A Time of Gaming Abundance

I find myself in an unfamiliar position - with access to a huge pool of players and I do not know what to do with them. I talked a little about this in Feast or Famine gaming - but that was about the opportunities in online gaming - now it appears the same points stand in person too.

We (RPGVienna) recently ran an event - Night of the Rolling Dice - a 'come along if you want to try D&D', thinking we might get maybe two dozen newbies and instead we had closer to a hundred come out of the woodwork; a small amount ~ 10% were old hands who were just finding our group but lots were newbies. Entire tables of 'this is my first time' folk - apparently from our post to r/wien.

My instincts, honed during the famine years of the 90s are 'grab them, don't let them go' - which I realise is no longer a necessary reaction but it still is mine.

From a selfish point of view, I can let these people drift off - I have enough to fill my tables, there will surely be more along when I need them, what is in it for me whether they get properly into the game or now. What I really *want* is for these folk to have the 'a-ha' click moment and to set their campaigns spinning. I guess from one angle this is the classic 'DM shortage' issue.

So what can one personally do about such a thing?

We have out open game nights, and people can come along to those - hopefully see a bunch of different player styles, a bunch of different DM styles, observe 'hang on, this is not rocket surgery' and just crack on with it. I guess the thing for me to do would be to go out and run some games and just help brute force this part of it.

Another thought would be to try and do something more informed - we created a meetup group for our 50 seat event and that group now has 125 164! people in it - we could try surveying them, see what they want to play - is it all D&D? Do they want to try other genres, other games?

My next thought is - beyond a vague 'something should be done' what specifically would I want to do? Not kick off some long haul campaign with no end in sight. Probably something more like classic drop in open table gaming, episodic, each week as it comes. In person is more forgiving of large tables so I could run that out a little.

I have an itch for 'running some big name campaigns' but on closer examination, I really don't want to do that. Casting an eye across my shelves it lights upon my Planescape books - I have my existing drop in Brancalonia for none-too-serious flailing around and Spelljammer for slightly more serious voyaging. Perhaps... oh, why not brush off and re-run the Splinters games? The Mechanus cog-crawl, the Beastlands hunt and the Acheron battle crawl are all more or less ready to go. Supplement those with some of the adventures from the various old Planescape books, throw in the Radiant Citadel adventures.

For now we are duplicating invites to our usual games to the meetup group and I guess I can just prep stuff and bring it to those sessions, that will be helpful enough until I can come up with a better idea.