Tag Archives: RPGs

In my continuing series on learning from sports as a useful metaphor for our RPG groups, we’ll talk about running tryouts.

This is something many groups have already started to do.  When I was young, there weren’t formal tryouts, but in the last decade or so most of the time I’ve joined a new group they’ve had some kind of procedure for it.

So You Want To Join The Team?

Running tryouts might be a good idea when forming a gaming group, or especially when adding people to an established group.  Everyone’s there to enjoy themselves, and group dynamics are such that if you add someone who people really dislike or whose playstyle doesn’t jive with everyone else’s, then you risk losing your established players in the bargain – or just having everyone enjoy the game less.  Gamers tend to not be able to create strong social boundaries, and I’ve seen many cases where someone joins a group and really royally messes it up for everyone, and the passive-aggressive defenses they can muster don’t help.  Some players just leave, others come a lot less, others come but seethe inside and cause trouble.  “Being nice” to one person (by issuing an unconditional invite to someone the group doesn’t know) shouldn’t come at the expense of being nice and considerate to your existing teammates.  Rule #1 is the team comes first.

Some gaming groups formed out of a group of friends already in which case there’s no need for it up front.  But when you move, or when someone you don’t know says “I hear you play D&D, I want to join” – either you just say no, or you just say yes and have a lot of potential unpleasantness to deal with, or you hold a tryout.

Setting Team Expectations

The group needs to discuss to set the terms of the tryouts according to their group culture.  Is it “the GM makes the call who to invite to one of his campaigns, and that’s it?”  (Maybe with a “is everyone cool with that” to get feedback…) This works well for some groups, especially if the GM is also the game’s host.  Is it “group consensus” of some sort – “everyone gets a veto,” or “majority rules?”  Majority rules is usually a bad idea; unanimity is better for an established group.  If you have the problem that you don’t really trust the people in your group to make a sound decision (e.g. one guy is jealous of anyone else who shines too much) then you have an issue you need to take care of before inflicting it on a visitor.

Is the tryout for one session, or several, or a short campaign?  Or is it a “90 day trial period”?   The team should be agreed on how this is going to work ahead of time, and some discussion on what a yes or no should consist of.  “We should only vote no if we really hate them,” or “Let’s be really picky, only vote yes if you really actively like them…”  In any event, once someone’s in, they’re in.  They are a teammate unless you really have a drastic need to eject them.  It’s not fair to have the “new guys” always tiptoeing around the “established players.”

Also make sure everyone understands that a tryout is just like a job interview – both sides need to make a good impression. Don’t just focus on “putting the new guy through his paces” – if he doesn’t like your group, he’ll reject you. It’s the usual “don’t change who you are, but put your best foot forward” thing. Make sure they feel welcome, brief them on what they need to know (where and when the game is, social rules of the house, etc.  Beware in that some established groups can be very off-putting to new people – lots of shared context, in-jokes, etc. make it intimidating. And whoever the new person is, it’s quite likely they’re less of a freak than at least one of your established group. So pre-discuss with your group how to act.

Setting New Player Expectations

First thing is to make sure they understand it’s a tryout and the terms of it. “Hey, we’d love to have you but want to make sure you gel with the group. Come play with us next Tuesday as a tryout, after that if everyone’s cool with it you’re in.” Or “We have three people trying out for our open seat, you’re first in so after your time it’ll be a couple weeks; we’ll let you know the week of the 5th.” Or maybe you’re not doing tryouts, you say “hey anyone’s welcome” – but if you say that, don’t call them up after and say “sorry they didn’t like you, you’re not coming back.” Or “come join us for this campaign, but for later campaigns it’s up to that GM to invite you…” Set clear expectations with them.

They should be on time, show normal “guest in someone’s house” graces, etc. Let them know about expected custom – if you’re a bunch of slacker pigs they probably should know that; if you expect no cursing, shoes off at the door, not a minute late, and bring pizza money they should know that.

Practice With Them Before Playing With Them

A lot of it is more about personality/group fit than anything RPG specific, so even a board game night will show if they get along with people or not.

As for trying out in game, I think it’s done better in a one shot than as a guest shot in an ongoing campaign – if the campaign is too in depth then they’re lost. In my current gaming group, my first session was the climactic session of their entire several year long previous campaign; the GM handed me a hundred page sheaf of docs on world background – quite offputting and hard to do well. Or at the start of a new campaign. If it’s in the middle it’s somewhat inevitable that they play a NPC for the first time – it’s understood this is a tryout, and it’s disruptive to introduce a new PC that might not be there next time (unless it’s a casual or high death game).

Make sure and think about saying the meta-stuff you don’t always say at a game. Expectations about attendance (e.g. it’s expected you call if you can’t come), kinds of preparation expected, gaming style (e.g. we adhere to the book rules without exception), and that.

Play the Game!

Everyone should relax and have fun!  It was all our first time once (usually more than once).  Everyone should try their best and go in with the attitude that it’ll work out and that the new player will add a new dimension to the game.

In one long term game I ran, a player brought in a woman from work who was interested in playing.  She had never gamed before, and you certainly would not peg her as “the type” – hot high maintenance career type with a yippy dog and disposable boyfriends, likes to go out drinking, etc.  But she turned out to be a great player and in fact was a large apart of what transformed that campaign into an unforgettable experience.

So think about tryouts and how you want to do them – and if you have been doing them, have they been a fair experience, or should you make them more like a sports team tryout, where everyone understands the format and results?

Many pages have been written about the woes of RPG attendance.  Some people attend without fail, and others are super flaky and don’t show up without notice.

