Making a Verein/Association - Knowledge Thread

Off Topic
32

Not going blind into this, I am aware that beauracracy is annoying and tedious, but that paper pushing is what lets this be responsible and can be audited to provide a certain amount of safety.

Yes, I do have a smattering of Latin as well as can understand context xD I would understand “pro forma” to include “for the purposes of legal liablity”. So that on paper, no individual is legally/financially responsible (yes, I understand that within the Verein some one still has to have liability, but there is a legal distinction between being liable for the behaivor of the Verein and being individually liable) (brain tired, getting liable and responsible confused, too tired to fix now)

You’ve brought up that YOU dont have issues turning ideas into actions and now Spielbar. Anecdotal proof and (imo) exceptions are a bad form of counter arguement. I dont know the story behind Spielbar, was/is there a signed agreement for Thursdays? Cause if it was all verbal, well we had that with 1070 too, until we didn’t.

Please have klaxons go off, the more open questioning, the (I hope) clearer I can be. IF any paywalling would occur, it would be no different than WOW Keepers: for the use of space and commodities provided. We are far off from this. Like at least a full calender year before it is reasonable to discuss any kind plan.

As to data, again, I’d love to be able to rely on the Members List here, but activity here isn’t a great way to do this. Many people dont check the forum on a weekly basis and I dont want a bunch of polls people dont see.

I’m imagining something along the lines of:
How many express interest in being members in the Verein
Their expected attendance (how many times a year)
A general vote on priorities of what would like to be added (e.g. buy stuff to keep at WOW Keepers or negotiate with WOW Keepers for lower fees for our members) spitballing here

How to poll for opinions best/effective? A mailing list? I dont see polls on the forum working, unless they’re around for like a month and people actively mention them at every VALUE.

honestly too tired right now to formulate more complex thoughts

1 Like
33

more reasonable would be 30 at best

you can look at the number of individual people showing up of the last 4 weeks of FR & SA VALUE and add the gazeebo gamers
… followed by subtracting those who showed up only once in that timeframe

edit: we are ~ 22 players (see below)

…

anyway good luck :+1:

34

Regarding numbers, yes, I can see a reduction in numbers due to the paywall of the WOW Keepers. I’d like to find a way to reduce that burden on members. What are your thoughts on that, @Darthbinks?

A secondary component for reduced numbers is summer vacation, lots of people are out of town with family or just going outside to the park. I expect to see numbers surge again in fall, as they did last year.

I genuinely dont understand why both @Darthbinks and @H take the paywall quote out of context. Literally the rest of the sentence is “and there is no intent to guarantee the paywall”, as in, if people arent for it, then it won’t happen. I’m honestly doing my best to be clear, but this feels like a bad faith quote.

This isnt a unilateral thing, it’s an effort to get a proper democratic vote.

Going post by post, here the cons that have been presented:
Having a Verein wont prevent drama/stealing
Not everyone involved in RPG Vienna wants to be involved in the Verein
Vereins are a lot of work
A Verein wont guarantee success of ideas
Renting spaces: bridge to be crossed if a space like that turns out to be the best option for those who want it
Politics in regards to Verein stuff
It’s not possible to make everyone happy with changes

35

This is a good post and I’d like to reply to parts of it.

Without sounding too overdramatic here: At that time, nothing else existed. I seem to remember Google + and Facebook Groups were fairly new at the time and I considered setting something up on those. I also had to scour some RPG forums (like enworld) to find people who might be interested. (I think Amlash was the first person I contacted who showed an interest) I ultimately decided against G+ and Facebook as not everyone had access to those platforms and a forum of my own meant that, even though it wouldn’t be ‘free’, I could control it. (I’m really glad I did this. G+ eventually shut down and Facebook Groups is a total mess!)

I personally have no problem with this. It’s a community of like-minded people who happen to have this forum to have a chat and coordinate things. If a better thing comes along, I’d want people to go for it and get involved. A couple of years ago, A few members of RPGV started up a separate ‘dndvienna’ discord which was more online focused and build around the ‘West Marches’ concept. It was a nice idea and I was part of the initial voice chat too.

