...the REST of our gaming groups

[Balsamic Dragon]

In my gaming group we usually play at my apartment, which has all the WOTC books but few of the other publishers. All the players bring their own PH, some bring a DMG as well. So I'm not really sure who owns what at home. I don't think any of the group use non-WOTC products for D&D, although all play non-D&D (non-d20) games. Oops, I take that back, one player's husband ran her group through the Freeport modules.

As for Enworld, I've told pretty much all the people I game with about it, but I think only a few actually drop by and most are lurkers. I know Forrester, but haven't actually gamed with him (hi!)

My current D&D group is myself (law student), my husband (computer techie), and 5 others (computer programer, game store owner, another computer techie, salesman and paralegal). Most of us are married or engaged to be married, and we are all around 25-35.

Balsamic Dragon

 

[Psion]

One friend of mine who lives far away (and has nothing to do with ENWorld) is a pretty rabid devourer of Kalamar, Scarred Lands, and Rokugan.

The players almost all have the splatbooks for the classes that they are currently playing. Some of them have more books depending on their interest. For example, the player of the party sorcerer has about every major magic-related D20 book (spells & spellcraft, spells & magic, relics & rituals), and his wife, who regularly plays rogues, has the Quintessential Rogue. Another player who is planning on running Spycraft has all the spycraft stuff except SFA. Another player (who GMs the SW campaign) has a good amount of SW stuff and is interested in buying my extra Dragonstar SFHB from me.

 

[reddist]

We need to go public

Yo Curtis.... Interesting delima here.

Most of the people I play with either own or work at a hobby/game store, so they're pretty well stocked and well informed.

I think our biggest problem is that we are "niche" rather than "mainstream." You don't see our books at Walmart. You rarely seem them at bookstores like B&N or Borders, and when you do they are tucked in with the graphic novels. The mainstream bookstores MIGHT carry the core books, maybe some splat stuff, and some SSS hardcovers, and that'll be about it.

If you want to seek out and purchase d20 material, you have to go to a specialist store. If you go to a specialist store, you generally know what it is you are looking of browsing for. You're already educated.

The general public does not spend a great deal of time in game and hobby store.

So.. how do we bring them in? How do we go from "niche" to "mainstream?" We have to bring our game to them. We have to make our game popular with the general public.

The FR TV series might help, though I think the D&D movie might have done more harm than good Advertise... what I wouldn't give to see a movie starring Vin Diesel and Cameraon Diaz, and just have a shot of them playing D&D. Product placement. Vin Diesel doing a WotC commercial, holding up a copy of the PH.

Get Ryan Dacey on to NPR, doing an interview with Terry Garr about the OGL movement. Arrange interviews with the winner of the Campaign Setting Search on Letterman and Leno. Hell, get some of your more problematic groups on Springer, and incite them to throw dice at each other. Get WotC, Necromancer Games, TG/MEG, and S&S to do radio spots when they release a new book.

Locally? Volunteer to run D&D "lite" games at libraries as part of some after-school kid's program. Advertise your group on college campuses. Start sanctioned clubs on campuses and recruit members during that "rush-week" right before classes start. Include a game of Frag or Giant Monster Rampage in your next team-builder at work. Invite your usual dinner guests over on the weekend and whip out the D&D Box set (that starter game with the crap dice).

got computer gamers you wanna pull in? Run a p&p game of d20 Diablo II or d20 Everquest. Show them the joys of playing face to face with other humans.

Hook 'em and reel 'em in! We gotta go mainstream.

Who's got other suggestions?

-Reddist

 

[CRG]

And see, my shame in my group is that I'm not going to GenCon.

Again, we're a large conglomerate group, that melds and whatnot, comprising of about 25-30 people. Of that group, probably half are going to GenCon. Granted, most of them are single and therefore out-spend me in the book department as well.

And those that aren't buying D20 are rabid pursuers of other games and systems. Warhammer, World of Darkness and Shadowrun chief among them.

We used to joke as we all had gaming-addictions. Some to paper. Some to lead. Some to fine-pewter. Others to plastic. Everybody has one. We're one of those groups where we can probably find (quickly) a dozen of the Spelljammer Polyhedron's laying around and thought it was really, really cool even though its not likely to see alot of use out of our groups except in some one-off or weekend games.

We buy hordes of WoTC stuff, some of the guys are big Scarn fans as well. There are several KoK things milling about, but we're no one will be running that setting in the forseeable future - its just more good source. When we get together it's not a question of who-owns-what-book but more "did NO ONE bring Sword and Fist?" followed by "No, it wouldn't fit in my bag and I'm not lugging ever book I own to this damn game".

How I long for ESDs of the 3e WoTC books.

Come to think of it, they'd be cheaper as well (like all the other PDF products) and then I could buy MORE!

Add another addiction to 'digital gaming material'.

 

[evil_rmf]

I play in one group and DM in another. In the group I play in, I am the youngest at 33. There are 2 separate games being run in that group. One is a mutant 1E mega-world (ridiculously high stats and magic, etc..) and the other is a straight up 1E. Nobody in that group, with the exception of me and another guy even wants to bother with d20.

The group I run is composed of me, two guys in there late 30s and one guy in his mid 20s. It is a 3E game and they all own the PHB and nothing else. I believe they don't have anything else for the following reasons:

1) it's a casual group, and they don't want to spend the money
2) they want to be surprised by what I throw at them
3) We design the prestige classes in my world; they aren't going to be able to pull one in from a supplement and drop it in as-is. We do this so the class really fits in and has purpose other than munchkinism.

