How do we design a gaming community?

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Excellent breakdown on community engagement and moderation from @Clayton.

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I’m happy it resonated. And I appreciate you sharing it. I partly wrote this one just for myself.

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that article just made me want to hear more stories of that crazy college club.

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I had no idea how rare that club was until years after I graduated. It was called BASH and ran out of Toledo, Ohio. It was everything you might expect from a club that started in the late 70s/early 80s. When I joined, the offices were post-apocalyptic. Decades of games, fandoms, and inside jokes had turned our basement office into its own lore-filled underworld in the bowels of the student union.

I think two of my favorite stories from that organization were:

  • The name BASH was an acronym for Benevolent Adventurers Strategic Headquarters. It was a passive aggressive way to frustrate the school administration back in the 80s. At the time, the students were playing war games in the common spaces, and it rankled the university admins having them there during tours, so they forced the students to incorporate or be kicked out. So, in malicious compliance, the nerds came up with an organization name that was a pain to spell out on typewriters for official university paperwork.
  • In the 80s it was in a court case with the State of Ohio and the leadership at the time kept rotating the leadership through the roles, so all the meeting minutes were scrambled and incoherent in the case. Not exactly clever or a good idea, but exactly the kind of plan a bunch of engineers and science majors would come up with not realizing how much trouble they were in.

By the time I was a member, we had quite a bit of work to do. It was a mess.

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Thanks for sharing! How to build a sustainable in person gaming club is very much on our mind. We’ve build a fairly good club in the North Brisbane area over the last year and a half - getting over 50 members and having weekly game nights. The biggest issues we have right now are scheduling and balancing games so there are enough people booked (to make the rent) and enough games that could take someone who does attend each week as part of an ongoing campaign (open tables or one shots). Any advice on the scheduling and logistics (getting and managing GMs and the variety of games) would be appreciated

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