Making a lot of Progress in Our First Week

Central Coast Game Community

Sep 04, 2022

Announcements

This weekly newsletter is intended to journal the efforts and progress of the D&D community project on the central coast. I expected to be writing this into the void, but it looks like we actually have a couple subscribers, and I want to thank you, and future readers (?) for coming on this journey with me on the central coast. I can be long winded, so I am going to break these newsletters into sections so you can read only the sections that interest you (see Housekeeping for descriptions of each section).

Rumors From The Barkeep

Lady’s Night

According to Ken at Leisure Time Games, there is a ladies only group planning to play D&D at Leisure Time Games in the Town Center Mall on Monday evenings after 5pm. It is unknown if they will be accepting new members, but it is exciting to hear that there will be an in-person game at the mall again!

D&D At School

Lakeview Junior High School just started a D&D after school program this week! It looks like they meet on Thursdays, and is hosted by one of the teachers.

Abel Maldonado Community Youth Center

Most of you probably already know, but I’ll say it here one more time just in case you haven’t heard. The Abel Maldonado Center has a monthly D&D game every fourth Saturday from 1pm to 5pm DMed by yours truly. We are currently playing through Curse of Strahd, with certain elements toned down and comedic-relief turned up for obvious reasons.

Bulletin Board

Genesis

As of 9/5/2022 Central Coast D&D is only 10 days old, can you believe it? I had no idea I would gain so much attention so quickly. Four hours after a late night post on r/santamaria I had already gained my first member (discord handle Dr Pepper), and I realized that my plea to create a community here on the Central Coast wasn’t completely hopeless.

A couple weeks prior to my first post, I was asked by a friend if I knew any professional dungeon masters who could DM his bachelor party in Ventura (Ya, I know, I have the best friends lol). I started researching the Ventura area for DMs, I sent emails, posted on local boards, and eventually got a reply back from a DM who agreed to run a crazy one shot for my buddy’s big night. When we spoke to the DM on the phone though, I realized how tightly knit the D&D community in Ventura actually is. The DM we ultimately hired in fact has been a professional DM since 2014, and everything he said about the community kept swimming in my head for the next week; this was the seed that lead to my post.

Dungeons & Dragons means a lot to me, it was how my friends and I socialized in high school, it has given me endless insights into character development and empathy for others, it has helped me kick an embarrassing addiction to video games, and it’s a huge creative outlet. I know it means a lot to others as well, and that is why I am so motivated to bring us all together, and I am so grateful for our early successes so far.

Planning a Meet & Greet

Currently on the discord channel #lets-plan-something we are discussing the possibility of planning a meet & greet on Sunday, October 2nd, or Saturday, October 1st. This conversation is currently pending a reply from Naughty Oak. Pop into the channel and give us your two cents.

Member Highlights

Several members have begun using the #optional-roles channel on the discord and labeled their LFG status. If you don’t know yet, you can assign yourself a new ‘role’ that effectively changes your status to one of the following: DM Looking For Player, Group Looking For DM, Player Looking For Group, New To D&D Please Help.

DMs Looking for Players: @dr pepper, @Chay
Groups Looking for DMs: none
Players Looking For Groups: @CeeJaaay
New D&D Player Need Help: @CeeJaaay

Future issues of the newsletter will highlight specific members who are trying to connect with people to play D&D, in hopes of helping them find their group.

Efforts & Progress

Efforts

So far the efforts we have made in the way of community outreach are mostly online in public forums: Reddit, Craigslist, Nextdoor, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, I have repurposed my website for the community, and I solicited an old and out of date discord server Central Coast Game Community, converting 3 local members to our community.

We created a flyer and placed a small stack with Ken at Leisure Time Games, though I am having a little trouble with my printer, so I haven’t been able to create any more, but plan to leave some with On The Play Gaming as well.

We also created a logo and made a concerted effort to standardize our brand across all of our platforms.

I reached out to several small businesses in the area for permission to game in their establishment including: Leisure Time Games, On The Play Gaming, and Naughty Oak. We are still in talks with Naughty Oak, but it is looking promising.

The Discord server has been a huge success since the beginning, and I am on a crash course to becoming a good-enough developer for that platform. Most of my time and effort has been put towards creating an intuitive server for members who are unfamiliar with the platform to use.

Progress

As of the time I am writing this, we have 13 members including myself. 11 of which found us organically, and only 1 of which I invited personally, I having already known them before this project started. I am very proud of this fact, and I believe it is a proof of concept that our community is full of prospective members.

I try to engage with all new members as they join, and from that it seems that the majority of our members found us through Reddit, namely the r/santamaria post (coincidentally, the first post I made 8/27/22). I have 1 confirmed member from the flyer, and 1 from Nextdoor.com.

As mentioned above, we have flyers in the mall, and I plan to refill the stack periodically as soon as I fix the printing issues I am having.

Discord user by the handle @FreyMaru has agreed to the role of Server Admin, and will be able to step in, in the case that I am unable to; I am very grateful of this, please thank @FreyMaru if you get the chance.

Housekeeping

Newsletter Updates

The section titled Announcements is going to be short & to the point, and will only cover important announcements.

The section titled Rumors From The Barkeep is going to cover updates that may not have to do specifically with Central Coast D&D, but are gaming related and are on the central coast; I will keep this section at the top of the newsletter, under Announcements.

The section titled Bulletin Board is going to cover community updates, milestones, and highlight locals who are looking for a group to play D&D with! I will keep this section just under Rumors From The Barkeep, because I imagine these two sections will be the most read.

The section titled Efforts and Progress is going to cover the major updates affecting the whole of Central Coast D&D; I will keep this positioned after Bulletin Board.

The section titled Housekeeping is going to cover minor updates affecting the management of Central Coast D&D; I will keep this at the end of the newsletter.

Discord Updates

Upgraded our discord server to a "Discord Community" which gives us the ability to require users to have verified emails, and discord will automatically scan our server for spam (I have the link to this server posted in a lot of places, I was getting nervous that someone might jump in and send unwanted messages to our members)

New members can only view the #welcome channel, once they click on the thumbs-up emoji however @Good Bot will give them access to the rest of the server.

Several channels no longer allow comments, so that the only comments visible are from administrators (Like this channel, the latest announcement will always be visible because there will never be comments allowed).

Permission for commenting in the #venues channels will be given to verified owners/managers of any of the venues represented in #venues so that they may correct any misrepresentations about their businesses.

Added channel #suggestions - All club related suggestions and related discussion.

Added channel #socials - All CentralCoastDnD socials (these were removed from #announcements )

As a Discord Community (not a regular discord server) we are required to have official rules and enforcement of our rules. I personally do not want to assume the responsibility of rule enforcement on the server any longer than I have to, I think the community will better benefit from communal enforcement, but this is what i came up with.

Personally, I don't really like rules, so I guess the rules are, just don't be the reason we have to make any rules; the Golden Rule comes to mind. Maybe this will change in the future, I am only the architect, I'll leave moderation standards up to the community members.

Other Updates

I have repurposed www.centralcoastdnd.com to be a place where I can send people to connect with our socials. I will also be posting a copy of the newsletter there under Blog & Newsletter, and plan to develop it further in coming weeks.

Thank You

Thank you all for joining me this week. I am very excited to play D&D with you all, and hopefully I get the chance to play with you all.

Inspiration for everyone!

Your local DM, Chay Comas