Gaming Community

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Duck One
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Gaming Community

Post by Duck One »

What is ALFA? A group of players with a particular way of enjoying the NWN game? Or is it a gaming community that is presently using NWN as its way of gaming? There is an important distinction there. Last night reflecting on my PnP days, a thought occurred to me that we should all be part of a bigger gaming community.

In those days, I had a group of friends who also had friends, who knew people who gamed. Every kind of fantasy adventure game you could imagine: war miniatures, comic book role playing, Magic the Gathering card games, and more variations of D&D style games than you could shake a stick at. A couple of nights a week I’d find myself traveling to someone’s house to do one or the other, meeting new people and making new friendships. The neat thing about the experience was that I’d run into familiar faces in different places. I’d show up at a newly forming group on Tuesdays that was starting a Marvel game and bump into the guy who had the ranger in my D&D a year before.

One guy named Jim organized what we had come to call JimCon. Each year in the summer he’d block out 4 days to make a long weekend of gaming at his house. People would take a couple of days of vacation and we’d all invade. He had a calendar set up with different parts of his house featuring a rotation of various games through the long weekend. The basement was a massive stage for miniatures, the PnP games were mostly in the living room, and the dining room was a rotation of card and table top games. People signed up in advance for the portions they could make, and we’d all bring food to share, grill out, and stay up to all hours of the night, with people crashing on the floor all over the place. The end of the weekend featured an “awards ceremony”, with novelty prizes handed out for original game play and humorous occurrences.

It was a gaming community, and it was great fun. Nobody took it too seriously. We recognized that we all had more in common than what separated us, and worked out to resolve disagreements as adults. Honestly, however, I don’t recall there being too many serious problems. We all had enough real life drama and carved out gaming as our escape from it. It was a community of people that was first and foremost about people with a common passion, and secondly about the game, and it transcended any one game.

I lost that when my family relocated with my new job, though I still keep in touch with a couple of those guys via social media. When I saw the release of NWN, it occurred to me that perhaps the next evolution of a gaming community could be virtual; an electronic community using chat rooms, bulletin boards, and electronic forms of the games to connect. When I found ALFA, and its ambitious vision, I had hopes that it would evolve to become like my former gaming community. And that is how I came to be here.

What if ALFA was something more than NWN gamers focuses exclusively on all those pillars? In addition to what we have now, what if there was:

• Other styles of NWN going on (Non-Faerun, more action oriented, more campaign oriented)
• Forums devoted to other games, both electronic and traditional
• VoIP rooms where people meet, discuss, and even game PnP style across the internet
• Calendars where people advertise and organize to make groups
• Occasional in person events (ala JimCon), LAN parties, social events

Perhaps the expansion of the community could result in:

• Attracting cross-over players to the current ALFA PW Project
• Sharing infrastructure costs and work across a larger community
• Having a ready-made base to leverage the next good D&D game that finally comes out
• Bringing more of a sense of community

It wouldn’t be the end of what we now know ALFA to be, and everyone here could continue to do exactly the same things they’re doing now. But by first being a community of people who happen to game, and secondly offering this one particular version of one game, ALFA wouldn’t necessarily lose anything, and potentially gain a lot.
Duck One

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FoamBats4All
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Re: Gaming Community

Post by FoamBats4All »

I do miss the ALFA Minecraft server.
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Brokenbone
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Re: Gaming Community

Post by Brokenbone »

Some of us already game in non-NWN2 fashion, together. Whether it's turning someone on to a favorite game / mods, playing something else multiplayer, or pulling together stuff on Roll20, yeah, it happens. Less in forums, more in IRC.

EDIT: if you're into something, LFG, I guess advertise in forums and IRC. There used to be some forum about that for maybe PbP and other games but it died out years and years ago. Forget who had a passion for that but he left (played a Wolf-named guy or had Wolf something in forum name...)
ALFA NWN2 PCs: Rhaggot of the Bruised-Eye, and Bamshogbo
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Zelknolf
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Re: Gaming Community

Post by Zelknolf »

It's been pretty difficult to get inertia behind other features, but people seemed generally welcome to it?

There were a few voices of "don't distract from our NWN2 offering" in the past, but people who don't want to NWN2 won't; having them organizing their other stuff here means they're still talking to the people who are, and if we post about a global plot or some exciting new content, we have potential to lure them back.
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