I wanted to post a quick summary of all five scheduled sessions I ran at GenCon this year, in case someone may benefit from them.  But before I do, some thoughts on scheduled indie game sessions in response to Jason M's comment...

Jason wrote:
3.  Regularly scheduled games are a pain in the ass and possibly not worth the trouble.  The only up-side was that it brought maybe ten people to play our games that wouldn't have known about them otherwise.  Balance that with logistical and administrative headaches, shitty time slots, poor management, and other irritating problems.

Spirit of the Century

I ran two sessions of this, which I will discuss together.  One, "the Warlord of Fear", had as its base plotline the fact that Cao Yun, a major criminal gang lord in Hong Kong circa 1932, was planning on making a play to take over Fujian province from Shan Shi Lan, its current "governor" (Aspect: Less brutal than most warlords).  Cao Yun's base was in Kowloon's Walled City.  The characters start at a tai-pan's dinner party with Shan Shi Lan as the guest of honor, where a group of Cao Yun's Golden Coin triad (let by Tony "Hot-Hand" Chow and his chrome plated mausers) try to assasinate him.  The plot was fairly straightforward as it was actually played, with the characters stopping "Hot-Hand", doing a bit of investigation, and then raiding Cao Yun's compound.

The other was "the Jade Ogre", about a dreaded pirate who was laying waste to shipping in the South Pacific circa 1932.  The characters start on board the S.S. Sumatra, bound for Sydney out of Hong Kong.  Of course, the vessel is attacked by the Jade Ogre and, as it turned out, the characters fought him and his Zeppelin flying minion Professor Klause Belial off.

My set up for both sessions was virtually the same.  I had 11 pregen characters, each one with a different Superb skill and a fair amount of variety in the Great skills as well, so that each character would have something they alone were really good at.  Three were "fighter" types (top skills Might, Weapons, and Guns), three were "talking" types (top skills Deceit, Rapport, and Intimidation) and the others were a smattering of different things.  I left five aspect slots and 9 of the skill slots (filling only the superb, both great, one good, and two average) empty, for customization by the players on the fly.  Strangely, in both sessions four out of the five players all picked the exact same pregens.  I'm not sure if this is because the others sucked, or these were so good, or just random chance.  I also had about a page of notes for both sessions and a few (2-3) main NPC's stated up for each.  I just winged the rest of it.

One bit of fiction to give you and idea of just how freaking cool Spirit of the Century is.  So, Professor Hank Jeffersion (Superb Skill - Might, Great Skills - Academics, Survival, Key aspects - "Field Anthropologist", "6'6", 275 pounds of pure muscle", "University of Kansas, Omaha") is on the S.S. Sumatra as it is being attacked from within by bribed crewmen and from above by a Zeppelin.  He goes to the edge of the ship and looks down to see the Jade Ogre's submarine, and a horde of the Jade Ogre's pirates climbing up cargo netting to the ship.  Jade Ogre himself is on the deck.  Hank has the Piledriver stunt (+4 to attacks against inanimate objects) so he attacks the netting, ripping it free and tossing the pirates into the water.  Jade Ogre looks up, smiles his jade-tooth smile (a detail supplied by one player, I might add) and calls Hank down.  Hank has the aspect "mild-tempered", but says, "I'll be right down", and leaps onto the deck of the submarine.  At this point, Hank's player looks at me and says "I think I know something about south sea pirates with my Academics".  I say "maybe you do, make a Good or better roll".  He makes his roll and says "I just remembered that South Seas Pirates will follow the strongest captain, established by challenge.  (adds aspect of "follow the strongest captain" to the pirates)  Now, Hank says, in Thai "Jade Ogre, you are NOT the strongest, I challenge you for command!"  All of the pirates, about to leap on Hank, stop, and all say "The challenge has been given".  What follows is an absolutely titanic wrestling matches between two characters with Might as their superb skill that had everyone around the table cheeriing.  You just don't GET that kind of fun in any other pulp game, period. 

