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At our PFS events we have a turnout of about 12-21 players. It is hard to plan how many GM's to have. Generally someone will step forward to run an extra table (new players are always welcome), but my OCD wants a method of being better prepared.
I was wondering what various groups do to address this issue - do you have a sign up sheet at your FLGS, or e-mail RSVP, or whatever.
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In Georgia, we use our own forum system to handle signups (scroll down to a specific lodge and click around). Each store/location has a store liaison that coordinates the games, finds GMs and reports the results. # of tables is usually dictated by size of venue, and usual player turnout. This way everyone knows ahead of time which scenarios are run, as well as for GMs to know which scenarios to prepare. 99.95% of the time no GM is running cold.
The other big site people use for signups is http://warhorn.net/. You make your event and have people sign up there. It quite popular for a lot of organizers of PFS events.
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Here in Chicago, we have a custom web site interface, too. For our weekly PFS night, we have a coordinator who picks 2 or 3 scenarios for the week and creates the event with a certain number of open seats, depending on how many tables we anticipate. We usually plan for 3 low level (1-5) tables and 2 higher level tables. As people sign up, we adjust the number of tables per scenario as needed.
And then we have walk ins who show up and screw up the whole system. But that usually just results in one extra low level table, if anything, and we have GMs like myself who have done First Steps enough times to do them on the fly, so it all works out.
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We, too, use Warhorn. We have almost all of our gamedays in DFW on one Warhorn event site so it's a one-stop shop for signups for our players and GMs.
It allows you to set the scenarios (with descriptions), times, number of tables/GMs and players per table.
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We use a meetup site
and if you want to guarantee a seat, you RSVP for the event.
And if you schedule the event at least 2 weeks out, you can see how many folks are signing up, and start asking for GM's ahead of time.
You can also set a max RSVP at whatever you want (say you know you have 2 GM's you set it at 14 people--GM's RSVP too). Then as more people RSVP to the waiting list, you can send out a call for someone to step up to GM to accommodate the waiting list.
If nobody does, you unfortunately will have to turn some folks away, but after one or two times of that, you'll get people stepping up to help.
RPG Superstar 2015 Top 32
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For the Seattle area, we have a message boards system (nwpfs.org) which has helped in planning one of our most crowded locations. I know of others that utilize a Facebook Page, and some that even use the Paizo boards.
A big thing that helped our organization was starting online discussions about what people were willing to run up to one month in advance. This had lead to 2/3 of our tables on Friday nights being already signed-up for and planned - it also lets us change scenarios if there is a lack of interest or player availability. Every 2nd Saturday of the month we have a double-slot session at our FLGS, and doing this has allowed us to schedule modules for running across both slots, and even doing multi-part scenarios in sequence with the same group of characters ^_^
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Yes, yes we do. Works for us though, even if it's hard for some people to beleave.I'm kind of waiting for someone from St. Louis to chime in. (I'm a little afeard to myself...)Ah've heard they do things a little ... differ'ntly ... out there in Saint Looey ...
I honestly boggle every time it comes up. It was hard enough when I took over at my FLGS, everyone including GMs signed in half an hour before game time and 2 or 3 of the veterans would sort it out. It worked, but took a while - there were nights when we started 30-40 minutes later than scheduled because of trying to find a combination that worked. Moving to planning ahead and signing up online has reduced set up time and headaches considerably.
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Yeah...we are a little backward in St. Louis. Mustering usually goes like this.
1) Show up at 6:30 and talk
2) Sometime around 6:45 try to put a table together
3) Get your table set sometime between 6:46 and 7:15
4) Hopefully start by 7 but usually by 7:30
It's backward, hectic, and it requires excellent GMs but also creates some excellent GMs (2 four start and multiple 3 star). We handle it well though by being pretty organized. Almost all the scenarios are nicely printed, we have a printer on site for things that are missing, and Nathan, our new VL, keeps an up to date scenario played list. I only wish that we had a unified non-facebook page for all the gaming events (something like meetup or even a standalone page).
