Finding Players

There are a number of useful online references for finding players. NearbyGamers is one of the best. Frappr Maps is also good. I'll start by contacting everyone listed on both those sites in the local area. In addition living in the United Kingdom I have the advantage of UK Roleplayers - a great resource, and there is a local forum for games in my city (I set it up myself so that the various gaming groups in the area could stay in touch with each other).

Most roleplayers at some point pass through their local gaming shops, many of them also buy comics. It’s worth checking out local gaming shops and comic shops, seeing if they have notice boards, and if they do advertising on them.

Friends who don't game may be interested in giving gaming a try. I have several work colleagues who play online games like World of Warcraft. Some of them have expressed an interest in roleplaying (normally followed by an excuse that they haven't got time for a regular weekly commitment unfortunately). Talk about gaming. If you don't talk about gaming you'll never find out if there are other gamers you deal with on a daily basis. You could see gamers every day and never realise.

The most important thing is to be active. Roleplayers won’t just come to you in your time of need. Unless you advertise your need for players, and talk about your gaming you wont find people. Each day we deal with dozens, perhaps hundreds of people. Each of those people is a either a hidden gamer or has the potential to be a gamer.

Assessing Players

Okay. Lets assume I've found a potential player. How do I know if I should let this stranger join my game? Will they be a good fit? Can I rely on them? I’m going to be picky. This is someone I'm going to hopefully be playing with for some time.

To begin with I need to know a little about them. Depending on the method by which I made contact with them I might phone or email him (or her). I'll tell them a little about my group, what we play, when we play and who we are (in general terms - nothing which will allow him to identify individual players). Then I'll find out what sort of group they are looking for, and ask whether this meets their expectations.

The next step is meeting them in person. I'm a little nervous about this stage. I'm not exaggerating when I say a gamer followed me and a friend home on foot from a comic shop (he followed us over 4 miles) because he overheard us talking about roleplaying. Thankfully he turned out to be harmless and friendly if a little obsessive. We told him about a local gaming club, he joined a game, and later dropped out when he discovered girls. You'll be pleased to know he grew up to be a really great guy, and later rediscovered roleplaying. The experience has taught me to be weary though. The next person to follow me home may be less 'harmless'. So - 'meet them'. I'm going to suggest that when you meet a new player for the first time it should be in a public place, somewhere quiet enough to talk and somewhere comfortable. Coffee shops are a good choice, but I favour a local bar thats got really comfortable couches and serves great coffee. A poor choice would be the local gaming sh

So what do I ask them? Well initially anything except roleplaying. If they are right for the group you'll be able to happily chat with them about life outside of gaming. I don't know about other groups, but my group meet for barbeques, to go to the cinema together, chat before and after games (often during if I cant keep them on track) and are happy to do favours for each other. At this point I'm not recruiting a gamer - I'm recruiting a potential member in a circle of friends.

Working players into the group

The first game with the group is potentially difficult. If you have a long running campaign the built up backstory can be potentially overwhelming for a new player. They'll be nervous and the other players won’t really get to see them at their best. There are various ways you might get around this, but I would suggest your first game with the new player either be a board game with roleplaying elements, or a short one-off convention length game. That way the new player is not at a disadvantage. You can work him into your campaign later - this is his chance to meet the group and you don’t want to detract from it. Like the first meeting I would suggest doing this in a neutral location. If this meeting goes well then you can start trading details and inviting them to real gaming sessions.

Summary

These are all thoughts based on my previous experience of recruiting players. My gaming group is now once again short of players and I'm back at the start of the recruitment process. I normally view this as a three stage process: Find the gamer, assess the gamer and introduce the gamer to the group. It’s an active process, and it involves talking to potential gamers and non-gamers about gaming. It’s also something I do with care since the wrong gamer will not work with my group and I've had experience with strange gamers before. I'll keep you updated on how recruitment goes this time.

• The system is prep-heavy. Not just mildly prep-heavy but enormously prep-heavy. Even though I've got a prewritten adventure I have to look each and every monster up, work out what all their abilities do, and this takes far more work than it should. I can stat a minion fight in SotC in about 20 seconds. Stating a fight with a ship full of pirates and two named NPCs for last session took the better part of 90 minutes.
• The character sheets are becoming increasingly complex, with more and more powers, point pools and strange rule sets which I need to understand, whilst managing to have nothing of any importance to the narrative anywhere on them.
• Combats are getting longer and longer as the game goes on. Player damage and monster damage are not scaling in line with each other, meaning that combats are now taking an inordinate amount of time. Meanwhile social conflict by the rules is taking seconds. This means the two non-combat characters are getting seconds of limelight compared to the hours the combat characters are getting.
• The adventure path is an implausible sequence of dungeon crawls - and I'm having to make extensive re-writes in order to produce a game with a sensible balance of delving and politicking. In fact I am spending much more time trying to re-write the adventure so that the various bits meet up than I would have to spend if I wrote entirely new material
• The level of railroading in the original adventure path is ridiculous. As an example one of the adventures ends with a storm and a shipwreck. The adventure makes it clear that this will happen, and the next adventure is dependent on the players having just survived a wreck and having to make their way across the island. One of my players is a mage specialising in weather, water and air magic, with the ability to predict and control the weather. Another is specialised in repair magic. There is no way they would have encountered the storm by surprise, if they had they could have calmed it, and even if they had been shipwrecked they could have repaired the ship far quicker than they could have walked across a 400 mile wide island covered in jungle.

