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Well, the online community is from all over the world and a hundred or more different lodges. They all have different standards and requirements.
Actually online is just three main lodges: VTT, PBP and online ACG, with each having a Venture Captain under our own Regional Coordinator. If people want to participate in online play they need to follow the requirements of the online lodges, regardless what their local, face to face, lodge requires. Having said that: we are going off on a tangent, although I am happy to discuss this further in PMs or another thread.
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Quick clarification without derailing the thread to much more. On line play is great. There are reasons I play there most of the time. And there are regular scheduled games that you can sign up for. I was just talking about the difficulty in coordinating pick up games.
Online play is great. Three cheers for online play! Hazzah! Hazzah! Hazzah!
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Actually online is just three main lodges: VTT, PBP and online ACG, with each having a Venture Captain under our own Regional Coordinator. If people want to participate in online play they need to follow the requirements of the online lodges, regardless what their local, face to face, lodge requires.
I'm not sure what other requirements they'd have, but i don't think it works like this.
You don't need a venture critter to oversee a real life game and you don't have to be under one to run online. I'm not sure what additional requirements they'd have , but venture critters don't lock out someone else setting up shop and running games.
Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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we'll always seat people who show up, but...I hear this and things like “I never turn players away” but how can you say that? I tend not to place much value in absolute statements since they are usually not as absolute as they sound. What if you are the GM and a full table of 7 players are seated, two new unregistered players arrive, and no one will step up to GM? GMs are a finite resource. Having a “never turn a player away” attitude is nice and should be encouraged, but the reality is, sometimes there just is no [legal] way to seat everyone.
Some will even exceed the maximum player count rather than turn players away, but we cannot support that as it’s clearly not allowed by the rules and more often than not seems to create poor play experiences.
I can only talk about how things have gone so far in the past four years or so. We haven't had to turn people away. We seem to have an unusually large and motivated pool of GMs, so splitting off has always succeeded. Although having to go home to fetch a scenario is of course still inconvenient.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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I'm cautiously interested in a replay after X years idea. My local venues have a fairly small crowd, half of which are old guard. So running stuff like Destiny of the Sands 1-3 is hard because that would mean excluding them unless they want to burn 3 replays. But now the newer players never get to play that series.
It would however require Paizo to really set up a proper lookup system for which scenarios people have played and when.
I have a few questions:
1) How many people on average show up every game day?
2) How many tables of games do you have going every game day?
3) How critical is it for a game to even happen, that you must sit old guard and new folks at the same table?
4) If you had it set up where the organizer dictated what scenarios were run each week (and used the Session Tracker for who's played what and your own tracking spreadsheet for what you've run when), and that happened to be one of these scenarios that all your old-guard couldn't play without replaying, how likely is it to ensure your game day didn't happen?
5) Do you think you'd lose players if they could only play once or twice a month instead of once or more a week?
I don't think you understand which issue I'm pointing at. It's not about running out of content; it's about showing older content to new players that the older guard has already played.
One part of our player base is spread over three stores and we play once per week, rotating between stores. We usually seat a single table, more during holidays. Some people have been there for four years, others just got started this year. There are still enough scenarios that they can all play together. We're actually the region the Session Tracker came from, it's been very useful.
But this is not about "replay to play at all". Rather, it's about letting the new players play good old stuff without excluding older players. If I wanted to schedule Destiny of the Sands to give the newer players an idea about what this whole Scarab Sages thing is about anyway, that would require excluding other players for three sessions in a row. That's really not something you want to do in a small lodge, because it means they're not getting to play that week, and meanwhile I'm struggling to actually make quorum.
Venture-Captain, Minnesota
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HOWEVER... if someone is looking for a Person of Authority for Reasons, then the V-folk would be that resource, right?
Yep. If a problem happens in a private online PFS game, we’re the cavalry that gets called in.
I’m happy though that most folks ignore us until they need us. The independence of online players and GMs pleases me. Small privately recruited PFS games are fun! I’m glad that people can get together and just start up a game and still be part of PFS.
As for the whole question of requiring or not requiring the PFS Session Tracker... There are Minnesota locations that require it so that they can schedule games. If you are doing lots of time-sensitive pickup games in the VTT PFS Dischord Channel, I could see requiring setting up the PFS tracker for the players who usually do that sort of game.
(This is said, with full hubris, as a VC from a completely different online area, and who has no authority over what happens in VTT land! Feel free to throw fruit my way. I probably deserve it!)
Hmm
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I'm not sure I have a ton of sympathy regarding difficulties in playing geek sudoku when there is an incredibly easy to use tool. If people refuse to use it, that's on them, not the campaign rules.
Oh sorry, this is my fault. I didn't properly emphasize the point I was trying to make and then got sidetracked the the replies. My bad. I'm sorry.
It's not that is takes so long to sort out games. That is a side issue that can be a bit annoying, but is not particularly relevant to the discussion.
The relevant part of my comment was that when all is said and done, no games could be found that could accommodate enough people to make a table.
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I am an infrequent player who has been playing for 4 years. Maybe I average 1 game over every 2-3 months. And I am running into duplicate game problems. My choice is play for no value, don't play and leave, or go try D&D adventure league.
And if I am running into those problems, I can't imagine that players who play weekly aren't running into the problem all the time. Maybe I am wrong.
Maybe Paizo is trying to drive new blood in by simply forcing out older players--I hope not. But there really needs to be some kind of intelligent way for players to replay scenarios--especially with 2.0 coming. Why push players away?
I really don't get it.
Venture-Captain, Nebraska—Omaha
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Maybe more averaging 1 game every month for 4 years. The rest sticks.
Sound like problem is the adventures being planned, not a problem with replay.
Over 9 seasons there are LOTS of adventures that can be played. I play regularly across 7 or so characters and I don't have problems find a table.
We take care to look for adventures that everyone can play.
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Maybe I average 1 game over every 2-3 months. And I am running into duplicate game problems.
This definitely isn't an issue with Paizo, since they release more games every month than you have the opportunity to play. This sounds like the same few games (I'm going to guess, Intros?) are being scheduled again and again at your local gaming venue.
Luckily, you have several options:
1) Try out online play. I was initially very hesitant, having gamed face-to-face for over two decades, but I've really warmed up to it (and am GMing in the current online Convention)
2) Travel to more than just your local venue. I will regularly commute up to two hours away for a game. My first VL believed in "cross-pollinating", and getting different communities to experience each others' players and play styles.
3) Talk to the people at your local venue. If there's not an organizer, maybe you can organize some events yourself? If there's a regular community, then there's somebody in charge, and you can tell them about your experiences.
4) Plan ahead to visit a Convention. Maybe you can get all of your playing scrunched into a busy weekend every few months, rather than just a single replay of an intro.
Paizo definitely doesn't want to push away customer of any experience level. I can't imagine any business model that would work doing that.
