The Looking-For-Games Chat Room

Question

Lately, there's some activity in The Back Room: Live Tabletop Games, which was just recently unfrozen for the purpose of catering to the good-people-of-this-stack who wanted to run or play RPGs with fellow good-people-of-this-stack.

So far, some playtesting has been done here and there, but advertising seemed lacking- asking it in RPG General Chat works but only for those who are online at that moment or who check previous messages, unless it's starred or something. It'd be nice to get a broader audience for the game or playtest I'm advertising.

A couple of months ago, a question in meta was asked about how to advertise games to be played with the stackizens.

In that question, I think the majority of the interested parties agreed that meta is a pretty bad medium to advertise games. But instead, a Looking-For-Group chat room shall be created for this purpose. So, if we're doing that:

What are some guidelines that should be followed in the LFG chatroom?

Should we have only one message per game advertisement? What information would be needed to advertise your game, at a minimum? (System? Player Count? Starting Level? Date and Time? are you a GM or looking for one?) Can all of that information even fit into one message? How should chatizens interested in the game voice out their interest? What other things do we need to look out for when implementing this?

Answer 1

I've seen a lot of chat rooms on a lot of Stacks, and I'm sorry to say a dedicated LFG room will just freeze and die. An LFG room is only as useful as its traffic volume, and most users simply don't want another room to keep track of. A dedicated room has all the problems of the main chat PLUS fewer eyes on the material and less activity to keep it from freezing over.

Instead, ping a moderator or room owner (me!) in RPG General Chat to pin your (short, clear) LFG message to the star bar. Pinning puts a message at the top of the star bar for two weeks, getting it the maximum potential exposure this site can offer--far more than a dedicated LFG room ever could.

As for the content of the message to be pinned in General Chat, keep it short and sweet--then add more information in further messages afterward. People will click through to the transcript to read the details if your pinned message got them interested.

I can think of least a dozen games off the top of my head which were started through RPG General Chat discussion; it works. There's no need to formalise or formulise the process beyond getting the announcement (not the full details, just the pitch) pinned (again, just ping me!) if you want to make it an open call.