I don’t remember exactly (of course!) but I’m pretty sure I Googled something like ‘RPGs in Vienna’ before the idea of a forum came up. I thought diefestung.com was probably something close to what I was looking for and I’d visited there previously to have a couple of intro games of 40k (which is why it’s really cool that there’s a link with WoW/Keepers again!) but I wanted to play D&D in English. 4e was out at the time and due to reading some negative opinions of it, I thought rpgvienna would be a better choice over dndvienna as it was more system agnostic.

Absolutely true :heart:

All of the ideas you listed are really cool and it would be great too see them come to fruition. Everything you listed is possible without a Verein. However, transforming RPG Vienna into a Verein could have a negative outcome and I personally believe the cons outweigh the pros at the moment. Once it’s ‘official’ there’s not really any way back. It’s a bit of a risk. I’m proud of how it started and what it’s become and I’m always open to ideas and suggestions.

4 Likes
36

Instead of waiting for something better to come along, what speaks against us being better? The risk of the community falling apart? That same risk exists if we don’t do anything.

I agree that it is possible without a Verein. IMO The issues I see is lack of any kind of control from the side of RPG Vienna, lack of legal responisbilty from any individual and would ultimatly be MORE work then doing it with a Verein.

I would parellel that attempting this without a Verein to running a store where no one is an employee and just volunteers. Technically possible, but the lack of reliablity will eventually lead to failure.

However, not transforming RPG Vienna into a Verein could have a negative outcome and I personally believe the cons don’t outweigh the pros at the moment. Once it’s ‘official’ there’s a way back. (Majority vote to dissolve the Verein) It’s a bit of a risk. I’m proud of how it started and what it’s become and I’m always open to ideas and suggestions.

I have attempted to list the mentioned cons above:

Having a Verein wont prevent drama/stealing
Not everyone involved in RPG Vienna wants to be involved in the Verein
Vereins are a lot of work
A Verein wont guarantee success of ideas
Renting spaces: bridge to be crossed if a space like that turns out to be the best option for those who want it
Politics in regards to Verein stuff
It’s not possible to make everyone happy with changes

What other cons have I missed? Because those cons exist whether there is a Verein or there isnt. It’s a matter of degrees that change. I would love to be able to address the cons and hesitations that exist, but am having trouble with processing them. (I have ADHD and am neuro-atypical, sometimes I need to be told repeatedly to get it through my thick skull, I do apologize for the inconvenience) Please be SPECIFIC with concerns

I feel like I’m coming across pushy and naggy (also repeating myself and being annoying). I’m just excited for the possiblities, but dont want to go forward without geniune support. I’m doing my best to present merits and demerits in an unbaised way, but am obviously fallible. I do wish best vibes and feel goods to all.

37

For who? Can you elaborate on this a bit more?

I saw one suggestion that the Verein could negotiate with a location more effectively than what’s possible at the moment but I don’t agree with this. H pointed out that as a group, we’d “book” some tables at spielbar and they would set them aside. That worked really well for a long time. Also, I don’t think negotiating with WoW Keepers for a lower entry fee is at all necessary. In fact, it’s extremely rude.

A lot of the reasons you’re bringing up in favor of a Verein seem purely financial and I don’t think that’s a good basis to build upon.

