Frank Filz‘s comment on yesterday’s post brought something percolating to the surface of my brain: in terms of composition, there are really only two kinds of gaming group.
There’s the kind that’s always in flux, perhaps with a core group of players who’ve been there since the beginning, perhaps not. This kind of group changes composition when campaigns begin or end, or when real life intervenes (people move, work hours change, etc.).
The other kind changes only occasionally — the composition of the group remains largely constant over time.
I see a fundamental difference between these two kinds of group. For the “stays the same” crowd, gaming with those specific people trumps other concerns, including (but not limited to) satisfaction with the games being played.
For flux-y groups, playing a game that everyone is really jazzed about is the primary concern. Players who aren’t into a specific game just sit that round out, gaming with other groups or taking a break.
(This distinction doesn’t mean that groups in flux don’t like their friends, or that more static groups don’t love the games they play, it just determines their top concern.)
So why do groups break down into these two general categories? In my experience, the biggest determining factor when it comes to the nature of your group is the environment you’re in at the time.
From my perspective (I don’t want to speak for my friends on this one, but I think they’d agree), my group is firmly in the second category. When we get together, it’s to game with each other — with this specific group of friends.
This is due partly to the scarcity, in our experience, of unattached players in our area — our environment, in other words. It’s also partly due to preference (at least for me): more often than not, I’ve gamed with close friends in stable groups, rather than casting a wider net.
My gaming group back in high school, by way of contrast, was solidly in the first category. It consisted of my entire extended circle of friends, plus whoever else we knew who might be interested in what was being played at the moment. There was a core that didn’t change much, but apart from that we were always in flux.
I’ve got choosing our next game (Doomsday approacheth…) on the brain, so I can easily see how falling into the first category affects that process for my group: it makes it tough. What other aspects of our hobby does this fundamental division into stable/fluctuating gaming groups influence?
What kind of group is yours? Why does it fall into that category? Am I right about there only being two basic categories?
Mine’s definitely the fluxy group. There’s about 10 or so players that form the group, and the games get pretty big, but not everyone plays everything. We basically have 4 “slots,” every other saturday and sunday. I run D&D on one Sunday and play in someone’s All Flesh game on a Saturday, and someone else is running Adventure on the alternate Sunday and a fourth person is running his homebrew RPG on the alternate Saturday.
Almost everyone plays in my game, the only exceptions being the homebrewer’s brother who only plays in that game and the Zombie Master’s friends who only play All Flesh. I think the Adventure group is basically my D&D group minus myself and one other person. The homebrew group is my D&D group minus myself and two other players.
I think there’s 3 players who play in all four games… The zombie master, the home brewer, and another guy who works at the store we play at (we can only play when one of the two people who works there are around, since we play after hours).
My group is definitely the flux-y group. We’ve got a core of 3 or 4 players. Then we’ve got people who come in and out depending on what game we are playing, or how it works with our schedule. I’m the primary GM of the group, but we hand off every so often to prevent GM burnout on everyones part.
I think the way that a group becomes either fluxy or solidified, is based on ages, schedules, and styles of play. If you find people who share your exact style of play, then you probably stay on sync for most things. If everyone digs DND style play, then you rarely switch and become a solidified group. Also if you are a tight group of friends you solidify, and might switch game styles to accommodate each friend’s tastes. Our group has 2 people in the core who are 9 to 5ers, 2 people in the core who are retail workers, and the ancillary members have a wide range of schedules. When a schedule changes it makes it hard to have a set gaming day.
I would like my group to solidify a little bit more, but I also like having new perspectives on gaming, and trying out new things. I don’t think either group can be seen as better, just different depending on the circumstances of the environment that forges it.
Here’s the problem I’ve had with “fluxy” groups:
Attendance is an issue – with so many players who may or may not be in a different game, nailing down a set day is hard, so you call it for what seems best and some people don’t make it reliably. But since you’re not dealing with a small group of friends, but rather a large mostly anonymous mass, they don’t bother to be courtious about it.
