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So the rash of posts lately where people have said they are running out of scenarios has got me thinking. A lot of these posts have talked about how people coordinate their game days and I am interested in hearing how other people coordinate their games days and why it works for them. I am particularly interested in the contexts that have been discussed recently, with many people requesting more low level scenarios. I really haven't seen the same problems that others have, but I am wondering if it's because of how I coordinate my game days, the nature of the local gamer population or some other factor I haven't considered. I also want to encourage us to share how we coordinate our game days to pick each others' brains a bit...
I coordinate at a store in Poway, CA which is about 20 minutes north of San Diego proper. I usually run three game days a month there (one on the first Saturday of the month which I have turned over to someone else so I can start coordinating another store) and one every other Monday night. This usually works out to 3 game days or 4 game slots a month. Including the other local game store in San Diego proper, there are up to 6 games available per month.
So, a little about how I organize game days, since it seems from what I have seen others post, they try to coordinate scenarios based on who has played what. I have never really tried to do that. Well, except I sometimes schedule scenarios that I know people who routinely judge for me haven't played as a return favor for all their judging. In other words, I don't have lists of what people have played, I simply schedule scenarios based on what has or has not been played in the area recently and my judgement of how much overlap there is between the Poway store and other stores in the area (there's a little overlap with Temecula and a slightly larger one with the San Diego store). I always schedule a 1-5 (or 1-7) for newer players and then schedule a 5-9 or 7-11 for the more experienced players. Once in a while one of the high tier tables doesn't get enough players, but other times I get surprised by having two tables of the high tier game seated.
The advantage of this method is that I don't have to keep track of who has played what scenarios. It also means I always have scenarios available for new players because I run a 1-5 (or 1-7) in every slot. There are always higher level games for people to play once they reach level 5, making it less likely that they will run out of low level scenarios as quickly. Usually the minimum number of tables I get during a single slot is 3, so this method works well for me. This works really well in an area where I get a constant influx of new players as well as people coming and going as their schedules permit.
One of the downsides to this is that sometimes new players don't get to play with older players until they hit level 5-7. However, this happens less often than you might think as it seems like there's always that one scenario that an older player missed and so sits down with the newer players... Sometimes players look at the schedule and realize they can't play anything. Sometimes that means they step up and judge, and sometimes that means they do something else that day. But, as far as I am concerned, that's OK, you can't please everyone all the time, so I do my best to please as many as possible.
So, I am curious. How do you coordinate your game days? What's the same? What's different? What can I blatantly steal to make my game days better?
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Hi Katie! *waves*
I would like to state, that up here, we're a weekly Society. So when we organize up in Solano/Yolo (SoYo), we take three major things into account:
1) Reporting Results--Since we run games almost every day of the week between our scheduled games and our impromptu department, our reporting results definitely help in planning for our games . If we see that a lot of players are playing a certain collection of adventures, then we will avoid putting them on our regular rotation for at least a few months as we are always influx of new players.
2) Area Requests-- I also take requests from our area, as well as our area coordinators concerning things they would like to see played. Some requests work, and some things do not. But I don't discourage group input. At this point, since I have multiple groups going at once, my group organizers, send me a tentative schedule to which we work with as an organization, I then finalize all the schedules for the groups at once, so that everyone knows what is going on at each location at any one time.
3) Current Season Play—A big thing for me and my area, is that they are all big fans of the current Season 4 Metaplot, but our main group in Vacaville is ahead in the story line while our newest location in Davis is just now getting into the plot. So it’s been interesting to intertwine them and make sure that players who have already played get something for them, as well as get our new players into the storyline as well. The best part is that everyone will start Season 5 together so it will be a definite plus.
Concerning the level progression issue, we have a thing were we will *intentionally* run a low-tier or high tier night no more than once or twice a quarter. This is to allow the new players a chance to play with the veterans, and those who have multiple characters in the lower tiers, can work on those and give their high tier PC’s a break. And it works in reverse. We've only had a few issues with this, but most of the time, we will intentionally do it in advance and so those players who have issues will either take the night off, or will step up and GM.