1 Like
38

at WOW/Keepers the first three times are free → so I don’t think that’s the reason
it is just a bit less central than our previous location, but still very accessable
… and as mentioned above after the 3rd time, the cost will be still below a café/restaurant
… and given the costs and efford running a location like this, the price seems reasonable

also there are 3 venues now, where currently gamers run “Open-Tables” regulary
(Sägewerk, WOW/Keepers and Türkenschanzpark :deciduous_tree: )
all with their indiviual advantages :slight_smile: :+1:

numbers have gone up and down in the past before
once we had 6-7 tables in Spielbar too (all playing Indie RPGs :slight_smile:)
that is just part of life

39

Hey all I guess I will throw my hat in the mix because I have been pinged twice in here now…I also tried some formatting to make it easier to find what you’re looking for

Wow Keepers Questions

  • @Jackfruitchilli WoWKeepers asks 60 bucks for a yearly membership and then you pay the reduced cost of 3 Euros per week. I paid for that membership and was allowed to include regular members which to me are Dungeon Masters so they also pay the reduced rate. Everyone else is 6 Euros but can individually get in touch with WoWKeepers. There is also a once a year 180 bucks option.

    • This is a very reasonable rate compared to playing at a Cafe and compared to renting out your own space. This is because WoW has the numbers we do NOT have. At our height we had 60 players. And even considering that number it would still be more expensive to rent our own place.

  • As mentioned by @Darthbinks the first three times at WoWkeepers are free so the paywall is no problem. I think the biggest turnoff for most is that it is an old cellar with a really small entrance but it hasn’t stopped from a lot of cool new people joining us.

  • @Rayce_Kaiser we are paying dues to a Verein that is giving a space to Table top Gaming. There is warhammer, numenerra and other dnd groups. You are making it sound like competition.

  • They were also really chill when I made a handful of mistakes in the beginning

How would we conduct a survey on… anything?

That is easy enough in my Opinion… us admins can just cross reference users by their Account age, then we check which of these accounts had recent activity and those are the people we want to include in such things. One would have to define a cut off point kinda like we did with our DM rules for V.A.L.U.E games March last year. Or we just throw a google forms in the discord say only allowed with google account registration and call it a day though that would be pretty low effort…

A loveletter to @Rayce_Kaiser

Hey Kaiser I have been reading your posts and it is very clear to me that you are as passionate if not even more passionate about this community than me. I also want to do more and cooler things, mostly spread the good word of TTRPGs to more people.

However

The idea that a Verein would make us more robust does not hold any water for me. I have successfully revived the Friday games twice now without any backing simply by organizing at 1070 by organizing WoWKeepers with the help of @Stracci and I am certain we will do it again should something happen.

The real reason for a verein is to get funding to do cool stuff

but space in Vienna is expensive, events we can still attend by just acting like one and everything else like merch and stuff is cute but at the end of the day feels very capitalist to some extent.

The fact is that we cannot go under, unless The Forum and Discord die at the same time. We will always have at least some people that are going to want to play at some point that is the beauty of it.

Hot takes from a guy that is too young

  • @H I wouldn’t call us perfectly egalitarian. Definitely a lot flatter than other places and that is beautiful, however we have admins and mods and just a lot of people that have naturally taken to leadership positions. I don’t think it could hurt to carry that outwards more. Especially new people want to gravitate towards someone that looks like they are responsible.
  • I don’t want to get too much into the nitty gritty of Vereinsgründung. I feel like that is what the actual date is for. However it would feel very much wrong to use the RPGVienna label for something that is not approved by the founders per se.
  • I am also not sure how it would work but @Mexikorn 's idea seems reasonable. Keep the legal stuff to a part of our efforts not the entire RPGVienna brand.
5 Likes
40

To try and give us a sense of how many of us there are at present, I went back over the VALUE games for 2023 so far (1070, WOWKeepers, Sagewerks) and looked at who registered to attend. Basically it looks like we have a core of ~16 folk who turn up a lot and a big fuzzy cloud of others who sometimes make it.

If we count people in seats throwing dice, there were ~ 420 of them at all the VALUE events so far. Just over half (216/420) times those dice-throwers were the same 16 people. So about half of our activity is coming from 1/6 of the people.

