Notes on D&D Meetup Group Experiment

Meetup jacked up its subscription costs (174%!) so I cancelled my own sub, our game group as a whole sees no value in paying for one and the thing apparently drifted from my hands this past midnight. This seems like a good point to do a post-mortem - for all that it may stagger on another month as it auto-pings all the members looking for someone else willing to stump up to take the group over.

The group was conceived in a moment of seeking to get the word out and test whether we could pull of a significant expansion, sufficient to justify the running costs of the formal club structure here in Austria - bank accounts, chairfolk, book-keeping, all that jazz. We figured we needed to bump our regular attendees from ~25 to ~120 to bear the kinds of costs associated with having our own venue and all that. At that point we had not done anything, just had our forum and welcomed anyone who found us. This was an experiment in getting the word out to see what might happen.

We were blessed with two tailwinds, one foreseen, one not - the D&D movie and Baldurs Gate 3. We figured there would be a bunch of folk looking to try D&D following those so we initially set up the 'Night of the Rolling Dice' for after the movie - a ten table session for beginners - and created the meetup group. As you can see below, numbers went up like a rocket. We got 60 sign-ups, 45 of whom showed up, a good time was had. Then we did it twice more - once to capitalise on Baldurs Gate 3 and a last the following February to see if we had the process down to a low-friction playbook.
Each time we launched and event, typically ~ 60 days beforehand, we got a kick of new members into the Meetup group.

The folk who came to the Nights of the Rolling Dice occassionally showed up at our regular nights - 2-3 out of each batch of 45. Our open nights were what we were really trying to grow, getting those weekly Friday night open table games up. After the second one we started to slam the capacity of our venue and fished around a bit for another site. With two sites we could continue to grow and from there ramped up to... almost double our size. Almost.

I took over stewardship of the meetup group after the second event and started to block in our regular Friday night sessions into the Meetup group so people could see there would be a game a few weeks out rather than just ~4 days beforehand. We know people came in through these Meetups because we had regular deconfliction problems between both folk who signed up on the Meetup and no-showed and folk who rocked up to the events without mentioning on the sign-up thread that they were coming. Again, a fair few people said they found us through Meetup but only a handful on any given week.

Even once we restricted attendance, the 'out weeks' were not filling up with lots of folk - no indication that telegraphing that these were regular games that happened every Friday was making any difference to folk beyond an isolated case or two.

Overall the Meetup group probably funneled folk towards us but when I queried the webmaster of our forum, the actual core organising venue for our group, they said that it was mere tens of click-throughs from Meetup versus high hundreds coming off Google.

So all told, the group seemed to attract numbers and where we had big events we could fill them - neither of these converted into people turning up regularly for whatever reasons. Engagement was practically nil from folk who signed up to any mail shots or via the on-site tools beyond a few isolated requests for what was needed for a first timer.

You can probably barely see at the tail end of the top graph, the curve flattens out. This matches to when I stopped booking in events on the calendar, about a month ago when I decided to cancel the sub - having events on the calendar does bring people into the group, but having them in the group does not seem to do much for you.

All told, I am sure we got a few people into our group through Meetup because I have heard people say it - all of the metrics otherwise say it was a waste of time and certainly not worth ponying up extra cash. When I pulled the plug on it, the immediate response from Meetup was 'we have made it easier to charge your members dues!' which is just mean passing the corporate screw-over down the line. The main thing that changed that I can see between this year and last is they slapped on a bunch of AI tools for auto-generating events which is a completely unhelpful - you don't need randomly generated events, you need to just get the details right and up there. That and getting taken over by 'Bending Spoons' who also took over Evernote and also jacked up the prices there by a giant amount.

So, for us, nothing useful was added to a service that was not core to our operations, I had taken a punt laying down a subscription in the first place to see if it unlocked some large untapped pool of potential players - so all the above and near double the price was not worth it. We already have our venue charge, small and reasonable. The idea of layering on charges to pay off some corporations random price hikes? Not happening, not rewarding corporate bad behaviour like that.

