07/26/2026
Good read, I’ve seen these things happen with new folks. We’re so excited to have a new friend that we suffocate them.
Fire Side Chat: Recruitment vs Assimilation
Recruit! Recruit! Recruit!
I frequently see people making posts online asking about the best way to bring people into the hobbies that we love. I get the heart behind these pleas, but I often find myself thinking, "are we missing the point?"
A large part of my mundane career is, for lack of a better term, recruiting and assimilation. In my world, those two things are very different from each other, and they are equally important. Many of the hobbies I'm involved with seem to only focus on the recruiting half of that equation while ignoring the assimilation half. I think our games assume that the game itself is so good that assimilation will just happen on its own. In my experience, that has never been the case.
Here's the way I've started thinking about it: recruitment is pouring water into a bucket. Assimilation is patching the holes. You can pour all day long, but if the bucket leaks, you're just tiring yourself out and wondering why the water level never rises. Most groups are exhausted from pouring and have never once looked at the bucket.
You can have the best recruitment process in the world and the best game in the world, but if your group isn't intentional about the "onboarding" process, most of the new people you bring in will never make it to the point where they truly enjoy your game. If your group doesn't do a good job of welcoming new people, making them feel comfortable, and shepherding them to the "next step," then the percentage of them who actually stick around long-term is going to be small.
So how can our games do a better job of assimilating new players into our groups? I think it comes down to two areas.
1. Local Assimilation
The easiest way to "set the hook" for a new player is to make sure they have an amazing time at your local gathering, whether that's a larp field, the back room of a card shop, or someone's garage. What they'll actually remember is whether they felt noticed.
The biggest mistake I see at the local level is overwhelming someone. We love this stuff so much that we want to dump all of it on a newcomer at once , every rule, every bit of lore, every inside joke. Don't. Let them ease their way in. Your job on day one isn't to make them an expert. It's to make them want to come back on day two.
A few specific things that help, none of which are "the rules".
Put gear in their hands, and lower the cost of entry over time. A newcomer standing on the sideline because they don't own anything is a newcomer you're about to lose. My local group has a simple ladder for this: when someone comes out a second time, we give them a sword, paid for out of the group's coffers. On their fourth time out, we let them choose a free piece of garb (these usually come from the practice pieces our veteran players make while they're working on new things). Nothing fancy, but the message is enormous: we invested in you, so stick around. Whatever your hobby's cost-of-entry is, find a way to remove it for the first few visits.
Give them a person, not a pamphlet. Assign someone (a battle buddy, a sponsor, a friendly veteran) whose whole job that day is this one new person. Not to lecture them, but to stand next to them, introduce them around, and make sure they're never the awkward stranger holding a foam sword alone.
Small wins, not a beatdown. Nobody comes back to get bodied by the vet who's been playing for twelve years. Let them land a hit. Let them win a hand. Throttle the intensity so their first taste is fun, not humbling.
Learn their name, and remember it. The single cheapest, highest-impact thing your group can do is know their name the second time they show up. That one moment says "you belong here" louder than any recruitment pitch ever could.
Invite them to the after-part. The food run, the group chat, the hangout once the game ends. That's where the game becomes people, and people are what someone actually stays for.
2. Event Assimilation
Here's where a lot of new players quietly fall off, and most groups never even see it happen.
Someone can have a blast at your local gathering for weeks and still never make the jump to a full event. And it's almost never because they don't want to go. It's because the whole thing is a giant unknown, and unknowns are stressful. I don't think our games do a good job of relieving the stress a first-time event-goer feels. Their head is full of questions they might be too embarrassed to ask out loud:
Where do I park? What am I going to eat? What do I even need to bring? Where do I set up my tent? Where are the bathrooms? If something goes wrong, who do I go to?
None of that is about the game. It's all logistics and logistics are exactly the kind of friction that stops a nervous newcomer from ever showing up, especially with the type of person our games generally attract, those with differing levels of social anxiety.
The fix I've landed on is simple: I try to offer a class on the first night of every event aimed specifically at first-time event-goers. It covers the boring, essential stuff that veterans forgot they ever had to learn:
-Who to go to if they need help
-A walk around the site so they know where the restrooms, feast hall, and camping areas are
-Answers to the practical questions of parking, food, what to pack
-And an open floor for anything else they're wondering about
It costs me one hour on the first night. In return, a brand-new person goes from "I hope I'm not screwing this up" to "okay, I've got this" and a relaxed newcomer is a newcomer who comes back. If you run events and you don't have something like this, it might be the single highest-return hour you can spend all weekend.
Recruitment gets all the attention because it's the exciting part. It feels like growth. But bringing someone through the door once was never the hard part, keeping them is. And keeping them isn't about having a better game. It's about being intentional: lowering the barriers, easing them in, giving them a person to stand next to, and clearing away the stress at every step from their first day to their first event.
So by all means, recruit. But before you write your next "how do we get more people?" post, go look at your bucket. It might not need more water. It might just need someone to patch the holes.
