Dealing with FLGS rejection

For more than a year now, I've been organizing a little roleplaying "club"… its primary purpose is to be a networking organization, and we have twice-monthly social meetings and occasional gaming events (we just had our first Game Day last weekend).

We started out meeting at restaurants, and near the end of last year, one of our two meetings moved into a game store just down the street from me. The owner of that store had worked hard to get us in there and has been pretty helpful. Our Game Day was in that store as well, but I'm already planning to hold the next game day in "neutral territory" so I can advertise it at other game stores. There are four in our town, three comic-and-game stores and one Hobby Town.

Hobby Town is over on the other side of town from where I live, and they carried very little roleplaying stuff when I'd last been there, at least three years ago. I visited them for the first time in ages last week and discovered that they'd changed hands, relocated to a bigger store, and are the best stocked game store in town. By Wichita standards, they're huge. I can't believe I overlooked them for a year in my promotional efforts.

So I went in there this week with my business card and flyers for the game club… when I asked if they would display my flyer, he immediately asked where we meet. When I told him that one of our two monthly meetings was in a game store on the other side of town, he refused to display my flyer on the grounds that it would send his customers to the competition. He not only gave my flyer back, he handed back my business card as well.

This caught me off-guard. In retrospect, it wasn't so surprising, but I'm wondering if it's bad business or good business. This club has pulled people out of "gaming retirement" and got them interested in roleplaying again. We've created customers where there were no customers before. We've created cross-exposure, which has encouraged people to buy games they hadn't looked at before. It may be small right now, but we have created sales.

And the biggest game store in town says they don't want any part of that. Do we create just sales for the store where we have our meeting? I don't know… but when I was in Hobby Town last weekend, I ran into our most regular member at the store. More of our members live closer to Hobby Town than they do the store on my side of town, and I know they buy stuff there.

From the beginning, I've wanted to keep this club pretty "store neutral" and avoided meeting in a game store. But we found ourselves struggling to find a good meeting place and I broke down and accepted the store's offer. And it's worked out fairly well. It's quiet (unlike the restaurant) and has a friendly atmosphere. It will support some of the activities we want to do (demonstrations and the like) that we can't do in a restaurant. But it breaks our "store neutral" agenda… and it's caused the biggest game store in town to virtually throw me out on my ear, because they see it as a threat.

So now I'm looking at a tough decision.

When I started taking flyers around to the other game stores, we were meeting in a neutral location. The other two game stores haven't kept track of where we actually meet, and I didn't think anything of refreshing my tear-tab fliers at all the game stores even after we'd started meeting at one of them. I had been concerned about our "neutrality" and had been looking for a way to get more involved with the other stores, so I wasn't totally oblivious to the issue.

The problem I've had is that I've had to work to maintain a relationship with the other two stores. The one we meet at called me, sends me email, asks for feedback and regularly tells me the improvements they're making to the gaming space. So while I'm focusing on organizing the Game Day or creating flyers or figuring out how to keep new attendees, my store-relationship efforts fall to the wayside and the only store I communicate with is the one that tries to communicate with me.

So, that tough decision. Do I leave things as they are, accept that I may reach only roleplayers that visit one store, and write off any relationship with Hobby Town and maybe the other stores as well? Or do I spurn our most enthusiastically supporting store by moving our meeting to a neutral location, so that I can get move involved with all the stores on an equal footing?

It kind of sucks to form an organization that eschews the use of in-store gaming space because we don't want to play favorites. By treating all the game stores equally, we end up holding them at a distance… we can form relationships with all of them, but they can only be shallow relationships, because we insist that the relationship remain "open." Not just open, but "just friends"… we can't get serious by having in-store events unless we can do those in-store events on an entirely equal basis. Which would only work if all the stores didn't mind promoting a group that held events in other stores. And that can't happen anyway, because not all the stores have equal ability to support events… one of them has down-sized in preparation to find a new location and has no open gaming space to speak of. Hobby Town has a very small space, but only for "those they can trust" because it's near merchandise and out of view of the register.

My goal is to benefit the roleplaying community of my area. It's not to support any specific game store, but part of supporting the community is doing what we can to help the stores thrive. Being the neutral party, I want all the stores to do well, I want them all to rake in the cash and see our hobby boom in my area. But the stores are, logically, set against each other. Some stores don't want to participate in things that build the hobby in general unless they see more in it for them than for other stores.

I have to say, hooking up with just one game store exclusively would be much easier. But it wouldn't build a strong community… it would promote fragmentation. If our club is successful as a single-store club, other stores would be encouraged to support the formation of competing clubs… which runs counter to my desire to network the community as fully as possible. I don't think we can make four roleplaying clubs work.

So I don't know what I'm going to do. I need to think about it more and discuss it with some key club members. And I'd certainly like to hear what you, my loyal readers, have to say.

(Keep in mind that Wichita has a population of around 400,000, counting the surrounding small communities. We have no dedicated game stores, and the roleplaying support, even in the largest store, is pretty slim compared to what I saw in Boston and even Kansas City. Our roleplaying community is small and/or fragmented… part of what I'm trying to address. But any suggestions have to keep in mind our "small city" status.)