Other bits from what I see:

  • It looks like we have had 102 people show up at least once this year across 28 events.
  • 6 people have been at more than half the events this year
  • If you joined more than 2 events you were in the top half of our active members
  • 26 folk joined more than twice but aren’t part of the “16 most active” group. We saw them 5 times on average.
  • 43 people only turned up once so far this year
  • on average we get 15 people/event at WoWkeepers (vs 20 in the last days of 1070)
  • on average we get 10 people/event at Sagewerk

Caveat: all this exclude the Gazebo, guests that people brought along and walk-ins. Those may make a difference but I do not think it would be a times-ten difference.

4 Likes
41

gazebo-rpg has 6 “often attenting people”
so we could say the number of folks who turn up a lot is 22 people

@xaosseed you can look at the gazebo statistics here

1 Like
42

With recent conversations about code of conduct, safety officers, banning people… I honestly think that these kinds of things would need to be tasked by the community in a structured way that is minuted. While the “disciplinary / Officer” thing is the only reason I see to support building a Vereinsstruktur, I do think the thread is worth reviving - so I guess I’ll bump this topic and see if it catches on… edited for typos

2 Likes
43

I fully agree. I’d also be in favor of a Verein. It would make organization a lot easier - safety tools and officers are just one aspect of that - as well as acquiring and maintaining a location. RPGVienna has grown so much over the last years, and instead of just being a “reserve” in case WoWKeepers is overcrowded, the Requisite is now as popula - we usually have 40 or more people playing each friday.

In case we acquire our own location, it oculd be used by private groups outside of VALUE time.

Another advantage of being a Verein is that RPGVienna could own items that all DMs and players can use. I am thinking of stuff that can’t just easily be brought to each session like dice and character sheets - I am thinking mofre about a large collection of miniatures (including bigger, more cumbersome ones like dragons you can’t easily amd safely carry around in a bag), 3D printers, terrain, digital battlemaps (screens you lie down on a table and connect to your laptop to display a VTT map on)…

Of course if we actually start a Verein, I would offer my assistance :wink:

1 Like
44

My perspective, seeing as I didn’t actually weigh in last year…

I love all these ideas. I think realistically, the reason there are lots of players is because it’s easy and uncomplicated. That might change (depending on what kind of rules for non-Verein-players we’d come up with). I think it would be awesome to have a 3D printer, terrain, source books, and all that - but it kind of feels like in the beginning, and possibly forever, it would essentially be a few elected officials, a few people paying a fee, and some bylaws. Which is a lot administratively, for little return. I doubt we’d be able to afford a place to play.

I’m wondering more along the lines of existing groups. Maybe we could attach ourselves to a Verein that already exists - say, Paradice Board Games or I think there’s Athenas Siegel for german D&D? - and essentially form our own sub-group within that.

45

Maybe @frogemiah can also give us some insight? She has played in a successful D&D Verein in Austria (Graz I believe?) before coming to Vienna and joining us.

Also, we already have to pay a fee each day (or become a member of the WoWKeepers Verein) to play VALUE; so the change wouldn’t actually be significant.

46

I am a Vereinsmeier. No one needs a verein.

it’s fees and bureaucracy.

2 Likes
47

As long as we are not in our own location, we’re going to have to keep paying a small fee to Requisite / Wow-Keepers. Just because we become a Verein doesn’t really change the way we have to pay for those locations. We are not going to find a location we can afford by let’s say 30 people paying 20 € a month (which seems like a bit much, anyway).

So would it be that Vereinsmembers pay a Vereinsfee AND a location fee? Would Vereinsmember pay less and “others” pay more? Would we find a like-minded group to go halfsies on the fees?

It’s all stuff that can be figured out if there’s a need to do it.

To me, at the moment it just feels a bit like maybe we’d be reinventing the wheel by actually starting up a Verein. The key benefit I see is the safety officer thing. I think that’s a bad reason to put up with all this work.

48

At WoWKeepers, it is actually either or, you don’t have to pay both a member fee and a location fee. At some other Vereine, members still pay, but a miniscule amount compared to non-members.

