Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?

[Ice_Sickle]

All the information I've found (and I've found a ton) falls into three catagories.

1) Bone basic, bog standard newbie stuff (How do I start a game? How does stealth work?)

2) Experts talking to experts using abreviations I don't understand VQ? PD? references to spells I'm not familiar with or discussions where it is assumed one knows the armor, damage, attack, moral of every unit, the details of every magic item and every spell.

3) Tables upon tables of data (I'm pouring over it but haven't internalized it yet).

With those as tools it's tough to get someone excited. However, without knowing the game all that well myself I've managed to recruit 9 new players. Here's how.

Two times/year my 8+ friends and I get together to play games. We started doing this in about '87. It started off mostly board games but the Last 13 years has been mostly computers. Everyone brings up there computer.

The Last time we got together was in March. There were 14 of us. I burned the demo onto a CD and set aside 2 hours for a walk through. All of us had tried it for 30 minutes or more but all but 2 found it too opaque.

We had everyone start a single player game, select Ulm and walked through diety creation and then basic play. By turn 3 or 4 people started moving ahead on their own and when they had questions the two of who'd played it a bit more tried to answer them. Of the 10 who participated in the walk-through tutorail 8 bought the game.

If you can't get a bunch of people together to play like that you can do the same thing over the Internet using a voice program like Roger Wilco, Battlefield Communicator, Team Speak, Sidewider Game Voice. Get your friends in the demo and walk them through a few turns explaining research, the economy, units.

It's a great game, truly. But I think it does take some hand-holding to get people into it.


Ice

[Slygar]

hopefully one of the features of Dom 3 will be a built in tutorial al'a Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic.

[BugRoger]

Thanks for the tips. I will continue my mission and show the game to my friends in person. This seems to be the most promising strategy. I already tried to show off the game on a LAN party Last year. This ended in a disaster because I hardly played the game before and we didn't get much further than setting up a game.

But I'm member of a board gaming club and we're holding a bianual board gaming con in a few days. I propably take my laptops with me and try to convert some fellows.

I also compiled the Newby Guide thread into an proper webpage. This is much more readable than the big post in the confused newby thread.

[Gandalf Parker]

The game can go slow at first. If you want to get them interested then have a major game-save available. Preferably something with all the nations and far enough into the game to start seeing minor summonings in the armies.

That way you can let them open the game with any nation they are interested in and scroll around a big game, watch some major battles, get a taste for trying to decide what to use gold and gems on whan you have many items, spells, and provinces you can build troops in.

In fact, I think such a game, downloadable, would be very useful for us all to have access to.

[HotNifeThruButr]

To me, the problem isn't about complexity, it's about the lack on action. Your average gaming dolt needs an action packed game to keep them interested, but Dominions doesn't give them that. The computer controls your battles, and all the orders you give happen next turn. Most people aren't made of a tough enough stuff to endure this, and quickly get bored and go play some corny game like Diablo.

[Norfleet]

Your average gaming dolt also has an incredibly short attention span. Hell, even the people who have managed to become interested in Dominions II have short attention spans. In *MY* day, the ability to concentrate on something for more than 20 hours at a time was NORMAL. If you couldn't, you'd be beaten until you could.

Nowadays, people have problems concentrating for more than half an hour. That's the real obstacle to interest in Dominions II: It requires an attention span better than that of an epileptic lemming. I place the blame firmly on the fact that children aren't beaten enough nowadays.

[liga]

Originally posted by BugRoger:

I also compiled the Newby Guide thread into an proper webpage. This is much more readable than the big post in the confused newby thread.

If you want to try to trasform in a web readable I'm keeping a .rtf file including all the interesting informations about the rules that comes up on the threda.

You can download it at

http://arrakis.unimo.it/~ligabue/dom2/docs/

it is the guida.rtf file

I'm used to update the files 1/2 times a week

good luck
Liga