Good things:
* Declarations, Assessments, and Maneuvers - If you are running this for a con with people who have never played before, REALLY stress the power of placing or finding out about aspects.  This is where the fun of the game really lies.  Sure, an aspect like "Follows the Strongest" on the Sea Pirates, mechanically, is only worth an extra free +2.  But story wise, WOW, the pirates only follow the strongest!  That is some powerful mojo! 
* Pregens with only half the sheet filled out - I cannot stress highly enough how well this worked.  People were totally grooving on writing down new aspects for their characters and deciding, at the moment of the roll, whether to add a skill or not to their sheet. 
* getting to the action fast - I don't let any grass grow under me as a GM for SotC.  If I haven't had some kind of major conflict in the first 30 minutes, then I'm not doing it right.
* but...getting the character bits in first - Pulp is all about character bits, and half of the fun is entertaining your fellow players with the fun bits you have for your character.  Therefore, I made sure that each player had time to get in their crazy accents, fun character schticks, and trademarked moves. 
* Concede, concede, concede - I usually just offerred interesting concessions when the writing was on the wall during conflicts to keep things moving.  This seemed to work well.

Bad things
* Explosives - What the Sam Hill?  If you are ever, ever tempted to let explosives into your game, read the rules carefully before hand.  WOW, that's some power.  I HADN'T read the rules beforehand, and found this out to my surprise.  Fortunately it only came into play in one of my sessions in the last 15 minutes or so, so the fact that a single grenade pretty much trashed ALL of Professor Belial's minions and the Professor himself was perfectly fine, but these rules seem completely counter to pretty much everything else in SotC.

Honestly, there were no down sides to SotC at GenCon.  Each session was an incredible joy, and I think the players absolutely loved it.

Next up, Grey Ranks...

But first, one more bad thing about Concrete Angels, above.  One thing I did was, on the spur of the moment, provide to two players an extra "character" each as a result of their flashbacks.  To the undercover cop, I provided a character called "Cops" and to Sleepy, I provided a character called "Stupid Thugs".  The intent was to give them some advantage based on their success in the flashbacks.  In practice this was really a horrible idea.  Not only did it make major conflicts even more confusing and difficult, it also gave those two players much more control over things then I anticipated.  Never do this.  One things Dust Devils does not have is any way to carry a mechancial ADVANTAGE over from one conflict to another, as you can in, say Shadow of Yesterday (bonus dice) or Heroquest, and I felt like, in the moment, I should give those characters one.  But in reality I should have left it strictly on the story level, and if any new characters were necessary brought them in under my control as stud hands.

Now, Grey Ranks...

I cannot emphasize enough how much of a zealot I am for this game.  I have called this the Schindler's List of RPG's and I'm am serious in doing so.  No other game I have played not only allows but FORCES you to deal with real, meaty issues and real, deep characters in this way.  This is the only RPG I think that can and has made me cry.

The session at GenCon continued to prove this to me.  I was not an actual player in the game, I simply expounded the rules and then helped out when people ran dry of ideas.  Really, it was the players that made it.  We had one euthanasia, two cases of madness, all kinds of glorious failure, and more teen angst than you could shake a stick at.  We also had deep religious awakenings and one or more triumphs of the human spirit. 

I really want to mention my friend Debbie.  Debbie is not a role-player.  Her first experience with role-playing was a LARP last year with a 50's B-Science Fiction Movie theme.  Her 2nd experience with role-playing, ever, was Grey Ranks.  This is like a grade schooler going into a College level physics class and taking a test on General Relativity.  And you know what? She passed.  She worked at it.  She came up with a wonderful character (Mouse, victim of past bullys and near a berserk release) and some wonderful situations.  She held her own against three other very skilled role-players.  She accepted suggestions from others when she was drawing a blank, and then made them her own.  She told me later how incredibly nervous she was, and how challenged she felt participating in something like Grey Ranks, but she pulled it off.  Props to Debbie. 

Anyway...

Good things:
- Jason's little prep envelope: Thanks Jason M, for this.  I was scared as heck that I had left my copy of the grid behind, but then you handed me this envelope and my world turned all rosy.  It had everything a person running Grey Ranks at a con needed.
- Stressing the failure vs. success choices: In Grey Ranks, the most crucial mechanical push to make the stories it makes is the fact that almost every choice a player makes means increasing the chance of success at one thing while decreasing it for something else (choice of which dice to roll where, explicit failure = high mission die, success = low mission die table).  I tried to make this very explicit at the beginning, and then stressed it throughout, and I think this helped people recognize the kind of game they were playing. 

