Ambassador - Lesson 1
What is an Ambassador?
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Hello there!
Welcome to the Ambassador Program for Star Wars™: Unlimited!
I’m Jonah - and I’m the program director here at Cascade Games. We are working in concert with the designers and developers of Star Wars: Unlimited at Fantasy Flight Games to create a certification program that lines up with the needs of the game to help foster community, growth, and learning across the globe.
This is the first in a series of lessons to help you earn your certification as an official ambassador for Star Wars: Unlimited. These lessons provide key knowledge for understanding the philosophies and best practices of Ambassadors.
Note that the Ambassador program is separate from the Judge Program, with separate goals, separate education, and separate certifications.
What is an Ambassador?
Ambassadors are central to their community, wherever they choose to set it up. They encourage new players to join and for veterans to try something new. They don’t have any explicit authority or power, but instead help develop their local play through their knowledge and support.
This also means that they’re held to a higher standard of behavior than other members of the community - when people look to you as a source of knowledge or influence, they also follow your lead. An ambassador who acts in non-sporting ways, or demonstrates unwelcoming attitudes is exceptionally detrimental to their community and their own growth.
But what does an Ambassador actually do? Well, it depends on what you want to do? At the fundamental level, we’re going to provide education and training on how to develop a community for Star Wars: Unlimited.
Ambassadors teach the game, run demos, and bring new players into the game.
They also help organize events, running clubs or leagues - often outside the structures of the local game store, but sometimes working with an individual store or work between several stores in an area.
Beyond that, Ambassadors can expand beyond the local community, stepping up to be a content creator or an influencer. They can teach rules, talk about the meta, design formats and ways to play, or just show off gameplay!
What is not an Ambassador?
Ambassadors are not (necessarily) judges. Ambassadors aren’t given explicit training in the minutiae of the rules or policy, as that’s not an expectation of them. While an Ambassador may also be a judge, that isn’t an expectation or a requirement.
Ambassadors also aren’t necessarily running events, so they won’t have as much necessary training on the logistics - but since they’re sometimes hosting or organizing, they’ll be trained in that perspective, which is somewhat different from the perspective of judges.
How do I become an Ambassador?
We’ll be rolling out several more lessons for the first rank of Ambassador. They’ll cover how to run demos in a way very similar to how it’s been covered for Apprentices, how to create an immersive narrative demo, and then some lessons on creating the atmosphere you want, how to host events, and how to bring people into your community.
Those lessons, like all other lessons won’t be required, but they’re strongly encouraged. Like with the other certifications we offer, there will be an exam - and the exam won’t cover objective rules and policy, like they do for other certifications. There will be more of a focus on philosophy and ideals, which can be difficult to intuit at times.
Before you can take the exam, there is a two-step checklist you must complete first. These two items can be accomplished in either order.
- Community Ideals: You must submit a self-review briefly discussing what you want to do as an ambassador and how or why you want to grow your community. This is to help you have a battle plan before you get started, so that you have something that can guide you as you move forward.
- An Endorsement: We ask for endorsements frequently, to make sure that you’re a real person, are a good fit for your local community, and can convince at least one other person to take an action. This endorsement must come from a Tournament Organizer, L1 or higher Judge and L2 or higher Ambassador.
- If you already have an endorsement for L1, this requirement is waived.
- An endorsement for Ambassador does not waive the requirement for L1 endorsements.
We’re excited to start sharing more opportunities and ideas for you to help grow your community in the coming days and weeks, and even more excited to see the communities you help grow and develop!
If you’re watching this on YouTube, and you want more lessons in your feed, go ahead and subscribe. Join us Tuesdays and Fridays after new lessons on twitch.tv/swu_judges for live broadcasts covering the content of these lessons as they are released, and join the Star Wars: Unlimited Judge Program Discord to join the community in discussion of this and much, much more.
Until next time, good luck and have fun!