Also, you need to take into account that, as a Verein, we could have other ways to generate income - such as by selling snacks and drinks, events, donations, renting out our location in times we don’t need it…

(we could also cooperate with other Vereins, e.g. rent the location just for weekends, and during the week only have one room that belongs to us where we can keep all our stuff including e.g. a 3D printer and painting table).

I also think that with someone actually able to legally represent us (§5 VerG, §6 VerG), it would be much easier to organize events like Night of the Rolling Dice and to cooperate with other Vereine, and it would make RPGVienna more accessible for minors.

Also, in case there are legal disputes, the Verein itself would be the one held responsible, not individual members.

1 Like
49

I see it in a very similar way. It really depends on what you want or expect. For just coming to play on Friday nights… we don’t need more. Everything works just fine, and if something changes I am sure we will find a solution.

I am happy with how it is. Never change a running system. Somehow I get the feeling that this is true for many more participants, the simplicity is what’s so appealing. Maybe I am wrong, who knows.

3 Likes
50

(having V-XP) the main problem of a Verein is

  • it is work to run it
  • it takes time to run it, that could be used to actually run games
  • it creates hierarchy, and potential political drama
  • we don’t have the numbers to generate the money to benefit from a Verein

keep in mind that the VALUE events have a high turn-over rate and that if you show up 3 times in a year, you are actually in the top half of gamers (xaosseed did a statistic about this)
… the regulars are just two handful of people

51

Hey! Thanks for the mention, I do however think that I’m not all too qualified to talk, because I was not involved in the running of the “Verein” itself, meaning I don’t have the sufficient insight to provide you with any real, useful arguments. (I have also only really been at RPG-Vienna for a bit over two years, so take my words with a grain of salt)

But still, I can round up a couple of things that might help shape your view and compare to our situation:

  • The place I used to visit was not limited to pen & paper games, but also included tabletop games, LARP-ing, improvisation theater, J-POP culture and other similar surrounding topics. To me that implies that rather than catering to a very specific niche, (VALUE events are mostly just D&D 5e with the occasional table running a different system) it is more diversified, making more people likely to join and pay the fee that keeps the place running.

  • There were very limited opening times for members to visit, so even though there was a space reserved for the Verein, with a multitude of RPG systems and other useful items, you could only access it during a limited time window, on one single day in the middle of the week. Back in the day as a high school student with a fixed schedule, that wasn’t an issue, but as an adult with responsibilities? Difficult.

Again, I never had access to the “underbelly” of the operation so I can’t tell you why that is.

  • We were incredibly lucky to have incredible people in charge, persons who are all part of the community and willing to sacrifice the time to deal with the paperwork and not-so-fun parts of having your own organization. People here just aren’t willing to deal with that, and it’s totally understandable, the group of regular visitors is constantly shifting and getting members, administrating them, dealing with fees and many other things I can’t even imagine right now would be significantly more laborious and quite burdensome with so much constant change. (In comparison to a small city like Klagenfurt)

  • They have connections to other organizations and there are constant collaborations, even nowadays. The RPG and Tabletop Shop? Yep, they’re associated. The youth center? Right next door. Come right on in kiddos! The situation here is just so different. We’re very independent and more importantly than anything, a forum where people get to share a common love for their interests, so insisting on creating a Verein feels like it might come between that raw joy of sharing a wonderful hobby and getting to know like-minded people.

So, although I am not strictly against the idea, i do feel like our current constellation makes a Verein incompatible. Personally I would proceed with caution before saying “yes” or “no” to the proposition. It’s not so black and white and there are many pros and cons involved. Sure, having our own space and books would be great, but is it worth the cost that comes with it? (literally and figuratively) I also believe that Neil should be involved in this conversation and decision.

Yeah, I hope my opinions are at least semi-coherent and cohesive! :partying_face:

Other than that, I feel unqualified, so I’d rather stay out of the discussion, if anyone wants to chat about the topic please feel free to message me privately. :tada:

Edit: Yikes that is an essay.

8 Likes