Bad things:
- Read the bloody rules: I should have read over the rules more fully before starting the thing.  Not only were there changes from the last playtest rules, but there were a few things I just flat out forgot about until part way through.  Grey Ranks is rules light, but not rules weightless.  Read the bloody rules, Hans!
- Don't lose your keys just before a session starts:  Wondering whether your car is being stolen is not a good way to generate energy in a convention session.  Thankfully this was actually a GM-less game, and the players were gracious enough to let me sprint to my car and secure my keys. 

Grey Ranks in its short form is pretty much a perfect convention game.  I highly recommend it, after seeing it in action.

That sums things up.  I'd love to hear from people who actually played in my sessions, and see what I missed, what I did wrong, what I might have done right, and what you liked didn't like about the games themselves. 

Thanks to Matt Snyder, the Evil Hat guys, and Jason Morningstar for designing such incredible games.

Hans, related to my scare quote, what was your experience as a volunteer GM with the venue, the staff, the organization?

Jason wrote:
Hans, related to my scare quote, what was your experience as a volunteer GM with the venue, the staff, the organization?

Hey Hans,

Thanks again for running the game.  I'm curious how you ended up structuring the session- for example, which chapters did the players go through?  Did you go through the full character generation prologue, or did you abbreviate that part?  Did you or the players have to do any special record-keeping to track the results of each scene (personal scene wins and losses, mission successes) for the final grid movement?

Also, as I've said elsewhere, we'd love to encourage more Grey Ranks events at other cons.  If there's anything in particular we can do to help you run games at other cons, just let us know!

Yeah, just to be clear in this thread (Hans already knows) my comments were based on my personal experience (as an exhibitor with many fish to fry) with Gen Con LLC, not Kat and Mike (who were calm and pleasant and professional and where they were supposed to be).  I must not be as con-hardened as you, Hans, because I ran two games in the same space and found it almost intolerably loud and distracting.  I'm really relieved to hear that it wasn't a big deal for you, and that everything else went smoothly. 

Steve wrote:
Thanks again for running the game.  I'm curious how you ended up structuring the session- for example, which chapters did the players go through?  Did you go through the full character generation prologue, or did you abbreviate that part?  Did you or the players have to do any special record-keeping to track the results of each scene (personal scene wins and losses, mission successes) for the final grid movement?

Good idea, Hans - most of it is [email=http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/downloads/]here[/email], but Steve wrote up that cheat sheet and I don't believe it is posted yet.  I'll get on that.

I was a player in Hans' "Warlord of Fear" Spirit of the Century game -- the one with the hand grenade, in fact. I played Prince Krishna etc. etc. etc. IV and bought the hand grenades during a "stocking up for the big mission" sequence.

The characters Hans prepared were great! I especially appreciated that each was written up with male/female names, and abilities that worked just as well either way. And being able to fill in Aspects and Skills on-the-fly was great.

I would normally say that I am not a huge fan of "pulp" (not opposed, just not aware enough to have much of an opinion), but that didn't detract in any way from the game. It was a great showcase for Spirit of the Century -- were it not for my extenuating circumstances, I would've purchased a copy at GenCon (circumstances = moving to Europe, buying RPGs as PDFs when possible now.)

I took a photo of Hans' GMing:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaw6/1209243896/

I was a player in Hans' game of Dust Devils (as Bowler Jim, a crazy Native American troublemaker, and was the only other survivor besides Sancho) and in The Jade Ogre game (as Prince Krishna - how could anyone resist such a character).

I have to say I had a fantastic time in both of those games.  I already owned Dust Devils and SOTC so I was excited to play, but two friends of mine also played in the SOTC game with me and they both stated it was the best game they played that year at GenCon.  In addition one of them bought the book because the game was so much fun.

My hats off to you Hans for bringing so much energy to the table and making it an incredible experience for everyone.

And as I stated at GenCon, I think the situation generator that you use in the "Wedding in Galilee" game (e.g. "Bride's true love or bride's worst nightmare) really deserves some attention - it was a fantastic tool for positioning our characters relative to the NPC's and their agendas.  For a convention game or other scenario where the GM is pre-establishing the overall situation this is solid gold.