I'm looking for information about the Vancouver, BC Pathfinder society, or Pathfinder players in the area. Far as I've been able to find, nobody is running anything at the moment except for private games.
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I'm looking for information about the Vancouver, BC Pathfinder society, or Pathfinder players in the area. Far as I've been able to find, nobody is running anything at the moment except for private games.
Yeah I'm in Courtenay on Van Isle and found the same thing. I am in the process of switching my PFadventure path group into a PFS group since we often have people porting in and out due to shift work situations. Regardless, I would ask your games shop if you could post a gamer request and see what happens.. Yes I know this almost guarantees you will GM but you can always (and quite easily with PFS) share the duties. Maybe even talk the games store into having a PFS table day that way a casual player could come and see, try it out and discover the greatness of Pathfinder, I know there is a Con in Vancouver but last i knew there were no Pathfinder tables there in the past... Maybe something that could be easily changed.
Good luck.
Venture-Lieutenant, Canada—Manitoba
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I'm looking for information about the Vancouver, BC Pathfinder society, or Pathfinder players in the area. Far as I've been able to find, nobody is running anything at the moment except for private games.Yeah I'm in Courtenay on Van Isle and found the same thing. I am in the process of switching my PFadventure path group into a PFS group since we often have people porting in and out due to shift work situations. Regardless, I would ask your games shop if you could post a gamer request and see what happens.. Yes I know this almost guarantees you will GM but you can always (and quite easily with PFS) share the duties. Maybe even talk the games store into having a PFS table day that way a casual player could come and see, try it out and discover the greatness of Pathfinder, I know there is a Con in Vancouver but last i knew there were no Pathfinder tables there in the past... Maybe something that could be easily changed.
Good luck.
I'm in Winnipeg, but I had the same issue until I just decided I'd start running PFS at the local store. 6 months in I have 11 regulars and a handful of itinerants, and we've literally outgrown the space the store has so that one group is meeting at a guy's home. I hope to run more games at the store once they're done their renovations, but finding GMs is the hard part. Best way to find them is to make them yourself - start running a regular PFS game, identify the players who have GM'd before or who have the right stuff, and talk them into running a second table or every so often so you can play.
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I was talking about this with Azmyth just last night -- as the issue is very similar in Toronto.
Now look, Toronto is not a small city. Even by American standards, Toronto is a VERY BIG city, with all kinds of gaming stores that have space for organized play.
But even still, PFS is not really on the radar at those stores.
Interestingly, it's not as if organized play for D&D is the only game in town. Frankly, Living RPGA games and D&D Encounters are almost impossible to find in Toronto as well. There have been attempts to offer a few sessions for 4E at 401 Games and The Duelling Grounds. But the fact is, these are poorly attended and very frequently cancelled. D&D Encounters ended abruptly after there was nobody to run it and nobody interested in attending, either.
Why this is so is not exactly clear, but there are two primary reasons I think that organized play of RPGs of any kind does not have much traction in Canada.
1) The RPGA did not make significant investments in Canada: The tradition of organized play and living campaigns that Erik Mona was involved with while at WotC -- and that Paizo is leveraging now with PFS -- just doesn't have significant roots in Canada. For example, while I am sure that it has happened, I cannot ever recall being at an RPGA sanctioned event at a local convention in Canada.
Membership levels in the RPGA in Canada were also distorted by automatic enrollment of Canadians in the RPGA when thay attended Gencon. That created a statistical false impression of a grass-roots level of participation in the RPGA by Canadians when, in fact, it never existed on the ground.
When the tradition isn't there -- it's doubly hard to create it. In brief e-mail discussions I've had with people at Paizo, to be blunt? They don't get this. They are Americans, their life experience in the hobby are formed in America and their supposition of what "local organizers" are capable of doing without more direct support is shaped and formed by their own experiences which were formed in that American context.
In Canada, it's not just about organizing PFS. It's about selling the entire idea of organized play to the players themselves. We don't have much familiarity or traditions of playing RPGs in the store to the same extent that gamers in the USA have. So the task for Hyrum and Mark isn't just about organizing PFS -- it's about establishing an interest in ANY form of organized play when it comes to RPGs.
We've had it with CCGs (because Wizards under Lisa Stevens spent the money and time to establish it). We've seen it with miniatures (because Games Workshop spent a lot of time and money on establishing that tradition, too). But we haven't seen it - EVER - with RPGs. You can't just wave a magic wand and expect these things to sprout like Topsy. It doesn't work that way.
And they don't get that. I don't know how to put it any more clearly than that. But I will say it again in case, for some reason, they missed it: LOCAL ORGANIZERS ALONE CANNOT DO THIS FOR YOU IN CANADA. There isn't a tradition of this form of play in Canada. To establish that tradition requires direct participation of Paizo's staff at a marketing level not only with store owners, but also to fans of the game itself. It's MORE WORK and MORE MONEY than it is to achieve these same goals in Canada than it is in the USA because the gaming culture north of the border is different because of the non-investment in organized play by TSR/WotC within Canada in past decades.
