Prime-time Adventures Season as a Con Game?

[kirby1024]

So, I've been rereading through my PTA book after a year or so of doing not a lot with it, and I suddenly hit on a cute idea that I wanted some feedback on.

The Roleplaying cons that I normally go to have between 8 and 13 sessions. It occurred to me that it'd be quite possible to run a full season of a PTA series at a con, doing one episode per session, with different groups playing each episode.

Now, there's a few traps that I can immediately think of right now in a format like this, like not having the usual buy-in, of having individual players not getting to see the full character arc, etc. But I wanted to hear what everyone else thinks of the general concept. Doomed to fail? Clearly a hit?

[oliof]

You can run a 4 or 5 episode mini series in a 4 hour slot with 5 players if you don't need to explain much of PtA and the show's premise is well understood. As facilitator of the game, you can help that going along by proposing a well known genre/setting (I did it twice; once with 'Mafia drama', the other time with 'ShadowRun') and making sure you have people at the table who have a good understanding of story structure/tv tropes.

[Standback]

I've done a smaller version of this - running 3 episodes of a 5-episode season at a long convention.

Two games were filled; the third was empty. A bit of a problem, perhaps, running the same game over and over. Or maybe my concept wasn't catchy enough.

The point being, the games I ran went very well, even though none of the players continued from one to the next. I'm planning to try it again next opportunity I can - probably our next springtime convention. Meanwhile, we're doing a little experiment involving a bunch of different GMs running different episodes from the same series, simultaneously.

[chance.thirteen]

I think it would be good if you could show case the spotlight function by having each player get to have their character in a high light and a support episode.