Hello my Paizo peeps! I could use some advise on organizing the gaming community here in my town.
BACKSTORY
A year or two ago a new Warhammer/Magic the Gathering store opened here. Just within the past couple of weeks they finally drove the game store of the last 26 years out of business. The old store didn't do anything to engage the community and mostly stayed in business by being the only game store in town. Unfortunately this does leave the town without any RPG stores. We do have quite a lot of players here (though not as many GMs) so the new Warhammer/Magic store is interested in filling this vacant role. The owner and his one employee don't know much about RPGs though. So they're having me help out. We apparently have had a Pathfinder Society guy here for over a year but he has done absolutely no community outreach whatsoever and seems to just to Society play with his own personal group. Basically by default I've ended up as the new RPG community organizer for my town and I need to figure out how to manage that.
HOW TO PROCEED?
So! I figure a good place to start would be to run weekly, open to the public, Beginner Box sessions. That seems a good way to drum up interest and get people introduced to each other. After that I might look into running APs (Kingmaker sounds interesting). Given the number of players that seem to be out there though I would need other people running games as well. I'm not sure how to recruits people for that though.
I figure another good starting point would be to create a sign ip sheet at the new store. Probably have something like Name, Contact Info, Availability, Games You're Interested In, Are You Able/Willing To Run Sessions? I dunno. Is there anything else I should be asking? What are other good ways to get people signed up?
How important are conventions? We have a couple of conventions here in town. Including a comic, anime, and nerd convention. Among others that I probably don't know about. I don't have much convention experience and am too poor to go to them regularly. How important in creating a local gaming network is a convention presence?
As the new game store guys don't have much RPG experience they asked me what games they should stock in the store. To be honest besides Pathfinder I don't really know. I pretty much tuned out from what's new and hip back in the 90s when WotC started buying everybody out and WEG and FASA went under. Which is fine for my personal group but we need to engage the community at large now. So what do folks play these days?
I'm sure there's lots of other concerns but that's what comes to mind right now. Thoughts and advise on how to proceed would be greatly appreciated.
So with the store's consent I decided to try to get permission to post adds at the university and community college. There's a lot of student gamers out there from what I can tell. I wonder where else might be a good place to put up some adds?
Obviously any Cons. Flyer up the area AND any restaurants near the area since noone wants to stand and read a flyer while walking buy but in a restaurant waiting for a table is a different story. And on the plus side you dont have to pay to get in that way to every con.
If they have a sizable miniature presence it may be worthwhile to post on some of those forums and drum up interest there.
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I suggest doing PFS one night per week to start. Setup a Warhorn for your night. It'll help keep players organized. You may want to consider just doing PFS at the FLGS. It's a very drop in style, over AP's which will takes weeks to complete. I also put up 1 module every quarter, they usually take 3 weeks to complete.
I took over as store coordinator from Painlord. I found his guides incredible useful. Check them out here: http://paizo.com/people/Painlord
I wouldn't have thought of restaurants. The mini forums is a good idea too. The PFS is probably also a good idea. Would give a regular steam of material without having to put too much effort into it.
Another idea I had was to run Thornkeep with the Beginner Box. Seeing as how it has 5 mini-dungeons it seems ideal for doing one dungeon per BB level. It probably wouldn't be too hard to convert? Then if I run an open BB session every week I can do a different dungeon per month. That way whoever can drop in will have a couple of chances to experience each dungeon... or is that over doing it?