Changing plans for a con game

[DaGreatJL]

Hey, just got back from Dundracon, and want to post about a game I ran there, and my experiences with it.

Okay, the first thing that screwed with my plans is that the con organizers didn't receive my application, and I didn't learn this until after the sign-up had ended. I still got in as official, but had to take a midnight-to-six slot, which really hurt me. In retrospect, I should've emailed the con to make sure they had got it. So there was mistake number 1.

Next, the blurb I wrote for the game was pretty uninspiring. I didn't explicitly mention that it was a cyberpunk game, which probably would've grabbed some attention (though I did say it was set on the streets of Manhattan in the year 2080, which should've been a clue.) Also, the game is very new, having come off the presses three or so weeks ago, so there most people wouldn't have heard of it, and may have been turned off by trying a game they don't know how to play already. I should've therfore put in a note saying 'Begineers welcome'. I didn't.

So, now we come time for the actual game. Five people sign up, out of eight slots, and only two of the five even show up.  Another person wanders in, and my girlfriend manages to scare up two more, which, including her, brings us up to six players.

Now, I had this big kind of what I guess could be called a Blood Opera game planned out. The action would center around a potential marrige between two of the player characters. They both belong to different homeless families that have managed to acquire power within the city; both families feel that the marrige would be okay, as long as the couple takes on THEIR family name, and lives as one of THEM. No compromise. The other players all would have agendas centering around the marrige; the jealous ex, the Iago-esque 'best friend' who wants to marry the boy herself, the protective brother who thinks the boyfriend is a loser, et cetera.

I didn't think that was going to happen, however. I didn't have all the players I wanted, the ones I DID have were exhausted from playing all day, and they didn't know the setting or rules well. Finally, though I had a pretty good grasp of the rules, I wasn't perfect, and the guy who wrote the game (a friend of mine) wasn't there to hold my hand. I could have dealt with any one of those problems, maybe any three, but all four together made me feel less than confident about pulling off what I wanted. So, I chickened out, and just ran one of the sample adventures from the book. It took about two hours (instead of the six we were scheduled for). It actually seemed to go well; the players said they enjoyed themselves, though they felt unsure about what their characters could actually do. Still, all the players had a good time, and seemed to like the game (meaning they might buy it).

If I run the game again at a con (and I plan to) the following is what I think I should do differently:

-Make sure I have the game registered well beforehand. The bad time slot may have been the single greatest thing that kept me from doing what I had planned.

-Write a better blurb, based on what I stated above.

-Have a sheet of paper for each character, summerizing the character's class, what their advantages and skills did, and the like. I had/have their motivations, goals, and personality well recorded, but this would've helped.

-(maybe)A quick-quick sheet or two of primer on the setting, with a little more detail than what I could provide in a five minute shpeil.

Any other comments what I could have done to better prep/run the game?

[james_west]

In my experience, for the typical weekend Con, Friday games are hard to fill, but you can run anything you want anytime on Saturday after noon. Even a midnight slot isn't that bad, if it's Saturday, although 10pm is better.

Next, if you want something as complex as it sounds like you did, I'd do a fairly extensive back-story on the characters as part of the handout; people will read them, in my experience. I'm sure this goes without saying, but you need some pretty hard bangs (to use Ron's term) to get them involved in the story right away.

Finally, you just can't expect con-goers to learn a complex rules set on the fly during a convention. It's probably not going to happen without getting exactly the result you did, even if you had known the rules backwards and forwards. Simple systems work OK, crunchy systems, probably not.

- James