The up side is that you, as a player, can easily play 15 publicly scenarios a month even if you are down to a few like Nosig says. We have weekly games sessions on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Sunday, and an all day event with prize support one Saturday a month. Additionally we have impromptu games at players houses and off schedule games for things like Eyes of the Ten (our next Eyes of the Ten game day will be two full tables).
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Here in Las Vegas, our Game Days are sign on warhorn (warhorn.net/LasVegas), discussions on a local site (vegasgamers.org, which is going to be going away) and meetup.com.
For my personal organizing, which is usually at a specific local FLGS, I use their web site event calendar for signups and such (shopofmagic.com). Sort of in abeyance for me right now, since I am running on a different day and time, and running an AP instead of PFS scenarios....
(In other words, my third star is a loooong way in the future, probably)
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Here in Colorado, we have a Yahoo Group for Colorado Springs, Denver, and elsewhere. At the beginning of the month, each representative for the game stores will post a call for GM's for whatever scenarios are selected. Once the GM's have signed up, it's sent again for player sign-ups. This ensures each table has a GM before people sign up for it, and that muster happens once a month (with updates as each game day comes around).
We are very blessed to have a good pool of PFS players here. One Saturday a month we have around 4 tables going at once in two different time slots at a Denver store. Some people carpool up from Colorado Springs just to play for the day or just the afternoon, plus people coming from the north. It's a good system.
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In Oklahoma City we pretty much follow the St. Louis model. The times differ, but the general feeling of herding cats is about the same. It is chaotic, conversational, fun and very free form. Our state wide VC is relatively new, and there are efforts to coordinate events across the state, but again remember the herding cats thing. There are several FLGS that cater to their local community. We have a Facebook "Pathfinder Society gaming in OKC. We meet about once a month, with a lot of regular campaigns running in the interim. There are a number of other sites in Oklahoma that are running or trying to run PFS. A group in Tulsa is striving to gather a group but is having trouble getting numbers together. Another group in Muskogee, Oklahoma has PFS gaming every Thursday night at a college student union. There are a couple other groups (One in Stillwater based out of their FLGS that meets roughly every month, I think.) At this point there is little coordination between most of the groups, but some of us are trying to establish relationships to gather folks into a loose organization to help coordinate the pool of available players. A lot of good folks, that love to play, but are spread out over a large geographic area.
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In the Mobile, AL area we started organizing our PFS activities about 9 months ago. We started with Meetup.com and signup sheets at the game stores. Next came the Mobile Area Pathfinder Society Facebook group, and a few months ago, I introduced Warhorn for registrations. These days the Warhorn site is the "official" registration site. But, I still advertise all events on Meetup, our FB group, and the FB pages of the game stores. We sometimes post flyers at the local university and at the games stores.
EVERYTHING has a link to the Warhorn site and encourages players to register there. A statewide website is in the works and at some point in the future I want to try integrating a built in registration system similar to Warhorn into the that site.
Warhorn has been a godsend for organization. At this point, I'd say 90+% of our players use the registration system. It helps me to know how many players to expect so I can make sure we have enough GMs.
Venture-Lieutenant, Maryland—Frederick
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At our PFS events we have a turnout of about 12-21 players. It is hard to plan how many GM's to have. Generally someone will step forward to run an extra table (new players are always welcome), but my OCD wants a method of being better prepared.
I was wondering what various groups do to address this issue - do you have a sign up sheet at your FLGS, or e-mail RSVP, or whatever.
We use MeetUp, which allows us to plan out events on a calender, schedule DMs in advance, and limit attendance to match the number of DMs that we have scheduled (the big rate limiting factor).
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Venture-Lieutenant, Maryland—Frederick
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We use MeetUp, which allows us to plan out events on a calender, schedule DMs in advance, and limit attendance to match the number of DMs that we have scheduled (the big rate limiting factor).At our PFS events we have a turnout of about 12-21 players. It is hard to plan how many GM's to have. Generally someone will step forward to run an extra table (new players are always welcome), but my OCD wants a method of being better prepared.
I was wondering what various groups do to address this issue - do you have a sign up sheet at your FLGS, or e-mail RSVP, or whatever.
Here is the link to my website we use for scheduling.
http://www.meetup.com/Frederick-RPG-Consortium/