(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.

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.

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

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?

A group that would like to be a stable one has ended up being a fluxy one.

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.

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.

Okay, to be more precise — my tabletop group is definitely of the stable variety, while my online group is certainly given to variation.

As described above, I believe that it has to do with both the bonds of friendship and scarcity. At my favorite online community, there are always plenty of players available, so as a GM I can feel pretty assured that no matter what I want to run, I’ll be able to work with a flexible pool of eager applicants. Flux and selectivity are ready luxuries.

On the other hand, finding face-to-face players in my area is a bit trickier, so it’s simply easier to stick with the people I already know and deepen those friendships.