mltillis wrote:Of the games that are DND formats, more than half are Pathfinder, 4th Ed, or 5th. Basically DND 3.5 and earlier is now relegated to being a niche of the role playing community with few newer members coming in as a whole. So we are essentially cannibalizing other sites to maintain members.
Wait...3.5 is now considered niche? Hold on. I need a second to sit down and contemplate what an old man I am now.
But seriously, I agree. That's why I've been recently trying to emphasize that we accept any games here, not just old school D&D. Any game at all. (Except FATAL.
) Hopefully we can diversify things over time, even if the site's title kind of implies we're AD&D only.
mltillis wrote:Another issue that affects smaller sites may come in part from a sense of obligation. Many players feel that they should run a game in exchange for playing in other games on the site. Then the games struggle to maintain players as there are half as many games as active players on the forum. Not wanting to see someone's game die off, the most dedicated members of the forum join to help out. Eventually it leads to everyone running one or more games and then playing in four or five others until they burn out. As your core members drop out from the strain, the site goes into a rapid decline from which it most likely will not recover.
So much agreement here. There was a point, not too long ago, where I was running more than 50% of the games here. It occurred to me that if anything happened to me or if I left Planet, the place would be practically dead overnight. Whenever we did get a new DM (Korgen, betaraybill, NoTrammeling), they always seemed to disappear without a trace, abandoning their games completely. Hopefully we can get more DMs in here soon.
Another problem was that whenever I started a new game, the same group of Planet veterans would always sign up. I would be running several games at once that all had nearly the exact same cast. Then when a new person would show up and want to join, ironically I wouldn't have room for them in any of my games. That's why with my most recent game, War of the Lance, I made a point to try and recruit aggressively outside of Planet to bring in new people. I intend to do the same with my next new game, Unlikely Hero's replacement. This was all for the purpose of bolstering Planet's population, to avoid the very thing you speak of above.
Plus, the more people we bring in, the more likely one of them will start up their own game, as well. And if they recruit largely from outside Planet, as well, that brings in even more people, and so on and so on. So yeah, I highly recommend recruiting outside of Planet whenever you can.
mltillis wrote: For those people, I would suggest checking into some of the material being written for Osric (ADND 1st Ed) and Hackmaster (ADND 2nd Ed).
Yep, I especially recommend
Advanced Adventures from OSRIC. It's where I got
Pod Caverns of the Sinister Shroom and
Sarcophagus Legion, which I incorporated into Unlikely Heroes.
Breila wrote:So it's on the Pacific cost that all the warm air got stuck! We've had rain and chilly winds for the past week here in Germany, and it looks like Summer is over for good. I'm glad I'll be in the Eastern US for the next three weeks. But I sympatise with you, King Jaded. We had waether like yours in June, and I didn't want to use the computer except early in the morning, before the sun was really up. Just addind the laptop cooling fan made the temperatures unbearable.
Oof, I hear that it's even hotter over on the east coast, so good luck with that! Usually the Pacific Northwest is well known for being rainy and overcast all of the time, but lately it's just been hot, hot, hot. Even worse, my apartment has no air conditioning.
Breila wrote:I have a collection of mutant snapdragon plants.
So it is just me, or does anyone else picture ravenous, man-eating plants upon hearing the term 'mutant'?
