: the Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh but meet on Monday and Wednesday? The other student, who was a vice president of the club, was going along with my suggestions. But it turned out Bob (who was the president) wanted to play with people he already knew.
So Bob was ready to mess with the GM and players to try to kill off the other campaign (or at least, that’s what he said, and he is a wild sort of fellow). I told Bob I’d not be inclined to play D&D with a GM who was willing to screw with his friends to this extent, because I’d expect him to screw with the players. GM’s who run games to amuse themselves (rather than entertain the players) don’t interest me.
Bob wants to entice players to “press the red button,” which will result in something bad happening. (You know, the switch labeled “Danger,” that some yahoo will nonetheless try.) But when I described the whole style of button-pushing, lever-pulling D&D to him, he got excited.
I first saw teens playing this style late in the evening at a Diplomacy convention 35 or so years ago. The GM presents players with a series of switches. When the switch is activated, more often than not something good happens, but sometimes something bad. Because the good outweighs the bad, the characters activate the switch. Some players refuse to pull the lever, but a great many will, just to see what happens, as long as they know it’s more likely to reward than harm. Think of the original Deck of Many Things, the same kind of thing in concentrated and exaggerated form. Smart people would find a really low-level character and let that character pick from the deck.
Back to Bob. The two problems were that he had to play on Thursday and he wasn’t willing to try to recruit players he didn’t know. In the end, Bob didn’t run a campaign at all.
Most of the RPG campaigns I know of hereabouts are played at a game shop or in a classroom (or public area) on a college campus. Clearly there are many others that are hosted at somebody’s house, frequently the GM’s. I did that for many years when I wasn’t hosting boardgame playtests. We tried to get several people to GM so that no one was stuck with the job (I view people who prefer GMing to playing with great suspicion!), and the hosting would be passed around as well.
There are many ways to recruit players. I’ve used notices posted at game shops, and more recently Meetup.com. You can talk with gamers in any game meeting.
I don’t see a reason to be reluctant to recruit people you don’t know. Through the years, many of my friends have been RPGers. I met my wife that way while living in London researching my doctoral dissertation. I was contacted (through a game shop notice) by someone from University of London who wanted to learn how to play D&D. But before we could meet at the start of the next term, he was "sent down" (flunked out to a lower level university not in London)! A friend of his then wrote to me, and I went down to U. London to teach four people. In the end, I married one; another married my wife's best friend; the other two married one another, although they were just friends at the time; and we're all still married to one another 40 years later. That’s the social power of RPGs.
This article was contributed by Lewis Pulsipher (lewpuls) as part of EN World's Columnist (ENWC) program. We are always on the lookout for freelance columnists! If you have a pitch, please contact us!