All told, we tested the potential for fast growth and managed to get to double on a good day - I think proving up there was some growth potential for us but not massive x6 amounts. I am intrigued as to whether we will continue to get new folk wandering in once the Meetup evaporates; I reckon yes but let us see.

Growing your game group (5yr Blog-iversary)

To mark the 5th anniversary of spinning up this blog I find the theme this past year has been 'getting more people gaming' - from running events to helping bring more people into our local game group to trying to connect up disparate D&D folk - nothing has been particularly innovative or high style just the shovel-work of running open tables and pointing people at other people.

One thing I did find inspirational from the broader blogger community was Gorgon Bones best practices - Record your hobby experience, Introduce others to your hobby and Participate in a hobby community - having that list was a weirdly helpful acknowledgement that we got to get the basics right - find the people, figure out when they can be at tables, find places with tables - before we can start doing the rest of it.

The things I've put my shoulder to over the year has been
- maintained the Meetup 'funnel' to bring people to our local gaming groups forum
- simplifying the big beginner events (Night of the Rolling Dice) so they demand less of us to run them
- helping expand to a second location for the regular Friday nights - mostly by just being one of the regular DMs there
- linking up a whole new bunch of local D&D folk with the DM supergroup - they've done some stuff already while my calendars been a shambles

The online stuff - Meetup, the RPGVienna forum, the discords - have got their memes and minor connections but there are a lot of folk who chirp up when booking their place at one of the open table sessions that we never hear from otherwise. I read this as the majority view the online spaces as somewhere face-to-face gaming is coordinated.

Online is all well and good for what it is, but for folk who want to go offline - who are sometimes folk with thriving online gaming - it is hard to do that from a cold start so giving them a helping hand is worthwhile. My own online gaming got nuked by the smallest householders shifting sleeping patterns - last year I was able to near guarantee they would be asleep by a time - enough that I ran the whole Southern Reaches campaign on weekdays after bedtime. This year - no such luck, even getting the last few episodes of Light of Xaryxis done is proving tricky.

Instead I've put the bits and pieces of time I have in evenings towards helping to try coordinate face to face gaming over weekend slots, both for myself and others.

Having that big online footprint is bringing folk in, both regular gamers and more unusual things like someone who's turned up to do an ethnographic study for their course. We have enough presence that we appear when you search so good enough. Certainly at this point, when I've been ill things have trundled merrily along without me doing anything which is good.

d6 Ways to funnel folk to your game group
1. Make sure something pops up when someone googles 'D&D' and your locality
2. Run open tables where people with no experience can rock up and game for the first time
3. Be flexible as DM's so you can say yes to whoever wants to join you; one of the people attending having a T1 game in their back pocket in case folk turn up but also being happy to play too
4. Figure out where is good to play - and when you start to hit the limits on a venue, be prepared to run multiple locations - so when they show up you can seat them
5. Tell your Friendly Local Games Store your group exists and is open to new folk - they'll cheerfully tell anyone who comes in shopping for the books
6. Trial periods on 'connector' social networks like Meetup, Couchsurfing, Internations, even Facebook can be low-effort ways to get the word out to people who are not actively looking for you (those people found you from point 1.

I figure there are lots of better game designers and OSR theoreticians out there, if I can road test and document what helps with getting those tables clattering with dice, that is probably a worthy use of this place - til the 6th anniversary at least.

Lessons Learned from large beginners D&D events.

Compiling our lessons learned from our Night of the Rolling Dice beginners intro D&D event as per Gorgon Bones best practices - though this allows me to hit the trifecta of Record your hobby experience, Introduce others to your hobby and Participate in a hobby community. A key focus of this one was to distill it down to something which is as low-touch as possible - we launch it ~ 2 months out, get a roster of DMs then do nothing until a week beforehand. Everyone is busy, this is your 'plug-and-play' event template.

Write up of the actual night is here: 60 sign ups, 45 attendees, 9/10 tables ran, players seemed to go home happy, feedback on the Meetup is 4.8/5.

What worked well

- Repeatable template - we have a playbook now for how the thing runs and can base decisions on learned experience rather than best guesses.

