So we got this inquiry in our inbox, and thought that you would be able to offer some suggestions. How would you approach this real-world challenge?
I have a bizarre Tues-Sat 3pm-midnight work schedule, so pretty much I’m limited to running games on Sundays or Monday evenings unless people all start suddenly wanting to game at 1am. We recently moved from Monday evening to Sundays, but about a third of my players have various amounts of trouble with Sunday with Monday having similar problems for some of the “Sundays good” players.
Since both groups are a little smaller than I’d like for running a game, and trying to scrounge up more players has proved to be difficult lately, I can’t see the upcoming holidays helping much. My local gamestore has been posting to facebook & such about wanting to find someone to run pathfinder games at the store and every time I’ve been over there to ask/check, they have not had the dresden books!
To solve the smaller than desired group problems I’m thinking about going in there to talk with them on Monday to see if they will give me the empty Monday evening slot of their calendar & a bump on their website/facebook page if I run it there. I haven’t really lived in the area long and don’t know them much though. Do you guys have any tips for me in selling them on my Dresden Mondays idea? (Currently they have no RPG games scheduled for a few months & are down to Heroclix on Sun with Friday/Sat split between cardgames like Magic and Yugioh, so my Monday day off works out nicely with their calendar.)
So that’s the situation. If it was you and this was a new-to-you local store, how would you approach it all?
At the FLGS I work for we’re more than happy to host all sorts of games and announce them on the store website and facebook page. I would just suggest going in and asking to speak with the person in charge of scheduling the game room and ask them about it. They might have the stipulation that the game might need to remain “open” to new players, but I don’t think that will be an issue.
I think it also might be good to start out with some one shot approaches, stuff so folks can figure out if they want to commit, etc. For that we’ve put out those handy one-shot free adventures…
If they need a fiscal reason to open a table for you. Suggest an increase in book sales. I ran an open SOTC game on Concord Ca. for over a year. The one consistent advantage for the store was that almost every new player went and bought a copy after they had seen what I was doing with it. Many of these people played in only one session before leaving to return to their previous group. I’d speculate they took the book with them to show off.
When a new FLGS opened up in my hometown, I needed a place to run my 2e AD&D game (yeah, was a long time ago.) I walked in and told them that I would like to run a game on Saturday nights (prime time, baby!) in their back room where they had a table setup. I told them that I expected 6-8 players to come in weekly (in addition to me) and he immediately lit up! He was excited to have extra traffic walk through his door. If he hadn’t been so clued in to the financial upside of my using this room, I would have explained to him that the extra traffic would bring in players to buy books and such.
If your FLGS won’t let you run a game there because of feared “low turnout,” then they’re not all that friendly….
i have a nearly identical schedule (Wed-Sat), but a unique problem. my group is out-of-state, so i use an online method. we use Ventrilo chat for voice, and a free virtual table for an infinite whiteboard surface with dice rolling algorithms (its called Gametable, or OSU gt 2.0). i have not gamed at a comic store in years, so i dont know what the turnout is these days. i do remember my old one being dead most of the week, except for some die-hard MTG players. best i can come up with is talk to your store peeps, post on their board, and see what turns up.
the comments helped out lot & made me realize a bunch of stuff that I hadn’t thought of before. The monday game has been growing nicely over the last few weeks, & they even managed to scrounge up some fudge dice allowing me to upgrade from d6′s with permanent marker to actual fudge dice
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