What to play is an issue – Yeah, you CAN declare any game you want and find people who’ll throw their hat in the ring and play, but there’s ALWAYS an argument about what gets thrown in the ring. Without the temprence that knowing you’ll be there when the game YOU want to play gets played gives you, and with dozens of opinions, this can be a far worse ordeal than for a smaller more structured groups.
Headhunters, Headunters, Headhunters!: Let’s face it, you can only play just so many times a week, and everyone you play with thinks they’re god’s gift to DMing. Thus, who DMs? Everyone DMs. Everyone DMs and players become a comodity that is fought after. Games are routinely disrupted and replaced by another DM that has their own agenda and poaches your players out from under you so they can play THEIR game. This happens about once every two to three weeks.
These are problems, I think, NOT with the basic concept of the fluxy group, BUT with the maturity level of people in general. Unfortuneatly, the larger your group becomes, the larger your ratio of n00bs to people you’d actually want to play with becomes. This is why, for the most part, I’m all for a smaller more static group.
my group started out as a fluxy group, and stayed that way for a few years. lots of people drifting in and out over time. since then, its settled down quite a bit. two of us are original members, we’ve dragged our spouses into it, and one other person. we’ll still add another player or lose them once in a while, but its getting rarer.
Our groups are mostly constant, though there has been substantial change over time. Over the last ten years, the game group has consisted of 4-6 people playing at a time, ballooning up to eight for a campaign or two, with steady turnover as people move away.
Changing out one person or couple at a time, I’m playing with an entirely different group than I was ten years ago. In the last 8 years or so, Kev and Jim hold steady. About five years ago, Ben joined us and has remained. Three years ago, Jennifer began gaming with us. Many people played with us for a game or three, but no longer do. Others were constant for a long time, but have moved or drifted away.
Among our group, I’m the only one who looks at other games and groups; I’ve played at store game nights, a few months of a D&D club campaign, and twice at the local monthly Meetup.com group that’s just getting established locally. Jennifer and I have tried out the RPGA game days at the library– I’m more consistent, but we both enjoy the games.
Ours is a group in constant decline. There were about 10 or so of us a decade ago, and as life events happen (new job, divorce and remarriage, moving) they drift away, with no one new coming in to replace them. We simply cannot find gamers!
My group is a relatively new one (less than 2 years old) and no one had met before the group. As you can imagine the general quality of gamers in East Tn is very poor so it has been a constant struggle to keep our numbers up.
A group that would like to be a stable one has ended up being a fluxy one.
Ye say true Sai Will. I would say ours is a flux group that strives toward stable.
So a practical question:
When an ongoing campaign fluxes and the new player knows neither the setting nor the system, do you hand them a pregen?
For me: For the most part, my groups have been fluxy. There have been periods of stability, though never lasting more than 3-4 years. And almmost not campaign that I have run that lasted more than a few weeks has survived without any flux.
In one way, there’s really only one type of group, it’s more a case of how frequent the flux occurs. Ok, perhaps there are a few true “stable” groups out there, where the same group has been playing together for 20 years.
Calybos’s experience points out perhaps the biggest issue with being committed to the stable group model. Attrition will eventually wipe out your stable group.
One thing I have been feeling strongly about since leaving college is that stability is a bad dynamic. Up through college, it seemed most gaming occurred in clubs, or at least tied to clubs, but as gaming became more and more socially acceptable, people started finding gamers through other means, and gaming groups became more static.
The problem is that with static gaming groups, it becomes hard to find new gamers. And if you’re new to an area, and looking for a game to join, well, all the groups are full.
I saw this in the third club I joined, the one I joined after college. Most of the games run in the club were very static, so new gamers were basically left out in the cold, unless they were willing to hook in with the handfull of boardgame players, or willing to sit around for several weeks trying to collect new players, and/or hope a campaign would end.
