Not a proper / full response from me (afraid that will have to wait a few days), but I wanted to comment on a few things:
First up, thanks to everyone for their comments so far; it's great to see people being both candid with their views, and imaginative in suggestions for how to proceed. Already a lot of useful ideas to begin thinking about!
DM wrote:I thought the concept was more casual than the "it all falls apart if people dont turn up to every session"?
Fair challenge; it's always been the case that guests aren't expected to show up every week. The issue was that because our pool of active guests is really quite small, just having a half-dozen of the usual suspects stay away from one session effectively torpedoed it. For those of us hosting, making missions or paying for the server, that only has to happen 1-2 times per month and the picture starts to look a bit worrying.
DM wrote:Posting AARs, "having" to turn up to every session, etc feel all too much like work, and not enough like casual. ... its just all the other stuff that goes with it that sucks the fun out of it...
Also very fair; I'm sorry if I've been too heavy-handed about asking for people to post to the AAR threads. I've just been keen to try and demonstrate what the sessions are like and generate some excitement, with a view to motivating more guests to participate. To add some context, the forum has 40 members, but our regular guests number less than a quarter of that.
LiddleFeesh wrote:One thing we perhaps should consider is inviting more players to join. There are enough AA:2 players in TZW to make a viable squad and combined with a few from MARSOC and other similar squads, we might have enough critical mass to make regular (larger scale) gaming a reality.
Increasing the size of our guest pool is one very straightforward way of tackling the issue of playercounts, whilst retaining that casual nature which is at the heart of the folk concept, and is also clearely valued by many (see DM's earlier comments).
To date, folk has been invite-only on an
invidual basis; partially (and somewhat brutally) that's been about a level of quality control. However, it's also been about showing sensitivity to the fact that many communities/groups react very negatively to anything they regard as 'poaching players'. We can certainly revisit this approach: perhaps we feel that, in the case of a group like MARSOC, we have faith that anyone trusted to join them is someone we'd welcome at a folk session. That's losing a degree of control, but perhaps a trade-off worth making? Assuming we want to pursue that idea (on a group-by-group basis), there would be at least two other issues to address:
1. The political dimension: as much as I believe, on an individual level, players are independent adults with their own free will etc., once we start to explore any kind of bulk invitation process I think we'd be foolish not to do so in a constructive, collaborative manner (with the other group's leadership). Drama and subterfuge serves nobody.
2. The practical dimension: taking MARSOC as a very real example, its primary gaming night is now Sunday (so Tigershark, to run last weekend's session, had to make a deliberate choice to drop out of that). Realistically, we would need to think about re-scheduling the folk sessions to make any bulk invite meaningful.
I think Feesh's suggestion is defintely worth exploring, and would love to know what others think. However, that's by no means the only route to expanding the pool of guests. What are your thoughts?
)
