After Action Report - Night of the Rolling Dice 3

We ran another of our open table events recently and got a bunch of folk in for it. We use Meetup as the 'on-ramp' and can reliably fill a 50 place event with a waitlist.

One key thing is venue - we found a place with a large back room that is happy to give it to us of a Saturday night with enough warning and without a deposit. At this point we are in virtuous circle territory - the venue is happy we'll fill the venue, so they're happy to give us the space to fill. The first event to prove this is the trick.

DMs are the other limiting factor - scrounge up enough DMs to run the tables you want plus a spare or two - book them in well ahead of time and then make their life as easy as possible - they should turn up ready to run something, you feed them players.

The other key thing is advance planning - get your venue booking in early, and put up the event place holder on Meetup to get that trickle of people started.

We get ~ 15% fade out of people before the event - plans change and confirms turn to no's - but we have a big enough waitlist that they fill automatically. We expect no-show on the night but that should be manageable by running tables with four in place of five players.

I crunched the numbers for the two Saturday night events - looked at genuine no-shows vs late 'not goings' and it comes out at ~24% - 50 folk said they would come, bringing ~10 guests, and we actually had ~ 45 bums on seats on the night. Overall this is decent for a no depost, no committment event but there is room to optimise. There are arguments for both requiring folk to be more pro-active in signing up on a forum thread vs keeping things casual and going for airline style over-booking. We might just tell the wait-lists in future that going by past numbers, there should be room for all of them but we just cannot guarantee it until people no show as we expect them to.

Tables run included a Lord of the Rings style, a World of Warcraft quest, the Delian Tomb, the Tarrasque task of Maureen Trask, Death House, a Spelljammer adventure, a police-soap-meets-Norse game, a classic mine delve, and two more roleplay focussed games. We managed to run all but the Tarrasque task - nine of ten possible tables with some short player loads compared to the first time we ran all tables. Our non-running table was the only one geared for T2 and 4/6 signed-up T2 folk no-showed. I think in future we say it is a T1 event only to allow transferability between tables with all the new folk.

This break down is 'people who said what level their character would be' (T1 / T2+), people who did not respond to the question (Blank) and people who explicitly stated they were first timers (beginners). Folk are getting better at giving us some info but rgar is mainly to confirm these are first timers coming along.

For this most recent one, I did the same as last time and ran episode 2 of Spelljammer Academy, stripped of the magical simulator elements and just turned into a straight up salvage voyage. It worked pretty well, new comers got it, jumped into the space-swashbuckling elements of it.

Barring a few hiccups it all ran smoothly and those hiccups were on the organisational side, pretty sure the attendees just saw the swan sailing serenely along so good enough. We will likely to this again though I will be handing it off to someone else.