IC:Free-form Adult Slice of Life still around?
As someone who both runs one of those games which I semi inherited but has also noticed that trend, I think there's a couple of things to consider:
As others have mentioned, the 'getting in early' bit is quite a big one. Given freeform by its nature will tend to move more in the direction of story over crunch, I think there can often be something intimidating about seeing a game with 2000+ posts and finding a way into that, and it can come through in terms of new players joining and perhaps finding it hard to slot into existing storylines.
I think that also then can cause a bit of a vicious cycle because it is harder to recruit at that point, and any time you lose a player due to natural wastage then it does tend to mean that your only source of new characters and plot points is existing players piloting secondary or tertiary characters, and that can give a fairly poor indication of the health of a game at any given time.
I'd also note that the Adult rating is a bit of a double edged sword, because it can be fairly hard for people to know what the balance is between writing intimacy/romance/boot knocking and actual plot, especially when most of your work will probably not be on public facing threads due to the requirements not to have Adult material accessible for non members.
As such, our game does contain a certain amount of boot knocking and romance, but it's certainly not constant and I'd maybe say we're talking 15-20% of the game's IC posts at best, but if you look through the cast list, it's hard to necessarily always glean that from what players put as a priority in terms of their character's interests and appearance. It doesn't also help that the thread for advertising it on Players Wanted has the title of 'Sex, lies and Lawyers', which doesn't help with people's preconceptions but I can't actually change it because another of the GM's posted the original thread!
Ultimately, I think we always see ebbs and flows in interest in games and styles as time goes on - go back a decade and there were a lot of Mature freeform games, but for various reasons (demographic change, more Adult content bleeding into mainstream popular culture) they're a lot less common now, and we've also seen a lot more game systems which feel more akin to freeform but offering a bit more structure which give people the best of both worlds (such as Blades in the Dark and other PbtA titles).
To directly address OP's post, I'd largely agree with bazhsw:
- Find a good angle or niche for the game to sit (be it in terms of a setting/location or the main dynamic of the game).
- Be very clear about the balance of romance to plot and your expectations for your players and their characters, but also accept different players will want different things.
- Really set out your stall as a GM in terms of what you can and will offer - an open sandbox will work for some people, but there's a very fine balance between giving players freedom to do what they want and not giving enough support to keep players engaged. Just because it's freeform doesn't mean you have to do any less work, and do consider whether you might want to look for a couple of co-GMs or mods to share the load when it comes to running NPCs.
- Accept that unless you're really lucky, you're going to eventually get to a point where you'll find it harder to get new players in because of the size of the game, and you'll probably end up relying on a core group, so maybe consider how you're going to deal with that in your planning (either by really going for a large player base or having the game with a fairly limited scope and then a reset)
This message was last edited by a moderator, as it was against the forum rules, at 14:05, Fri 20 Oct 2023.