25: WELCOME
How do you welcome new players?
Most of my experience here comes from public-facing game groups, notably GEAS (the University of Edinburgh RPG society) but also club nights, as well as conventions. For a club, start by showing inclusiveness and diversity. Have introductory events at Welcome Week for freshers, and at the starts of semesters, as well as other things like GMing workshops. Conpulsion is one of these - having games new people can come into and try helps there too.
And do try to make introductory one-shots welcoming, not just to new players to that specific game but to new players in general.
This is easier for some games than others. D&D has known expectations. Licenced RPGs have the advantage of familiarity. One-shot-friendly games naturally work well although they’re not so good if it’s all campaigns all year from then on.
Games with big and unfamiliar settings ask a bit more. There’s a reason that there have been four quickstart adventures across Vampire: The Masquerade and Requiem and three of them start with the PCs waking up after becoming vampires with no idea what happened to them. And those still aren’t great introductions to the core gameplay, where PCs are more established and expected to know the basics. Following from advice from Rose Bailey, a good tactic is to run some other kind of story such as a heist, where the PCs being vampires gives them some extra options and complications and gives them a chance to show off as well.
Bonus round:
Tradition - Don’t do something just because it’s traditional.
Fresh - Or because it isn’t. Try it, sure, but don’t drop everything old.
Box - I’m old enough to like boxed sets for core rules, but I also acknowledge that in many case they weren’t necessary and nice hardback books are generally better unless a game has a lot of specialty dice or other components. But they still give that nice “this is a game” feel, and things like separate player and GM books have their advantages.
Runeslinger on Tradition
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