Anyone else runnng in a school?

[xmiyux]

I am basically looking for other educators running PFS or SFS in an academic setting with whom I can share notes and get advice.

I have done an after school game and RPG club for many years but have not done organized play with them. They are interested and I have started running some Starfinder. Would generally love to be able to pick the brains of other educators doing the same.

[Wolfspirit]

Do you have any specific questions you'd like answered or insight you're looking for? I haven't done Organized Play at school but played various games and creative problem solving organizations.

[xmiyux]

Basically how are folks handling organized play in this setting.

For years I have run DCC RPG in school as a drop in and drop out sort of adventure. We pick up each week where we left off the previous week and sometimes the players were different by a person or two. Things like making up a test after school keeps one kid away but another kid can make it that week, etc.

So I have started with the Starfinder Quests in that we can generally get mostly through one quest in the hour after school (and if not we can easily finish it in two sessions split over two weeks).

After those quests are done though, we get into larger adventures that will take those kids a month and a half to work through.

1. How is that even logged (one adventure, one table, multiple days played?) and how do people handle the flaky nature of some teens showing up.

2. With a limit of seven, how are others handling larger crowds?

I specifically am asking because after hunting down schools that were listed on their websites as doing PFS and contacting their sponsors I discovered that many of them stopped doing organized play for the very reasons I mentioned.

But I am an educator and a nerd about organizing things so I sort of want to puzzle out a way to make it work.

[Wolfspirit]

1. PBP has similar "broken up over a span of time", so there's a precedent for reporting one event at a specific date, even if it took a month and a half to complete that. So that's not a problem.
2. The "fluid participation" and "large group" of your format may be larger problems to participating in traditional Scenarios and Organized Play.

My go-to answer to "non-traditional" groups is to suggest running an AP in campaign mode. The rules for group size and consistent participation are much more lax while still being able to participate in Organized Play. Check out the Campaign Mode rules and see if that would work for your group.

Regardless, I hope things work out for you. It certainly sounds like a worthwile endeavor though!

[xmiyux]

Thanks!

I will look into that.

In general I think it has real potential. The high school students are excited about it and when I tapped one of them after the first quest and said, "You are going to run it for the next group" he immediately assented and seemed excited.

Which is actually all I really wanted. My goal is to get them confident to run games for friends and family. I got one of the local libraries to start carrying some of the core books for a few RPGs so it gets resources out there in the community (via the teens) to really spread the growth of the hobby.

Especially if it gets teens sitting down and playing with their parents.

[Woran]

While I have no experience running for a school setting, I would like to add, that you can use the scenarios for starfinder and pathfinder without the need to be official. They are cool adventures on their own, and break down pretty well as they are written in acts.
It is of course cool to have a character they can take to a convention or a store game day, but with not everyone regularly attending and the scenarios broken up in bits, it would be a lot of work for you to track who finished what, and then to tell some kids they lost out on gold/XP due to the rules. I think that would actually de-motivate them a lot.

Getting them excited, and learning a lot trough play is the most important thing I think.