Blog Book Club #30 Opening Your Gaming Table

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Welcome to this week’s blog club. We are discussing “Opening Your Game Table,” by Justin Alexander of the Alexandrian.

Next week is Fantasy F*ckin’ Vietnam by Chris Kutalik

You can see a list of previous blog club posts here.

In this post, Alexander discusses why he started an open table campaign. Largely it seems like it was an effort to recapture some of the magic of his daily D&D lunch break from his childhood. This is contrasted with his accounts of infrequent bimonthly schedules of D&D as an adult.

Alexander’s trials with scheduling a long ongoing campaign that rely on a core group of players resonated with me. In our lives jobs change, relationships form, children are born, people move away. Despite the many valid reasons for leaving a campaign, it becomes an ordeal to onboard new players, especially in a trad style game where each player is akin to a key “cast member” in an ongoing story.

I appreciated that Alexander explained his open table design not just with a baseball metaphor, but also by laying out some of the practical steps he uses to create this type of campaign. Also that Alexander doesn’t put the open table on a pedestal as the best type of campaign, just one that solves the problem of player retention.

What surprised me reading this blog post was the shout out to Caverns of Thracia and the explanation of how key elements of megadungeons are well suited to open table games. This matches my own experiences as a player. Long term games can be difficult to join but an open table megadungeon offered me the opportunity to cross the bridge from reading about the OSR to finally playing it.

Later in the blog club, we’ll return to more posts from Alexander’s series on open table campaigns. So… what happened the last time you ran or played in an open table?

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I’ve tried running an open table online but it pretty quickly settled into a core group of 4-5 people. I may give it another try this year, but running out-of-the-mainstream systems (Dragonbane is currently my game of choice) does tend to limit the player base.

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That’s been my experience as well. Which still serves as a great way to find a consistent and motivated group, but it doesn’t quite fulfill the promise of the open table. I have a feeling open tables work better in-person at public spaces (unless you’re advertising your online game frequently, which frankly is not something I’m interested in doing).

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I run an open table on Friday nights. The first month, maybe, I got a super inconsistent attendance record. 6 months I have 7 regular players and the occasional rando that rocks in.

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Yeah, I’ve similarly ended up with a relatively consistent core of players from sporadic online adverts rather than a huge turnover of one-time drop ins.

I don’t mind this, though. New players are always welcome, but for me the open table’s key benefit is not that we’ll have a vibrant community of loads of players but that the reduced commitment requirements allows familiar faces to pop back in whenever they feel able to. Less an open throwabout in the park trying to draw in as many people as possible and more a handful of chums chucking the ball about and drifting in and out according to commitments in the real world, chums who wouldn’t bother showing up at all if they were penalised for not playing out a full baseball game. Openness to fresh faces is a bonus.

3. At the end of each session, everybody heads back to town. At the start of the next session, a new adventuring party forms and heads back to the dungeon.

I agree with the post that this one is crucial. My open table drifted away from this as the regular players wanted longer delves, but when real life drew many of those players away the campaign nearly died. We’ve reverted to one session = one expedition which is a lot more welcoming for newcomers and drop ins.

Having occasionally popped in on one of my players’ own open table when life allows, I was struck by how invested I felt in the adventure when we set out from a settlement vs starting the session already in or by a dungeon. With the latter, anything that happened to my character felt slightly unfair as I hadn’t actively chosen for them to be in that situation. With the former, there always felt like I had more agency in my character’s inevitable demise, even if the extent of that agency was, “Yeah, I agree, let’s go there”.

With that being said, open table campaign structures are not the be-all and end-all of gaming. (Any more than catch is the be-all and end-all of playing baseball.) I’m still running my regular campaign, which has now reached its 60th session. And there’s a ton of depth, detail, and complexity in that dedicated campaign which is impossible to achieve in the loose style of the open table.

I do still hanker after an Evils of Illmire campaign with the same selection of players and full region-wide faction-heavy gameplay, but in recent years I’ve not had the mental capacity for that “depth, detail, and complexity”; rather than abandon gaming, having a shallower, open table has meant that I’ve been able to have a more-or-less weekly game for the last five years.

And if I were to ever want to get that Illmire campaign off the ground, I would have a decent list of folks to invite whose week-in week-out attendance I could rely upon (although, frankly, it’s mainly a case of finding out who is now drawing their pension: retirees are an excellent demographic for being able to commit regularly!).

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I joined a gaming club and I didn’t know anyone so I ran an open table of Torchbearer.

Week one I had two players. One went on to become a regular.

By session 11 I’d gained my 3rd regular although I didn’t know it yet.

I lost 2 regulars just from people moving away but by then (without knowing it) I was already up to 5 regular players.

By session 38 it was all regulars and I couldn’t accept more guests so I suggested spending 8 more sessions wrapping it up so I could pursue other interests for a while.

The group stayed together without me and I ran for them the year after.

When I finished and left again they became 2 open tables. Then 3.

Now we synchronise our campaigns so that we all finish them at the same time and do monthly one shots. That way we get to mix up who plays with whom. The enduring group is probably the best thing I made happen by accident.

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I ran an open table game for about a year and noticed a similar pattern, I think these kind of social things take time to work towards a sense of stability.

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When I started grad school, I was struggling to find a consistent group of players for a normal campaign and this Blog Post was actually a big inspiration for me to try an open-table style.

I used White Box: FMAG because it is a pretty easy system for on-boarding people (especially those who had never played) and because it is cheap enough that I could keep a few spare copies at the table available for people to reference/take home with them.

Instead of a Mega-dungeon, I set it in Black Wyrm of Brandonsford, with Hole in the Oak, Winter’s Daughter, and Barrow of the Elf-King placed in random hexes alongside it. I also included some ways for them to upgrade/help the town through quests. One thing we struggled with was downtime, many downtime systems require a lot more time & gold than the players had available, so I ended up designing my own.

It was really cool to see the way players would plot and scheme on their own time, exchanging rumors and knowledge. But I had a unique opportunity to see this, because the master’s program we we’re in is pretty close-knit.

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