To be honest I cannot understand why the players are happy with it. One of the characters is a political demagogue, another a confidence trickster, and neither of them is actually getting to do almost anything. I'm also disappointed that dispite several conversations with them they haven't taken the hint that I am not happy with it.

Anyway, In 2 hours I'm going to give them two simple choice: We will make our way to the end of the current adventure which we will consider the end of the season. We will then take a break from it.

The first choice: Do we either give the game up for good, or will they allow me to give the remainder of the adventure path an extensive re-write. In fact this rewrite will probably consist of working out who all the key players are and what their motivations are, and what's actually going on - i.e. putting me in a position where I can plan each session based on the players actions and not some pre-written script.

As for the second choice: If we rejoin the action do they want to do so using FATE or Burning Wheel.

I feel bad about this. I know from talking to them that they are enjoying the game - a lot, but I feel that is largely due to the sheer amount of work I've had to put in to work around the issues with the system and the to fix the adventure. The simple fact is I am not enjoying it, and haven't really been enjoying it for about half a year now. Its become a chore and I' have better things to be doing with my time.

I wonder how they'll feel about Shab-al-Hiri Roach next week.

E.E. "Doc" Smith style Space Opera immediately suggests Smith's two seminal series the Lensman series and the Skylark series. I read the lensman series several times a long time ago. I've read parts of the Skylark series but not the whole series. Smith had a doctorate in chemistry and attempted to make the 'science' in his books accurate. Unfortunately he didn't read beyond his field and appeared to have a limited knowledge of physics (and definitely never considered the impact of general relativity on his science). His works are touched however with an impressive knowledge of early twentieth century munitions and explosive, a good understanding of traditional tactics and an ability to extrapolate how things might develop.

Smith's works are a product of the era they were produced in. They are extremely pulpy, but despite an inherent belief that man will always overcome adversity it is always better arms which win the day. Most of Smith's book boil down to an arms race resulting in increasingly apocalyptic weapons. In addition by today’s standards Smith's works seem some what sexist - but at the time Smith was extremely open minded. He's been quoted as saying he believed that men and women were "equal, but different," however in his books woman always take stay at home role. His only two strong fame characters in the Lensman series are Virgilia Samms who always seems to need the protection of men, and Clarrissa MacDougall who showed her status as the most evolutionarily advanced woman the human race would ever produce by becoming a nurse and staying at home to pine for Kimball Kinnison.

In trying to capture Smith's works as a campaign setting I would first try to capture the fast fun pulpy feeling. In addition in Smith's works there is no moral ambiguity. People are either good or evil. They may be spies, but at heart they are all white or all black. Further more both the incorruptible and the completely corrupt people should be bigger than life characters. As such I need to ensure the setting has no shades of grey and the main characters need to be huge men of steel characters with abilities well beyond normal men. Finally Smith's settings are all about the technology and the weapons. Big buzz bars carrying huge amounts of energy and enormous machines should dominate. Everything in a Smith universe should be big, and the weapons should be over powered.

Victorian Undersea Adventure all stems from the work of Jules Verne. Verne actually only wrote one novel involving the submarine Captain Nemo the Nautilus - 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' (1870), although the final fate of Captain Nemo is mentioned in 'The Mysterious Island' (1874). The most famous version of Captain Nemo is the 1954 Disney Nemo, and it would be a huge mistake not to use this in my source material. This movie has two sequels - Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969), The Return of Captain Nemo (1972) which have little to do with Verne's work, but are interesting (if rather flawed) additions to the Victorian Undersea adventure genre. There are also some interesting genre animations including the Japanese anime series 'Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water', and Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire, although it could be pointed out this film is set 11 years to late to be considered Victorian Undersea adventure and is actually early Elizabethan. Whatever the case, the feel is right.

This genre is again dominated by the environment and a sense of exploring the unknown. In many ways it is a precursor to the Sci-Fi cliché of people trapped in a claustrophobic vessel that provides their soul protection from the dangerous environment they are exploring. To capture the atmosphere there should be the excitement of mad explosive action when things go wrong, combined with growing the growing threat of inter-crew hostilities as the environment forces pre-existing tensions to the fore. The dangers here are both the environment / nature and the very crew themselves. This is a much more human story than the E.E.Doc Smith story, yet again the machines are pretty significant central characters in their own right - the Nautilus dominated Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, whilst the Ulysses dominated Atlantis: The Lost Empire. It could also be a difficult game to capture correctly, since living antagonists are always much easier to get players invested in, than natural terrors.

Then there is the question of undersea cities. Jules Verne didn't feel this was really necessary for his story, but since his time Undersea cities have almost become central to any Undersea adventure - and as almost invariably called Atlantis. I'm tempted to push for one so I can add 'The Spy who Loved me' to the research list. Its one of the only two Roger Moore bond films I'd rate in the top 10 Bond films (the other is 'Live and Let Die').