ST Forge: How to Add Players!

ST Forge is a weekly series to help Storytellers and Game Masters improve their craft and learn new ways to engage their players.

Recruiting players to your game is a time of jubilee. After all, someone else besides your current lot is about to descend into the bowels of geekdom and the insanity of your storyteller mind—this is clearly worth celebrating. Sometimes it’s just a simple matter of handing them a sheet and having them take a seat at the table, and other times it's a bit more complex. Beyond tabletop games, Live Action Role Playing games have a fair amount of subtlety around new players being recruited. They are the lifeblood to keep a game fresh and exciting and prevent staleness. Even online role-playing games, new guilds, and more all rely upon new players coming to join an existing pool of players. As the storyteller, guild master, game master, or whatever hat you wish to wear, we are the arbiters to make this happen in an engaging way. We can all do better than just handing someone a sheet so let’s go over some tips to onboard fresh players.

Without new players, your local gaming groups are doomed to die. Joining an existing campaign can be daunting, and filled with anxiety for even the most experienced players. Yet bringing in fresh blood can breathe life into a dying campaign (and after playing the adult-schedule-bingo) and finally give all your friends a chance to play together. Here are three ways to make the process smoother.

Okay, yes this is from my favorite game. But even Shinra needed to recruit new people! Image from Crisis Core by Square Enix

It’s more than Playstyle - it’s personality

In the excitement of adding a new player to a group, I’ve seen one uncomfortable topic get overlooked—should you? It’s entirely possible to be friends with someone off the table but find your playstyles incompatible. One of the most common grievances is a storyteller who is too lax or over-the-top with the book canon, and a player who is the opposite. Both could love the game and appreciate it but will resent the other every step of the way. It’s also worth noting that introducing an experienced player into a group of newbies can have a detrimental effect of creating mixed emotions and feelings of uselessness.

Luckily, communication solves many of these issues. As the storyteller, talk to both sides beforehand and then together afterward about game style, rules, storytelling style, and more. Have some laughs while at it and talk about past games over drinks with everyone—this process doesn’t need to be harsh. Going through past horror stories and sharing game battle scars is an effective way to hash out any pre-game issues. For LARPs and larger games, it’s a good method to funnel fresh players in through experienced vets you get along with. After all, time is your most valuable resource, but it’s always important to remember that actual friendships could be on the line. It’s more than a playstyle; it’s time and energy, two things everyone has in limited quantity (as far as I know.)

Side Scenes Save Us All

Once everyone is vetted, have some fun and create mystery around their entry. If possible, keep their actual character details secret from the entire group. Since you’re the storyteller, you can start working on hints of their character ahead of time while they are still working on their background and building their sheet. Tell stories of a local barbarian who rocked a bandit camp out of revenge at the tavern, or maybe even have those bandits turning themselves in out of fear of a barbarian builds anticipation.

If you are fortunate to have the time, run a single side session with the new player first. Doing this allows you to showcase stories of your existing players’ impact on the world, and gives the new player a chance to react, adding their own footnote to the party’s actions. This way, when they meet in character, they’ve got more in-depth motivation than ‘so you’re in a tavern…’. This advice is tripled if you ran a Session Zero for your main group. Any new player coming to the table should have the same onboarding experience. It sounds easy to pull off, but when you already have an existing game night, it can suck to tell everyone they should stay home. A way around this is to plan the event with everyone and have your existing players take on NPC roles in the new player’s backstory for that game session.

It’s not competitive. So hand out the damn exp.

You’ve had a level seventeen game going on for a while, or a LARP that’s been sitting in existence for five years, and you need new blood, but nobody applies—it might be balance. This last bit may ruffle our gamer feathers but try leveling the scales and giving the new player the same exp as everyone else. Load them up with the same value of magical items, and even give them a few unique and special tricks (because we all know the other characters have a few); ultimately, try and get the new player as close to equal as everyone else.

I know, “it’s not fair to those who have been playing,” is that not what everyone says? If you take a step back and look at all the social connections and NPCs the characters know, you’ll realize those scales are really tipped in their favor. Few players enjoy playing sidekicks or being hamstrung, and unlike a video game, there is no way for them to ever catch up by grinding out exp. Once you realize that the benefit of playing the game is playing the game and not your character sheet, the ruffled feathers over letting new players in as an equal smooths out. Even more, the new player will be more excited to join, and the existing players won’t have to baby them either. For this reason, in LARPs especially, I highly advise STs to put in a floor exp rule that is progressive based upon the highest exp earned.

Have any new player horror stories? What about awesome ones? Tell us your experience below!

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Featured Image: The Black Ballad Draft Art by Michael Katchan