- Booking well ahead of time (30-50 days) gives plenty of time for the event to percolate in Meetups and other calendars and for people to find their way to us. For both night-time events we hit capacity with a week to go. It does mean re-confirming with your DMs and venue that they have not forgotten but far better that then scrounging for either on short notice

- Venue interaction - we tightened up orders - only drinks before you go to table, food orders get your name on it - which practically eliminated unclaimed (and unpaid) orders at the end of the night. This got arranged by email with the venue beforehand - their standard practice is bringing things to tables which had issues when people were moving around.

- Nudging those signed up to confirm - giving folk a reminder to drop off the list if they cannot go a few days out followed by a 'check if you are up off the waitlist' mail to the same folk the day before served to get over a dozen people to flag they weren't coming and pull a bunch of the waitlist up

- Dice sales - people can borrow dice on deposit for the evening - everyone wants to take them home which generates a few quid to pay off our minimal costs

- Raffle - we did not lean hard on our FLGS this time around so I scrounged my shelves for duplicates and we cooked up another few prizes just to have a few bits for a small one - still worked well.

- Masking tape name tags - a roll of masking tape and a black marker gives good-enough name tags at minimal cost, minimal waste afterwards

- Pre-gen characters - with lots of folk (>60%) saying they were new and needed characters, previous ideas of helping people create their character are not feasible. We created a block of pre-gens and had them ready to hand out. I used Fast Character for mine, it was good enough for the night.

- Safety brief / safety tools - flagged as a thing people appreciated - we have x-cards on the tables and give a 'play nice' intro speech - you can read it all here - but feedback from even my table was immediate and positive so good to know people find it helpful.

What to do differently

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.

Open Table Procedures - Euro Edition

tl;dr: tempo of booking, prepping and running open table games

Take on Rules wrote My Procedure for Facilitating Open Table Gaming and cast a light on a very different gaming set-up to my own so I thought I would document how things are running here in Vienna.

As per Gorgon Bones best practices - though this allows me to hit the trifecta of Record your hobby experience, Introduce others to your hobby and Participate in a hobby community.

Sequence

Long-lead (long beforehand)
- program up the slots in the Meetup group with generic 'visit our forum' links
- pull down pre-gens from the Brancalonia site, print them
- block out Friday nights on my calendar
- put up a setting brief on the forum

D-5/7 - forum opens for the next session
- confirm venue - 99% of the time it is our usual, occassionally we skip to somewhere else. This usual is a club-house for wargamers/card gamers that we connected with last year after a few years of cafe gaming. It is a bit out of the way but cheap. Lots of big tables, a fair amount of seats
- watch for the next Friday thread to go up on the forum; jump on and say if I'm going and what I'll be running/playing. we fill quickly these days so getting in early is important
- usually I run, copy/paste my little Brancalonia pitch
- update the Meetup entry for this date with a link to the specific forum thread
- tweak post-session summary from last time to make a new entry on the campaign log

D-2/5 - prep the session
- of an evening I prep for the game - read the content, write my own timeline
- spot any recurring NPCs, factions or the like for Conservation of NPCs
- one of the forum organisers will tot up the attendees, list the DMs, the players who have expressed a preference for a DM and who is left
- check who I have at my table - any repeat players and any hooks to work in

D-1/Gameday
- pack my go-bag off my checklist
- leave work, big coffee in a thermos for at table, small coffee and muffin for on the way
- get to the venue, check my name off and pony up my €3, find a seat and drag it to the table
- help match open seats with stray players once I get there
- change into my Brancalonia t-shirt because I've got one

Catastrophic Success: Venue Capacity Management

tl;dr: at the limit of venue capacity, how to spin out another venue to avoid turning people away?

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.

Grow Your Own DMs

Travelling home for Christmas I read old notes and fished out a thoughts we had at a rare non-gaming gathering of our local games soc - one theme was we need to help people start DM'ing.

There is broader chatter about a DM crisis but for us specifically we have been seeing all these people turn up in the forums going ‘hey, I’d love to do more gaming’ and if we can do one or two things to show them “DMing is not that hard! just go for it!” then I think that will be great in the long run.

