Say "Goodnight," Gracie…

Well, after consulting the volunteer staff, I made the decision. Fudge Factor is going on an indefinite hiatus, possibly to never return in its current form. There just wasn't enough material coming in to make it work. I wish it would have worked out differently. The full announcement is at [[http://www.fudgefactor.org/news/2006/04/fudge-factor-turning-out-lights.html|Fudge Roleplaying News]].

This isn't without benefit… it frees me up to work on other things, and I certainly have things in mind. Things that I think are going to be more beneficial to the Fudge community than Fudge Factor has been.

I'm also trying to extricate myself from managing the [[http://fudge.phoenyx.net/guide/bin/view/Guide/FudgeList|Fudge List]]. I'm looking for a team of moderators to take over ownership. Ten years has proven to be enough for me, and I need to free up that time to work on those other things I mentioned above.

Time to move on and see how I can better benefit the Fudge community.

Why "Wichita Roleplayers" and not "GamestoreX Roleplayers"

Judd, of the [[http://www.ithacagamers.com/sonsofkryos.html|Sons of Kryos]] podcast, asks in a recent comment why I "feel the need to reach out to as many gamers as possible?" I started writing a reply and decided it was worthy of a post.

I started the Wichita Roleplayers because roleplayers in this town are so poorly connected… as an example, many of us thought our Hobby Town had been closed for a couple years, when they had just moved across the parking lot into a storefront you couldn't see from the old store. We're very poorly connected, both between game stores and even among the crowd that frequents a single game store. I'd had flyers up for our first Game Day in the store where it was held for weeks… yet many guys who claimed to frequent the store regularly had never even heard about the Wichita Roleplayers (around for over a year), let alone our Game Day.

I've lamented for years that it's very hard to find the kinds of roleplayers I enjoy playing with. Many of Wichita's gamers are on the Internet, but mention an indie game title and you get a blank stare from 99.9% of the locals. Heck, I meet regularly people who don't even know anything about GURPS, or regular GURPS players who don't know there's a new edition out, let alone indie games.

So my mission from the beginning has been very much "all of Wichita and its surrounding communities." I think sticking with one store, no matter how friendly they are, severely limits what we can accomplish. One happy gamer is a good thing… but if I can make twenty happy gamers with just a little more effort, I think it's worth it.

My goal is helping roleplayers connect with each other… and that means all the roleplayers, not just the ones within the orbit of a single game store. If I'm looking for Fudge players in Wichita, I may only find one if I restrict myself to a quarter of the players. If I want to find enough Fudge players to put together a game, I'm going to have to address all of the community, not just part of it. If I tell people to come to the Wichita Roleplayers meetings to recruit new players for their games, having a selection from all of Wichita instead of just part of it means a greater likelihood of finding compatible gamers.

And I think that is my primary motive… to connect all the gamers within easy driving distance of Wichita to maximize the possibility of finding compatible players. To reach only a part of Wichita fails in my goal of providing a service that connects people of like interests.

And in the end, it is what I decided to do. That another person would be satisfied with doing less doesn't mean that I can be.

Game Day 2 progresses…

Busy, busy, and it seems that this blog is going to end up being more about running game days and local roleplaying clubs than anything else.

We're moving forward on the next Wichita Roleplayers' [[http://www.wichitagamers.com/roleplaying/gameday/|Roleplaying Game Day]].

We've got a building on WSU campus reserved for June 3rd, I'm done with the graphics for our primary advertising piece, and the call for GMs just went out last night and I've already received a couple of responses.

This time is going to be a bit bigger than last, and hopefully we can attract people to the event. The last Game Day was in a store and maybe a quarter of the participants were walk-in traffic. We had only four games and packed them to the gills with eight players in three of the four games. This time we don't have the benefit of walk-in traffic, but we can advertise in all the game stores instead of just the one.

I'm really going to push GMs to be more prepared further in advance… no creating pre-gen PCs in the hour before the game starts. And breaking with big convention tradition, instead of a one-sentence description of games, I'm going to try to get a short paragraph or two and descriptions of the characters so prospective players have an idea of what they're signing on for.

More news as things progress. The big issue right now is recruiting enough gamemasters quickly enough. We're hoping to run at least six games, with the possibility of eight. I'm hoping to run a game myself, but we'll have to see how that goes.