Registered Campaigns and Judges

Some of you have probably noticed the links at the top of the page for “Registered Judges” and “Registered Campaigns”. These are listings that serve (in theory) as game finders. Judges list themselves as available for trial games, and campaigns are listed as being open to new players. At the moment, both listings are extremely out of date. The last Judge or Campaign was added in July of 2012.

My question is: would people here find value in these if they were up to date and maintained? Would anyone be interested in registering themselves (as a Judge) or their campaign as being available? Or do you think both are an anachronism?

I was late getting into the game (just picked it up a few months ago) and the first thing I did was check out those links. Now that I’ve started up my campaign I would absolutely register it - especially since I could still use another player or two.

I also immediately checked the registered judges list, because I wasn’t sure I could convince any of my friends to play ACKS. That said, I think it may be an anachronism.

I think in theory having a service to match players to games would be good; the difficulty I’ve had is that RPGs are a bit like jobs- the ones that have to advertise are the ones that have to advertise, and if nobody’s lining up to play Steve’s game unless he gets a billboard, that might say something about Steve.

Interesting point. I know I just started an open table game, though, and I had people chomping at the bit to play (i.e. I’d like to think I’m not “Steve”). Now that I want to expand my player base beyond the 8 or so people I know and have played with for ages, it seems like I need to advertise…

Thanks for the input! Oh, and what do you, or would you, use to find players and games?

It’s anachronistic, but charming in it’s way. What it could use more than anything is some dynamics; it’s hard to tell from looking (and/or not recognizing the names) who’s still around and what listings are valid.

I didn’t mean to offend! There are a lot of legitimate reasons for advertising publicly that don’t imply lack of quality. It’s just that in my experience, DMs who acquire a large group of happy players tend to retain that group, and thus not need to advertise for their next campaign because they’ve already got a line of people asking when their next campaign is going to be. Meanwhile, the Steves suffer constant attrition and must constantly recruit, so over time the pool of DMs becomes less and less representative.

I tend to find that the best games are discovered via pre-existing social connections- They start with sentences like “By the way, my friend Clinton said he was thinking about running Dark Heresy. You want in on that? I think you’d get along with the other guys in the that group.”

Concept: What if instead of having a list of Registered Judges and Ongoing Campaigns, you could just slap that information on your profile, so it’d appear next to every post?

That way players could, while browsing, say to themselves “This Koewn fellow has some interesting ideas, and seems very well-spoken. Ooh, and he has slots open!”

Oh, no offence taken, I assure you! I get what you’re saying about the “Steve” of the world. Similar to you, my experience is that connection to games happens through pre-existing social networks; hence the extent of my current play-group. I like your idea about it being in people’s profile and appearing next to their posts. A lot. I’ll look into the feasibility of a structure to support something like that.

My intent would be keep any such effort edited and up to date, otherwise it’s useless.

In a hypothetical world where I had time to either run or play in another game, I would love for a resource like this to exist.

I like the profile/appearing next to post idea as well. It automatically filters itself; anyone who is currently posting is currently advertising, and anyone who’s currently posting means that they are currently active and therefore their campaign is probably active as well.

One flaw in the “tag on every post” idea: My game is played face-to-face at a location in southern Sweden. On the one hand, most of the forum’s members simply aren’t able to join us for geographic reasons. On the other, I expect that someone looking for a group in our area to play with would probably be better served by being able to check a list and immediately see “Oh! There’s a group playing in Skåne!” than by having to follow the forum for an extended period, looking to see whether anyone is tagged as running a nearby game.

Don’t get me wrong. I still think it’s a good idea (especially if the tag includes information on where the game is played and, if online, what timezone it centers on), but I don’t think it’s a complete solution by itself. It should be done in addition to the lists of registered judges/campaigns, not a replacement for them. (Or, if you want to get really fancy… tie the registered lists into the tagging system, so that putting yourself on the lists automatically adds the appropriate tags and, conversely, the registered lists can also show when the associated person was last active on the forum. Maybe a link to a search for their posts, too…)

Thanks for the input everybody!