An open campaign call was 3x over subscribed, the DM did some test sessions to pick out the best fit players - still left a bunch of players who would have been on to play something without a DM. Similiarly we have often had the usual cohort of DM's at our regular Friday night open table games run something last minute when they came to game because we don’t have enough DMs.

We could live without more DMs, sure but but it would be great to sew the seeds of a new crop of DMs when we don’t need them so they are there when we want to step back, people move, get sick, whatever.

Thoughts we had to try and get people relaxed to take the first leap:
1. Create a list of available adventures we would recommend for one-shots
2. "Open Hand DM'in" where you talk through why you are doing as you play
3. "New DM support" where some old hands join a new DMs table explicitly to back them up
4. DM workshops - talking theory and lessons learned outside the games

For the first, there is allegedly a list of recommended adventurers league adventures somewhere on the forum and I am going to try and unearthing that old roster for newbies (or old guard) to know which are the ones worth running e.g. Wolves of Welton, Wild Sheep Chase, Pudding Faire.

"DM with Open Cards” table - where a DM plays a scenario while telling the players / potential new DMs, why certain stuff has been done and why. This has met great interest and as well as being done as dedicated sessions outside our usual gatherings, some folk are being a DM-intern sitting in beside the DM just to watch from behind the curtain for a session. We have had great response from different DM's among the group - ones who are NPC focussed, ones who are combat focussed - to the point that I can see some of us old hands taking up the opportunity to listen in on some of these ourselves.

"Declare a new DM table" - where people can ask for some veterans to join and support them running the first time. I will be doing one of these myself next sessions I go to - someone that has sat to a bunch of my tables and I was honestly surprised to hear had never DM'ed before so I am sure it will be a blast. This is pretty much just the starting-out version of what I would do myself in that I would look to seed a table with at least one friendly face if I'm setting off to do something new (location or open table wise).

DM’ing workshops to get more new DM’s started hitting topics like ‘combat made easy’ and ‘improv need not be intimidating’ - these being shorter times outside of the regular gaming meetups with a bit more prep and theory focus. Some folk wrote up a bunch of stuff on the forums a while back but nothing beats in person talks. I am going to do a session pitched as how I prep a written adventure for our Friday night games though really I am prepared for that to be a more general Q&A session.

If we can get even a half dozen folk to set up their DM screens as part of our regular cohort, that will be a great success. What we will do for chairs and finding space in our venues is a problem for another day.

Table Matching Survey Results

I ran a survey of our local game group to discover preferences and see what else people would like to be playing. From conversations at Night of the Rolling Dice I thought it would be a good idea to survey the group to ask what games people want to play to then try and match up tables. Partially inspired by the frequency of recent group matching posts here, I wanted to try and highlight preferred frequency (weekly, monthly, etc), preferred session length, online/in-person/both so folk could hopefully see that there were others interested in the same timeslots.

Our standard tempo is a Friday night session and a sometimes Saturday brunch session - my hypothesis going into this was these were driven purely by force of habit - those timings generally working and being 'good enough' we left them. I wanted to know if there could be other times that would suit people who could not make the Friday night slots and what those would be.

What stands out to me from the point of view of getting more tables going:
* We have people interested to play most weeknight evenings - plenty of room to fit in a new game.
* We have nine people interested to run a table - behold your player pool!
* 11 of us are happy to play online

People available per day - our regular slot is a Friday due to room availability but it looks like it would be even better for folk on a Saturday or Sunday.

Preferred frequency of play - most people are being covered by our weekly session but we have a fair few that once or twice a month suit better.

What comes after the Nights of the Rolling Dice?

I have ended up running a D&D Meetup group and have been trying to figure out what to do with it.

We ran two big events - Night of the Rolling Dice and Night of the Rolling Dice 2: This Time By Daylight - both 10 tables of DM + 5 using DM's from RPG Vienna. Packed out, 40-50 players turned up for each, with waitlists too. All good.

I feel people can be better served than by occassional big set piece gaming meetups. We have regular Friday night open tables (as discussed before) and I have been putting them up on the meetup with low response on the Meetup itself (2-3 folk, maybe, often none at all) but we do seem to get twos and threes rocking up at the door.

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.