We're one seat down...

[caramida]

...in my local gaming group. We meet Sundays. Below is the ad we're posting at local gaming stores. If you are interested, feel free to comment or follow instructions below. Even if you aren't interested, I'm interested to know what you think about our recruitment strategies, as evidenced by the ad below:

MATURE ROLEPLAYER WANTED
Five college-educated professionals, mid-20s-to-late-30s, w/backgrounds in humanities and non-gaming interests & commitments (i.e. lives), looking for 1 mature roleplayer to round out our weekly RPG group.

Current games include: Delta Green (modern Call of Cthulhu, run with GURPS), Earthdawn, L5R

We've also played: Ars Magica, GURPS Traveller, Pendragon, Star Wars (d6), TORG

Also interested in: Castle Falkenstein, Space 1889, 7th Sea

We do NOT play: D&D/d20, Palladium, World of Darkness, homebrews

We play Sundays, ~3-8PM, in SF or Oakland. We GM in rotation for ~2-3 months. Experience is not as important as attitude. We want people who:

• Can describe their character w/o referring to a statistic or goodie on their character sheet, but don't try to "be" their character.
• Learn & follow rules, w/o abusing them.
• Do not dress up and pretend they're vampires.
• Are looking for a creative outlet, but aren't "artistes."
• Enjoy politics, drama, literature, art, and history for their own sake.
• Don't take gaming (or themselves) too seriously, but aren't goofy.
• Will commit to regular attendance.

More info: http://home.covad.net/~spankyg/Gaming/MrGamesAd.html

Contact:

* screened comments will get you an email address or contact info *

We'll want to meet with you at least once in person before we invite you to play, to get to know you and make sure our styles are compatible. If you're the kind of person we want, you'll probably want the same.

Comments

[dicedork.livejournal.com]

Just so you know, and please don't take this negatively but more as reader response...I, personally, would *never* respond to this. It's way to exclusionary and has to many "don't do"'s on it. I'd picture you guys as a bunch of hard asses with only ONE right way of roleplaying. Plus it seems more like a job interview, and most people game to have fun. It's hard enough getting people to join a troupe from an add like this. (I've tried a few times when I first got to the area and didn't have friends.)

I appreciate your thoughtful response.

[caramida.livejournal.com]

Please understand, we ARE there to have fun. But you have enough experience gaming to know that there are lots of gamers out there whose gaming habits are inimical to just that. This ad has been crafted specifically to attempt to select for the sorts of people who have gotten frustrated with Power Gamers/Munchkins, People-Who-Think-If-You-Can't-Play-Sixteen-Hours-In-A-Sitting-You-Aren't-A-Real-Gamer, Artistes, kids, Hack-n-Slashers, Rules-Lawyers, and Drama-Kings/Queens.

At no point do we believe that there is 'only ONE right way of roleplaying'. Most definitely, we have gamed enough to know that there are MANY different right ways to do it, and we have found (sometimes the hard way) that some of those ways are basically incompatible with each other.

To that end, we seek to find gamers who understand this, and incidentally, are not offended that we should seek to maximize our own enjoyment of gaming in the small amount of time we have to play each week.

Yes, we specifically filter out a lot of people. This is intentional, because there are a lot of people (who are fine people) who just don?t match our gaming styles. Those who do, we must work harder to find, often because they themselves have gotten pickier due to their own frustrating experiences with incompatible gamers.

If you are gaming to get your +8 HackMaster sword, then you probably will have the most fun with other gamers of the same sort. In that case, you might not have a great time with our interaction-based, character- and story-driven role-playing games. If you read the description above and opt out as a result, you've saved yourself time and trouble as well as us. Life is to short to not have fun at your fun. What's the problem there?

[name-redacted.livejournal.com]

As the author of this ad, I'd just like to say that I agree with everything caramida has said. And I think it speaks to the fact that he and I have enjoyed gaming so long together that our philosophies on the subject match so neatly. I would rather that the group languish for months with an open seat (and it has) than spend even one session trapped in a game with someone I considered obnoxious.

It's not that we think there's "only ONE right way of roleplaying," but rather that we know that there are many ways of roleplaying (or rather of gaming, since some of those only loosely qualify as "roleplaying"), and that there are a bunch of them that we don't like, and if that's the kind of game someone is looking for, they'll be dissatisfied with our group, and we with them. So why not save us all a lot of grief?

You're absolutely right on one thing - I've described our selection process as the unholy love child of a job interview and a blind date. Even as discriminating as we've been, we've still made mistakes and let players in who ultimately failed to gel with the group. But mostly, I think our approach has paid off, and we have a hell of a lot of fun.

[tinellaq.livejournal.com]

Ya know....

I've been in the gaming group in question longer than most folks. (I'm 2nd-crustiest in terms of time played, and 3rd in terms of start date). And I play d20, and WoD, and have in the (distant) past been known to dress up and pretend to be a vampire. I don't have a background in the humanities, and I strongly resent the suggestion that I am not goofy.

So right now, the ad would exclude me. It might even have scared me off. (I joined on Brian's recommendation, not via an ad like this.)

So perhaps a reword is in order.

---

I think that it might be worthwhile to consider WHY you come down so hard on various games.

I'd claim that we're rejecting d20 and Palladium because we're rejecting RPGs that are overblown tactical combat games. I'd claim we're rejecting WoD because we reject melodrama and pointless pretension in our RPing. I'd claim that giving the latter clauses in our advertisement rather than the former would a) do a better job of communicating what we really want and b) scare off less people.

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Something else to consider: perhaps with the ad so strictly worded, we're scaring off solid people, and ending up with more respondents who are so desperate for a game they're willing to put up with or ignore the tone of the ad. And possibly the message too.