Now granted, if you are a monthly or bi-monthly game day group, this may not work for you, but for our weekly society groups, I hope some of my tips help. Thanks for reading!
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When I was running in SD proper, I was having trouble keeping track of what was going on at Katie's game day and all the others, so I wound up making a spreadsheet to track when each scenario had most recently been played. Then, any time I was picking a schedule, I'd just sort the list by date and pick the oldest based on tiers (usually I was running two low-tier tables).
The spreadsheet's still floating around somewhere, although I don't know if it's up to date since my game day went under. It didn't require a lot of upkeep--usually just a few minutes a month, once the other game days posted their schedules--and it was really handy; I'd recommend that for anyone who wants to keep up a good rotation.
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We have a weekly PFS game night here on the northside of Chicago that has anywhere from 3-6 tables on a given night. We usually run low-tier (1-5), mid-tier (3-7/5-9) & a high-tier (7-11) games, with the lower tiers having the most players.
Our ad-hoc process is: right before the next month's schedule is made, players can make requests to GM or play certain scenarios to the schedule-making VL. The VL takes the requests into consideration and balances those against the spreadsheet of what has been played at the store in the past six months as well as other game night needs.
When there is an open slot in the schedule that PFS is officially "off", like Memorial Day, someone else can step up and offer to coordinate. We just ran 6 tables of Thornkeep: Forgotten Laboratory this past Monday!
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I think most of the people who keep track of who has played what in their group have fairly small numbers of regular players.
Groups with a large base, such as Sammy's and mine with 50+ people who may come, generally simply offer multiple mods with sign up sheets so that people know if there is room for them or not. If they have already played something, then they can run it, and frequently this is what happens.
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I think most of the people who keep track of who has played what in their group have fairly small numbers of regular players.
Groups with a large base, such as Sammy's and mine with 50+ people who may come, generally simply offer multiple mods with sign up sheets so that people know if there is room for them or not. If they have already played something, then they can run it, and frequently this is what happens.
In bigger groups that is definitely a good way of keeping track.
For our area, one of the things we also do, is that we are able to keep better track through our many open connections. We utilize Meetup which holds onto records for up to 2 years and we can export it. Our Facebook also runs our Impromptu department games, but they only hold it for a week, so we require our GM's to report those games immediately so that we don't loose who did what.
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St. Louis area various groups for the various locations. The most commonly used one is a facebook group run by our VC Brett. It currently has 109 members. As such we consistently run 5-6 tables every Tuesday and Wednesday and 15+ tables on our monthly all day game day. With such a large group it is difficult to schedule twice weekly games. So some players will request scenarios, while other GMs will either ask if their is interest in a scenario or contact our VC/VL for advice on what to run. Some games, run by our better GMs, are spur of the moment and thrown together at the event. This helps us fill tables and keep the group growing, since no one is turned away.
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I think most of the people who keep track of who has played what in their group have fairly small numbers of regular players.
Groups with a large base, such as Sammy's and mine with 50+ people who may come, generally simply offer multiple mods with sign up sheets so that people know if there is room for them or not. If they have already played something, then they can run it, and frequently this is what happens.
I apparently was under estimating the size of our group. We have over 400 people signed up to our games site, which of course contains some non-pfs players.
RPG Superstar 2015 Top 16
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The Rocky Mountain Lodge (Front Range of Colorado) uses a yahoo group to organize our game days. You can check it out at RM Pathfinder.
This group is used by everyone in the area. There are 5-6 stores in the Denver Metro Area that use it as well as about 4-5 stores in Colorado Springs and several stores in Northern Colorado.