2) RPGs in Schools: One of the reasons it is different in Canada is because the knee-twitching backlash that happened south of the border in past decades which prevented RPG gaming in public schools never happened north of the border. To summarize this cultural difference in a nutshell: 35% of Americans self-identify as "conservative or evangelical Christians" while only 7% of Canadians do. Moreover, a large portion of those 7% are in rural areas. Accordingly, what can be a political earthquake in the USA has no political consequences at all north of the border.
This means that where there was great hoopla and a banning of gaming in public schools in many areas of the USA, this never happened in Canada. So RPGs and play space has always been present in our public schools -- and that venue carried over into our university student union buildings without skipping a beat. In the 80s and 90s atleast, we never bothered to game in stores because we never had to.
Gamers have met in schools, post-secondary institutions and work of coure, but only infrequently at stores as part of organized play of RPGs.
To change this and establish a new paradigm takes time and effort which is beyond that currently expected by Paizo.
Paizo has to modify its expectations with resepct to Canada and re-assess the nature of organized play north of the border in a fundamental way. Until they do that? We'll see more of the same.
Which is to say: very little organized play of RPGs of any kind, anywhere, at all within Canada.
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Interesting point, Steel. Although a native Canadian, I lived in the US for a few years (shout out to my peeps around Fitchburg, Mass!), and you're right, both the "player culture" and the "store culture" is completely different there. Many stores have play spaces, but they're generally small, and thus unable to physically handle the "just add another table!" fix to replay. Or, they are geared towards card tournaments (everyone in one big room) which really don't work for RPGs. And they close at 9PM. It's not just a player culture, it's the store culture that isn't as supportive to organized play in Canada. As you point it, it's because the stores have never been needed as play locations.
However, there *is* a HUGE interest in Pathfinder in Canada from what I've seen. Frankly, I got most of my PFS players by posting a note saying I was running a Pathfinder campaign - there are not many GMs out there accepting new players. When they got to the table and saw it was organized play, they said, "OK, whatever I have to do to play Pathfinder." Now granted, some people rankle at the organized play quirks like treasure division, but only a few have left, and we've now outgrown the physical size of the store we started at. To me, this means there's a huge opportunity for PFS growth in Canada.
I'm not sure the culture *can't* be changed - in many ways organized play is new to Canada, and is appearing *after* the various online gaming experiences most people are familiar with. It's a huge opportunity to use PFS to introduce Pathfinder to larger audiences, and at the same time promote organized play in Canada.
I hope to be running PFS games at my first con ever this May (KeyCon 21), which will increase visibility as well. (See my about-to-be-started thread, "Help, I'm running PFS at a convention - what do I do?")
Not sure what else Paizo could realistically do to help, other than provide rewards to encourage stores to host PFS events, but that's probably not feasible. It really is a store and player mindset.
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Not sure what else Paizo could realistically do to help, other than provide rewards to encourage stores to host PFS events, but that's probably not feasible. It really is a store and player mindset.
Well, on the subject of Pathfinder popularity in Canada. I'm sure it's present, but currently, the scuttlebutt seems to be that PF per capita sales in Canada are comparably much less than they are in the USA.
Why this is so is unclear to me.
As to what Paizo can do to facilitate organized play? I'm quite certain they can do a helluva lot to change it if they want to spend the money to do it. But... it's not a mountain to climb just because it is there. It needs to make sense for them. Sense, in this case, is spelled "cents". And a lot of them, too.
If the money is not there, then the reason to do it is not there either, imo.
What I am sure of is that the problem can't ever be addressed unless and until Paizo knows it's an issue. Canada is usually treated as part of the domestic market of the USA with few to ZERO allowances made for differences between the two markets.
In fairness? There usually are no real differences (excepting Quebec) and English Canada can safely be treated in most respects exactly like the domestic US market for marketing purposes.
The gotcha in that one is the word "usually". The flip-side of the word "usually" is the reverse meaning of "sometimes not". In this case, the "sometimes not" appears to have reared its ugly head.
What the best solution is? I don't know. But I do know this: it's extremely hard to address a problem that you don't even know exists.
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A lot of the difficulty in spreading an org play program in Canada is based on geography and population density.
The lack of a major games convention also hurts. Most conventions are small regional affairs, or conglomerates like Fan Expo where gaming is a small side venue. If there were something the size of Origins, or even U-Con, where a couple of hundred players are introduced to Pathfinder, it would make a major difference.
There are pockets of frequent PFS play all over the place. I was surprised at some of the emails I got within the first few days of becoming a co-ordinator.
