Friday, December 10, 2010

Building Up the Hobby

I follow quite a few blogs.  Especially ones that discuss the many aspects of role playing games.  There is one thing that I noticed, and that ( at least to my knowledge ) there are very few aimed at educating people new to the hobby; if any at all.  I'm mainly talking about RPGs.  Most of the blogs seemed to be aimed at people who've been playing a while.  Am I wrong?

Wouldn't it help our hobby if there were blogs for newbies?  The Warhammer 40K blogging crowd seem to be great at wanting to help new players.  I've read several blogs where they welcome questions from their readers.  Loquacious on her blog, World of Wonder is creating a resource for beginning 40K players.  Once it's finished it should be excellent.  She saw a real need for such a resource, and in taking the initiative to help others she's also helping herself. Is there something similar for RPGs?  If there is, I haven't found it.

At the start of the new year, I plan on trying to contact some local gamers, and find a venue to meet at.  I've got a fairly good idea for a location, but not sure it's going to work out.  I also want to be able to recruit some beginning players.  Not sure HOW I'm going to do that.  That's going to take a bit of brainstorming.  If I do find some new players I want to be able to tell them about some resources to help them get started in this hobby, and I'm not talking about D&D for Dummies.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for the mention! Honestly, the project is more for me than anyone else, but I sure hope someone else gets use out of it when it's done.

    I've seen one or two blogs that incorporate '101' elements into their overall premise; but with one or two major exceptions most of the RPG blogs out there are written by GMs. VERY, VERY few are written by players with an outlook towards players.

    I'd be interested in this project, but maybe we should discuss it by email- I have questions and so on.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good idea. Though a do wonder what the longevity of that sort of approach might be. GM-types want various sorts of "inside baseball" discussion that blogs are good for. How much of that do players need? Even if it was totally a "how-to" thing new players woul learn that and move on. I don't know how steady a stream of new folks there are to a rather niche hobby.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I actually think the only way the hobby will survive long term is to have more GMs. Adding new players is treating symptoms, not the cause, IMHO.

    I have a blog post that is percolating to the top on this subject as I wrap up Errant and start thinking about my projects as a whole.

    ReplyDelete