Gaming groups in college were more static than in high school. In high school, I attended MIT’s gaming club, where many of the D&D games allowed characters to migrate between campaigns (even when they started playing Champions there was a bit of migration), and there was lots of flux. In college, the campaigns had little or no character migration, but players would play in multiple games with lots of cross pollination.
One thing that helped the flux in college was that gaming occurred multiple days of the week (definitely Friday and Saturday, and some on Sunday, and occaisional weekday gaming), that allowed people to try out other groups even if they were in a sort of stable group that played every week. MIT when I was there was mostly Saturday only, though it expanded into Friday, and there had long been a group of older folks who played on Sundays (many/most of these involved with The Wild Hunt APA).
Fortunately, I think the internet is making it a lot easier to find gamers. I got through my early years starting with a core group of friends, then joining the MIT club, and then the college club. I found the post-college club (at NC State in Raleigh NC) by logging onto BBSes. While in Raleigh, I did find a few players through notices at stores (with one, “wow, that was stupid, glad nothing happened” incident where a 15 yr old responded, and I picked him up in my van to bring him back to my apartment to play), and one player through my caving club (with our original group there formed by him bringing a friend along, and me recruiting a former college buddy who happened to move into the area – which I found out when I saw him in a restaurant parking lot). That campaign did eventually have several folks join from a store posting. Other than one campaign started through the NC State club and that campaign, Raleigh was very dry. Oregon turned out much better, primarily because I actually went and hooked up to various Yahoo groups (which had just started in the last couple years in Raleigh – but other things like LEGO and work had me almost out of gaming).
MountZionRyan: When I have had new players, I almost always get together with them outside of normal play time to talk to them about the game and do chargen. I have occaisionally offered to let them run an NPC for a session or two but have almost never been taken up on that.
Frank
We were the flux group, but now we have a stable gaming core of 5 and the membership hasn’t changed in months. I’m sure anyone that’s registered time in the business world has heard this one, but the requisite Forming / Storming / Norming / Performing stages have all been checked off and we’re enjoying the Perform stage. To that end, we’re kind of taking a “We’re Closed” attitude until the current campaign ends (not stopping til 20th lvl and just made 10th). =)
Our group is stable, completely by choice. There are plenty of players available, and I’ve had to (very relunctantly) turn down some additions because of sheer size of the group. We haven’t had a change in membership since 2000, and the last two changes were additions. The core has been constant since 1987.
The key to a large stable group is that the you have a core, but you aren’t afraid to recruit new members that will become fully part of the stable group.
Some of us have kids that are getting old enough to game now. I expect that when they do, we will become a little less “stable”, though the group won’t change all that much. Rather, we’ll have so many people that we’ll be forced to run two or three games at once. At that point, we won’t be forced to turn people away because of size issues. Add enough people, and it becomes somewhat of a club. But we’ll never have an open club. And if the thing grew so much that it lost our original chemistry, the current core would simply always play together, putting us back where we are today.
I’d rather teach a friend to play than hope that an existing gamer will become a friend.
I’m glad I wasn’t way off-base with this observation — from your comments, it seems like this basic division is pretty common.
(MountZionRyan) When an ongoing campaign fluxes and the new player knows neither the setting nor the system, do you hand them a pregen?
You might want to ease them into it with a pregen, and then offer them the chance to make a new PC once they’re comfortable with the group and the game. As long as everyone helps them out, though, there’s no wrong approach here — unless intimate knowledge of the setting is a requirement for your players.
When I restarted gaming last year, I switched from model #2 to model #1 in order to gain some independence from good friends who make my life as a GM miserable. One loves rules and books, the other doesn’t. One loves intrigue, the loves dungeon crawls. It was hard to keep up games and emotionally taxing. Now I run three groups, people sign up as they want, one with a dungeon crawl, one with more intrigue, and a crazy Zorcerer of Zo game. Excellent! More game for my buck…