I own over 2 dozen d20 products, half of them non-wotc. My players flip through some of the books and find stuff they like and then I/we generally find a reason to work it into the game, sometimes straight-up as printed, sometimes heavily modified, or somewhere in between.

 

[Voadam]

In my group, one player has no 3e books, one has just the PH, one has the PH and Tome and Blood, one has the PH and both WOT books, one has the PH, the DMG, the MM, Song and Silence and 1 WotC module. And then there is me with maybe half the WotC non module D&D stuff, three licensed ravenloft products, one KOK module, and more third party d20 products than the rest combined (both print and electronic).

 

[Furn_Darkside]

In any case, I'm curious about the rest of your group. What do they buy, what are they D20 spending habits?

Salutations,

2 of my players are really casual- both own the ph (though one took over a year of playing to buy it). One plans to buy d20 Modern (ugh).

The other player in my group owns the three core products and picks up the WOTC splat books.

The only 3rd party product I can think of that he has purchased is Godlike.

None of them are active enough in gaming to even be able to name a 3rd parrty publisher.

FD

 

[Desdichado]

The last group I played with (haven't played for a month or two due to too busy summer schedule at my house) had, on average, about 6-7 folks. Two of us (myself and A2Z, whom I actually initially recruited from these boards) read the boards. Another guy doesn't read the boards, but really enjoys DMing and has almost all the WotC books (but he doesn't have much outside of WotC). The rest of the group, AFAIK, just have PHB's, maybe a splatbook or two and that's it.

Of course, it's the players that occasionally DM that have the most stuff, which isn't terribly surprising.

 

[Radiating Gnome]

I play in two groups, and I occassionally turn up for an RPGA event on a slow weekend.

Personally I own all the core WOTC stuff that isn't setting specific -- I don't have all the FR and OA stuff, but just about everything else.

IN the group where I'm a player, made up of RPGA players, there are more players who own books -- as a group we're much more informed about rules and sourcebooks. Many of us actually owm more books that the DM, who is running a home grown world and uses only the core books (and the WOTC class books, if he needs to).

In the game where I'm the DM, I run a game losely set in Greyhawk, but with plenty of other odd things mixed in. We've actually just started a weird alternate material plane jaunt into a sort of WWII Poland that I've created as a fusion of Call of the Cthulu and Pinnacle's Weird War D20 book. That group of players, most of whom had played D&D as teenagers 15-20 years ago, (the first edition days) didn't own books when we started and were dabblers -- not really interested in the rules or buying books, they were just looking to have a good time. It was a special day -- a real victory for me as a DM, I felt, when all of a sudden all the dabblers in the group turned up with their own PHB's. Now a couple of them have the class book for their character's class, and they're starting to get more interested in the rules. With that group I have been known to plan encounters as object lessons in certain strategies and rules, like flanking sneak attacks. They learn, but their main focus continues to be just having fun, and they'll never be the sort of gamer that searches books out. Whatever they can find on the shelf at Borders is more than enough for them.

AS for reading these boards, I think I'm the only person in both groups who does, although I post a story hour of the game I run (heroes of spittlemarch) and send the link to my players every week, and often recommend the boards as a rules adjudication resource for the game I play in.

I guess I'm saying it takes all kinds. Now if I could just find a group interested in playing Spycraft with me to justify all the money I spent on those books . . .

-rg

 

[Heap Thaumaturgist]

Well, back when I played more often, I was still the only guy that regularly bought the books. Then again, I was DM 100% of the time. We had two PHBs, and I had a handful of product. The only non-me purchases were made by a player who really wanted to do FR stuff, he was originally going to DM and found out he hated it, but still wanted to game FR, so I agreed to run some of his stuff. We all moved away, I think his boxed sets and books are in the closet somewhere.

Now, my game group isn't exactly formed completely yet, we're waiting for the start of the semester. I imagine it'll be exactly as it is now ... I'll own all the books, and we'll be running a homebrew of my own making. We're the shining example of casual players. It's usually a spur of the moment thing, and we never had what you'd call a solid campaign running. We all have so many other things to do that D&D is all but a board game we can break out on a really slow weekend. I own only one 3rd Party game book.

Of my players, most are on the internet fairly regularly. One of them knows about the site, but never visits, I just talk about what's going on in the world of RPGs. Lately he's been telling everybody about the WotC campaign search and that has stirred up some interest in the hobby, enough for me to make a regular game in the fall, I imagine.

I've been to GenCon once, because I was in the state at the time on a totally unrelated matter. The friend I took with me wasn't a gamer, but he still had alot of fun checking out the vendors for non-game related products and smiling at the attractive anime-fan girls. I've been to one other con.

I think, on the whole, we provide an interesting demographic for "Casual Gamers". I'm the only one that takes it to the level of hobby, and it's a pretty constant hobby for me. I'm on this site every day, I know most of what is going on, and I work on my own game materials pretty much constantly. I have four fully fleshed campaign worlds that I'm very aware will never see active play, and a collection of RPGs that never get played. I love my RPGs, but I have a hard time finding a group I can game with. I prefer to game with my close friends, and most of them aren't avid gamers.

I could probably game every day of the week if I had a reason to, but as it is I'm lucky if I game four times a year.

--HT