The VO's and store coordinators post the games for their venues each month with a signup list for each game. Signups are handled by email or replies to the group. It works pretty well as you can see what games are available and signup for games at various locations without driving all over town (or the state!). Also we try to avoid running the same scenario a bunch of times really close together to cut down on competition between the venues.
It is pretty much impossible to keep track of who has played what since we currently have 339 members in the yahoo group.
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Venture-Captain, California—San Francisco Bay Area South & West
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I find it somewhat ridiculous just how much time is being spent copying data from one window on a computer screen (or from a piece of paper) to another window talking to a different database. Computers should be making things easier for us, not the other way round.
A few months ago I put together a spreadsheet to keep track of which scenarios I'd played with which character, and also which ones I'd GMed.
Then I expanded it to include the same information for my wife's characters, and to show what scenarios scheduled at local game stores or conventions we were considering playing.
I tried programming up the spreadsheet to make sure all chronicles were being assigned legally, to calculate the level of each character, and to keep track of chronicles being held until the character reached the appropriate level, but that was getting pretty messy. So I exported the data to a text file, and put together a C++ program to validate and process the data.
I'm now in the middle of changing this to be web-based, backed by a SQL database, and will then make it available to other local players. That necessitates a slight change in the approach - with only two players (and around 100 tables apiece) it's simple enough to recalculate everything on the fly, but that approach doesn't really scale well.
The next step will be to use the accumulated data of who has played what, and maybe even who has level-appropriate characters, to help in scheduling scenarios at our FLGS. At that point I'd like to expand to include something akin to a Warhorn front end, a way for an event coordinator to muster tables, and a back end that spits out pre-filled table signup sheets (and prepares post-game reporting data).
Beyond that I hope to grow to add other local game stores, and even to keep track of PFS events at our local conventions.
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Locally I believe they have always used Warhorn. Some people do not like it, but I have yet to see a similar system that does a comparable job.
When I first started playing (in August of last year), games seemed to be a bit more haphazard (play was occurring every weekend). Our VC, Callum then instituted a every 2 week policy (so we didnt run out of scenarios and so everyone managed to have a life outside of the cycle).
Of late , Callum has also brought in our Season 4 feel, where we just schedule season 4 scenarios. Having 3 venues is a help (all fairly close to each other).
One thing that isnt really done here is midweek games. Most of us are working a 9-5 job and Im sure some of us have a non pfs game to fit into that mix somewhere. One of the gms has recently started a Friday night game.
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It sounds like we have some very large groups for organization purposes but they are spread out over a much larger area than I thought. Our St. Louis group of 109 members is just to organize games at 1 LGS. Although there is still cross talk among the regional groups in Missouri, we have yet to try and combine organization and game promotion on a regional scale with the other groups.
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Our region uses both meetup and warhorn to organize our game days. All the local game days are posted on the meetup group with links to the proper warhorn site to sign up. It works well for us since people are able to find us on the meetup group and we can keep track of expected counts on the warhorn. Many a time I've had to schedule additional judges because of sign ups on the warhorn - but that tool makes it easier for me never to have to turn someone away because of lack of judges...
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It sounds like we have some very large groups for organization purposes but they are spread out over a much larger area than I thought. Our St. Louis group of 109 members is just to organize games at 1 LGS. Although there is still cross talk among the regional groups in Missouri, we have yet to try and combine organization and game promotion on a regional scale with the other groups.
The 400+ member I quoted was for one game day per week at one store. A couple of months ago a new game day started using the same site but there is a lot of overlap in the groups. There are 3 other game days within an hour of me.
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Our online games are scheduled via pfrpg.com.au, which includes an ideal scenario generator. As people mark off scenarios (and they often have to be pushed/reminded to update it, unfortunately), we can select a GM and whoever is likely/keen to play. It spits out scenarios and tiers that the players haven't played, that might be ideal for the GM to run.
The schedule is almost exactly like warhorn, though you need to be registered on the site before the game is scheduled, or manually invited after you register.