Disappointment

So I went to the regular gaming night at the local club again last night.

It was the first time in 18 months that I haven't had a table of players. 

The first few times the event ran, we had 30 odd players, three or more tables of games, I had regulars who would go out of their way to play the games I ran. I had enthusiasm for the whole thing, and I wanted to push the envelop with interesting ideas. With the right players this worked, but the numbers dwindled.

We had some issues on some months, and the momentum was lost.

It was still a case that every night that we ran, a couple of tables ran, but many of those nights had my number of players drop from the point where I had too many and had to turn them away, to the point where I struggled to get enough players to get a decent session. I started running games with 7 or 8 players, and more recently had a game with 3. This was the first night where there were only enough players showing up to run a single game. 

There were two of us ready to run games, and a single player, on behalf of his group, asked us what we were running to see what their adventure for the night might be. I offered a couple of games that are my regular stand-bys, both requiring no preparation, minimalist rules fitting on a page or two, a focus on storytelling, sandboxy, high protagonism... the other guy was running stock standard D&D, pretty much straight out of a railroaded adventure module.

The single group of players last night picked the familiar name brand.

This is exactly the kind of thing that I think of when D&D players complain about indie games (or anything else in TTRPG space for that matter). They say that non-D&D game designers are always "in your face" or constantly evangelising their products...while simultaneously saying that they don't know what else is out there... in reality it seems that a big chunk of them don't want new games, they want the familiar, they want the name brand, but I don't know if this is because they don't want to take risks or actually make decisions for themselves, whether they'd rather be led along in someone else's escapism rather than making imaginary worlds of their own.

I could write a whole lot more here, but it's more disappointment than anger.

On the positive side, there were a group of half a dozen friends dressed in medieval attire with foam swords at the event, they didn't play anything, but I approached them with a proposal for a LARP... and there was interest.

Maybe things are about to evolve again...maybe the cycle will turn to LARP again.