ANST - Re: Amtgard vs. the SCA

[Laury Torrence]

> ~Ld.Johan Bjornsson wrote:
> Folks, just let it be.  The teens will hang out with people their age
> and Amtgard has more teens-per-populace than we do.
                <snip>
> We don't really need to be recruiting individual, or groups, of teens
> without having their parents involved...its a recipe for disaster.
                <snip>
>  Active recruitment for the Amtgard teens will be bad in the long run.
                <snip>
> as well as drawing fire from the entire Amtgard populace
> in general.

There are certain truisms here.......teens *do* generally want to hang
out with people there own age.  Amtgard *does* have, by far, a larger
populace base of teen-agers than we do in the SCA.

I have a problem myself with recruiting teenagers without their parents. But
I'm still trying to figure out when this became a *recruiting* discussion.  This
began as a discussion of how to *retain* our teens *already* in the SCA's
interest, since they are not allowed to participate in combat while underage
(with exceptions I'm sure).  A lot of the teens I speak to, enjoy playing fantasy
RPG's once in a while, but *prefer* the ambience and social structure of the
SCA much better.
Forgive the generalism here, but for the most part, I wouldn't want to have the
sort of goofy, immature kids I've seen playing with the Amtgard group.  The ones
that are interested in coming to play with us, are as a rule, *much* more mature
and educational minded than the rest.  As for drawing fire from them, we already do.
Some of the things I've heard in the past border on the hilarious, they are as creative
with their "put downs" as they are with their games!  It's hard to get mad at a young
person who looks at you in all seriousness and says "I don't want to play with the SCA
because you guys are too strict, you can't throw spell-bags in a melee" <there was a lot
of blinking from me here, hard to keep a straight face>
At any rate, what we need to remember, yet again, is our young people are a resource,
not a burden. Maybe we should try a bit harder to assist them in finding a way to fit in
better.

HE Caterina
je suis le tenebreux


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