We had to do our first turn-aways from our regular Friday night sessions because we simply did not have the chairs in the venue, which sucks but is also kind of impressive. Membership of the Meetup group has been climbing steadily - we're still not seeing more than a tiny fraction of them but even that fraction has been enough to drive up our attendance - and in particular it is the problematic aspect of people not reading the instructions.
Our venue capacity is 25 and a bit - the bit being contingent on how busy the other people who use the space are. If they're not up to much then we can fit another table - if they are busy then we're 25 as a hard limit. We dinged 37 a week or so back - and then some extra folk turned up and we could not accommodate them.
We coordinate on our forum - attendees, players to DMs, etc - and people just hitting RSVP and rocking up from Meetup does not appear on that. Some folk are checking through, signing up and then pretty much realise that the Meetup is not where we really organise and just turn up on the forum in future which I guess is correct. I have scaled back our 'seats available' to zero on those Meetups for the future so they are literally placeholders there - only people who click through and figure out how to come to us should be turning up.
We kind of have the DMs to cater to these potential extra folk (though we need to work on our bench for the long term) but we do not have the seats and were lucky to find the space we've got access to. The current backbone group is going to stay where it is - first because it if ain't broke, don't fix it and second because a number of the organisers have shelled out for year memberships of the place so I cannot ask them to abandon that cash they have put up.
We know from the Nights of the Rolling Dice that we can pull in 50 players that we never otherwise see if we give them ~ a month notice. On the week-to-week cycle we run on the forum we're getting the usual 25 suspects. I do not know how to reality test the number we can consistently pull in on a weekly basis from the pool of players beyond the usual suspects. There are nearly 400 members on the Meetup - could we pull in another group of 25 weekly? Thats 5% - that seems like it might be doable.
Now we just need *another* venue. Two dozen folk is the kind of volume that bars will open backrooms for - so I guess the next test would be ... maybe fortnightly 25 seat sessions for a period to see if we get regulars? The key problem is where works on a Friday night - finding space for a table can be done in any one of many bars but space for multiple tables rapidly gets problematic.
We were able to run for a good long while playing in a bar, I guess we can try to see if we can sustain the numbers to justify booking an event room. Maybe once this next Night of the Rolling Dice is over I will try setting up smaller, shorter cycle events - a set of three perhaps? - and take a view from there. There is a nice little Irish bar out my side of town that will open their event space for a booking of 24 - can we do that *over and above* the usual suspects of RPGVienna? Unknown - I guess we have to test it.
The core goal here is to eliminate 'seats' as a limiter on people getting gaming in. Sure the FOMO of the restricted venue size is probably lighting a fire under people but it looks like we're having to turn a bunch of folk away too which is not great. Hopefully less frequent but still regular events at another location will be enough of a stop-gap.
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