Bottom line, like many other things in Canada, PFSOP (and Pathfinder in general) can only be increased in regions, by a driving force in that region.
I was at my FLGS tonight, where they have a visible display rack of all of the Paizo/Gamemastery products that they can stock, playing Witchwar Legacy. Last night was weekly Society play, tomorrow is a one-off Society night, Sunday is an AP.
A customer came in looking for a 4E PHB, and had to go looking thru the bookshelf at the back, and ended up being told that it was a special order.
So sales/popularity of Pathfinder are still a regional thing, but there are definitely spikes.
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Quite interesting where this post is going so a few thoughts.
A) I never played DnD in a school setting and if I had it probably would have been bad for me it had and still has a very " your a geek and will forever live in your moms basement whilst worshiping the devil connotations." While possibly allowed in schools I have never seen it done in Highschool or University.
B) Most stores that I have seen and frequented have actually been multi-dimensional. Meaning they are not simply games stores, often used book stores, record stores, comic book and collectibles shops. Furthermore, save for one shop in Langley (BC, Canada people not the one in the US) none of them had space for customers to play in store.
C) I have never been to a gaming convention although I do believe there is (or has been) one in Vancouver, although it is mainly a comic book con from what I understand but did offer some games tables, none of which (from my recollection, I did not attend but simply looked through guest speakers activities ext before deciding not to attend) were Pathfinder, although I believe there were 3.5 DnD tables.
What am I saying. I agree there is little culture of open and organized gameplay. Gamers tend to post notes like "new/old player looking for group (DnD Pathfinder or otherwise please call" at their 'games shop' and hope someone somewhere will see it.
I am currently a teacher and have yet to see anyone play in a school or start a club. Furthermore it appears that the computer has taken over the fantasy setting games in canada (at least for youth) and many of us old guys still had A-DnD stuff until recently and half the people I know still cling to it and will not change/buy new games systems.
I really like what pathfinder has done and will try Org Play with my home group but any hope for regular or irregular groups of over ten people gaming in a room together playing organized games in this region... unlikely.
Cheers all
At least are Beer doesn't taste like @*%&...
Ahh
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I'm looking for information about the Vancouver, BC Pathfinder society, or Pathfinder players in the area. Far as I've been able to find, nobody is running anything at the moment except for private games.
I'm looking to start running PFS games locally in Vancouver. I did for about a year when PFS first started, but had very little success running at game stores and game days. Greater Vancouver is a strange gamer town - I bet you we have more game stores per person than anywhere else in North America, but we have never had success at organizing large game events. There were Con's 10-20 years back that had 300-400 people, but they were rare beasts. We have a large gamer base, but they tend be a lot of CCG gamers, playing in the shops and the RPGer's are all at home.
I know you've been mustering a game in town, so that gives me some hope that it might catch on. We had a huge Living Greyhawk base in Vancouver, but once that ended, people withdrew to home games or hopped to 4ed and LFR, although most of those folks said they would never do that! :)
So TheeGravedigger, maybe in the end, we can get a little local action going. Once there are some players a few GM's monthly or bi-weekly game days can start happening. Already I have had two players from when I tried originally message me about playing!
There is the Trumpeter's Salute Con happening first weekend in April (at Bonsor by Metrotown) which is a wargaming Con, but they usually have a two or three RPG tables. I'm going to attend and run PFS for must blocks and see if I get some traction.
In the meantime I'll be looking for a game space (in store or maybe a common room) to run a couple of blocks each month.
--michael
Steel_wind, I'm very sorry for poking you this way, but I'm despaired. You haven't answered my mails and the only thing I need is for you to tell me to piss off. If you ever got any of my mails, I'm in need to go to Havana and it's an expensive travel so I saved some money for the travel by the arrival of the loot. But now I thing that is never going to happen, so all I need is a confirmation. Man, is cool. We aren't worse than before, and little by little I'm printing parts of the main core book and the adventure path translated by us. So, once again, the beast is dying, all it needs is a coup-de-grace. Once again, sorry.
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Steel_wind, I'm very sorry for poking you this way, but I'm despaired. You haven't answered my mails and the only thing I need is for you to tell me to piss off. If you ever got any of my mails, I'm in need to go to Havana and it's an expensive travel so I saved some money for the travel by the arrival of the loot. But now I thing that is never going to happen, so all I need is a confirmation. Man, is cool. We aren't worse than before, and little by little I'm printing parts of the main core book and the adventure path translated by us. So, once again, the beast is dying, all it needs is a coup-de-grace. Once again, sorry.
I have answered your mail. Send to me privately again please and I will try again.
Better still, you might register at ENWorld.org as well. Unlike this message board, ENWorld has a private message system. Then we won't have to worry about where the mail is going. It will be waiting for you on the board itself.