Gaming groups occasionally try to make self-conscious “social contracts” but usually conflicts over this are just a passive-aggressive fun fest.  RPG groups seem to have difficult times setting boundaries.  “But they’re just here for fun…  Who are we to tell them they have to show up?”  However, this causes problems for GMs, who are often trying to plan intricate plots around the players, and for players that want to invest more in the game.

Well, sports have that problem too.  And they have developed concepts to help formalize it.  Consider classifying your games as one of the following:

Pickup Game: Where people just want to play some ball and make it happen with whoever’s willing.  Casual games, for fun.  Anyone is welcome, attendance is not mandatory week to week.  If only a couple folks are there, then we’ll find something else to do.  It would be polite to tell folks if you’re not coming, so they don’t wait on you, but if you can’t come it’s no big deal.  This also signals the GM – they need to run one shots, or plan campaigns that accommodate lots of in and out.  If you don’t show up too much, then don’t be surprised if you show up and there’s no game or they moved it without telling you.

League Play: You have committed to a team of the rec league/intramural variety.  You recognize that there’s a team that needs a certain number of people to make.  Maybe you’re a regular or maybe you miss from time to time, but this signals a certain level of expected commitment. Like with a bowling team – if you don’t show up at least half the time, they are probably going to say “Hey man, we need to fill that seat with someone who’ll be here more regularly.”  RSVPing is mandatory.  This works well for the middle of the road kind of campaign – sometimes intense, sometimes light, it’s best if everyone’s there but there’s enough slack that the GM can work through  you being out.

Semi-Pro/Pro: Your happy ass is going to be there unless you’re injured, and even then you should be there on the sidelines to support your team.  Absences should be rare and well excused.  This helps support very serious or complex games, and the GM can “count on” players being there when crafting encounters/plots.  There’s no need to RSVP because if you don’t show up and no one gets a call, they’re going to call the cops and hospitals on the assumption there’s something very badly wrong.

Consider that, by discussing and declaring if a campaign will be pickup, league, or pro, you set excellent expectations among the players and with the GM.

I ran a Pro campaign once.  I said, “I want to run a deep in character campaign with a complex plot.  You have to commit to regular attendance.  More than one absence in a month means you get written out, period.”  I had five busy professionals play in that campaign, and it ran for five years.  We only had one person turn over and that’s because they moved out of town.  I ran a pickup game another night for the gamers in our circle who couldn’t or didn’t want to do that.

My current gaming group is League play.  Sometimes people can’t show up and that’s OK, but if someone really can’t show up time and time again then they need to bow out.

Sometimes, you don’t have enough people willing to commit to a higher commitment for a team to “make”.  And it’s important to know that up front – running a game that is pretending to be League but is really Pickup just ends up disappointing everyone.  Players that do show up regularly get disappointed that it’s “board game night again” because only two people showed.  The GM looks at their politics-heavy plot that’s not working out and sigh regretfully.  The local city league soccer teams have some teams that pretend they can make, but then just crumble and make everyone unhappy because they don’t really have enough regulars (and if you think playing a man down in a RPG is a hassle, play a soccer game a man down, you’ll be feeling that in the morning).  If you can’t get a team to make, just play pickup.

Using this terminology can help you all be honest with each other about your desires and what the group is going to do, and helps set expectations – “Oh, I should treat this like I treat my company’s softball team!  I guess I won’t just not show up and not tell anyone.”

I was reading and discussing various gaming related topics with people lately, like “how do you set attendance expectations” and “is it everyone’s responsibility to make sure everyone has fun,” and I kept thinking “Hmm, I’ve heard solutions to these problems before…  Oh, that’s right, from sports.”  And then it came to me; the closest analogy to how a RPG game functions is a sporting event, and the gaming group resembles nothing more than a sports team.  And that realization opens up a lot of extremely time-tested best practices for us to use.

For those of you who only dimly remember sports from enforced gym classes back in high school, let me explain.  RPGs are very dissimilar to board games, card games, and other pastimes of that sort because they require a “team” to play.  Just like a baseball or basketball team, you have a small group of people, who have somewhat specialized roles (instead of “center” we have a “fighter”) that have to work together to achieve victory.  Some computer games have gotten to this point, where within them you have leagues and ladders and whatnot. You have some competitive board game etc, leagues but those are mostly individual. And there are other relevant groups we could pattern our dynamics after, like an acting troupe – but I figured “being flaky and having sex with each other a lot” isn’t the direction I wanted to go with this.

I think refactoring the way we think about our gaming groups as a sports team adds a lot of healthy insight and clarifies a lot of the group-dynamics problems we tend to have. The human race has put huge money and effort into team sports and a lot of wisdom has emerged from that.  To a degree we have trouble figuring out how to conduct ourselves and our gaming groups because it’s such a fringe, uncommon thing, we’re not sure what to model after. There’s a lot of default expected behavior relative to sports teams (that translate across teams and even across sports) and it would be nice to have more of that in gaming.

I’m going to post separately about various aspects of this, but here’s a teaser list of topics where sports brings some good knowledge to our gaming.

• Game Attendance – pickup game or league play?
• Gaming Sportsmanship – being a good winner and loser and showing consideration to others
• Players as Teammates
• Player Behavior – show hustle, shut the hell up when the coach is talking, etc.
• The GM as Coach – the GM’s other responsibilities
• You’re Off The Team – why, when and how do you disinvite a player?

So meditate upon this truth.  What if my gaming group was, say, a city league soccer team?  What would we be doing differently?  Share insights here, I might pick them up for an article down the road.