Though I attended two conventions recently, I only refereed events at one of them – CleriCon. At Gamehole Con, I was there solely as a participant, playing in several games run by others. Partly, I did this out of superstition. The first time I signed up to referee at GHC was back in 2019, when I was hit by a car the day before my flight was scheduled to head to Wisconsin. Though I was able to literally) walk away from the accident with only some superficial lacerations and a non-displaced fracture of my fibula, I was forbidden from traveling for at least 48 hours out of concern that I might have suffered a concussion. Fortunately, I hadn't, but I was also unable to attend the con that year or run any of the events I'd signed up for. The incident left me with a strange worry that, were I ever to offer to run sessions at Gamehole Con again, misfortune might befall me.
CleriCon is a completely different matter. The reason I discovered the con in the first place was that I was trying – ultimately in vain, alas – to start up a small RPG gathering here in Toronto. In looking online for resources to aid me in my Quixotic quest, I learned about the existence of CleriCon, then entering its third year. As soon as I learned about it, I immediately offered to run some games there and did so without any injury to myself. So emboldened, I offered to do the same again this year, refereeing sessions on both Friday night and Saturday morning.
Though both sessions were well received and everyone involved had fun, it was the Saturday morning session that, in my opinion, was the better of the two. On that occasion, I ran the first level of my Dwimmermount megadungeon and provided the players not just with pregenerated characters but a very specific and narrow goal, namely, the location of the Dwarven cemetery reputed to be somewhere on that level. The players were able to do some exploration, fight some monsters, and eventually discover the cemetery, all in the course of the time slot. It was pretty much perfect.
On Friday night, though, I ran them through the revised version of The Cursed Chateau that I've been working on throughout this year (not as much as I'd hoped but that's another story). Once again, I gave the players pregenerated characters and a goal. However, the goal this time – determine what happened to previous groups of adventurers who'd entered the chateau and not returned – was much too broad. Combined with the fact that the adventure includes lots of random elements so that each playthrough is intentionally different and it was pretty much guaranteed the players wouldn't complete their mission in the time allotted.
Now, as I said, everyone enjoyed themselves. Indeed, some of the players from Friday night returned on Saturday morning to play with me again. Even so, I personally felt as if The Cursed Chateau session was not quite as "complete" or satisfying as the Dwimmermount one the next day. The former simply ended when the clock ran out, while the latter came to a conclusion that made sense, if you can understand the difference. In fact, the Dwimmermount session made so much sense that, while I was having lunch with some of the players later, one of them asked me how I'd arranged things in such a way to ensure the session ended on a "high note." I confessed that it was pure chance – a combination of good choices on the part of the players and the luck of the dice. I'd love to take credit for how well the session ended, but I can't.
This got me to thinking about what makes a good convention scenario and how best to write one. I most definitely plan to run more sessions at next year's CleriCon and, despite my superstition, I am also planning to submit sessions to next year's Gamehole Con (likely playtests of both the second edition of Thousand Suns and Secrets of sha-Arthan). But with only four hours to play, I find myself pondering how to ensure more satisfying sessions and fewer that just peter out when the time elapses. I had so much fun with the games I played this year that I'd like to do whatever I can to increase the odds that my own sessions will be just as enjoyable for potential players.
So, if anyone out there is more experienced with writing and refereeing con events, I'd love to hear what you have to say about this. For that matter, I'd love simply to hear the observations of anyone who regularly plays con games. What makes a good convention scenario? Are there any common elements that you think increase the odds of their being fun for everyone? Any insights you can offer in this matter would be greatly appreciated.
Now I'm intrigued by what that Toronto event/group was going to look like. I think the city could use another con or game night.
ReplyDeleteWhat I had in mind was something akin to CleriCon in terms of scope and size. Unfortunately, finding a venue that was affordable was a big problem. Everything in Toronto is expensive to rent for an entire day and, even beyond that, scheduling was a nightmare.
DeleteChurch halls are a good source of venue. My wife regularly organises events for 60 - 200 people in evenings and the odd morning and she generally organises these out of church or religious halls.
DeleteWell, if you want to give it another go, I'd happily share the workload.
DeleteIt’s not great revelation but a con game needs to be a bite sized campaign in one brief 3/4 hour sitting. So most of the fun events that happen in a campaign should be compacted down into con game. I have t had great success with procedural generation in con games despite my preference for it as a DMing style. Con games simply don’t have the time. Really the narrative railroad really shines in a Con game due to the time constraints. Clear attainable victory conditions are a must.
ReplyDeleteI recently wrote a whole series of posts on the Cauldron convention, which includes information on how I craft/run adventures for four hour time slots; there's similar information on my reports from last year as well. All can be found under this label:
ReplyDeletehttps://bxblackrazor.blogspot.com/search/label/cauldron
For the most part, you want to make sure the scope of your adventure isn't too large...even a tightly run game with experienced players isn't going to get through more than 9 or 10 encounter areas. When you design a site, you have to plan accordingly. I run my games at a very brisk pace, and nine is generally my max.
That doesn't mean you have to do a "railroad;" I've run dungeons with 20-30+ keyed encounters that allow players to make plenty of exploration choices. But they're not going to see all that content in a single 4-hour session.
SO: have pre-gens prepared. Make sure you start them AT the adventure site (this is a con game, just get to playing). Give the players an objective/goal (even if that goal is simply "collect as much loot as possible"). And then run the adventure. If you want some sort of Big Bad climactic encounter, make sure it can be reached within 7-9 keyed locations; if you put it four levels deep and 20 rooms in, it ain't never going to hit the table in a four hour time limit.
You could do much worse than to look to the grandfathers of the con-genre, TSR's early modules, most of which seem to have been written for Origins or Gen Con. I think the most straightforward would have to be C1 Tamoachan. It's the first module to use boxed text so as to offer a unified presentation to each party (note detractors that it was 1979, so that's been with us a long, long while). And C1 plainly presents a railroad-scenario with a con-friendly time limit; the party of pre-gens (one of whom is a native and thus can read the local inscriptions etc.) falls to the bottom of the dungeon and has to get out before they die: "The air in this place is bad, poisonous. I fear that if we are still entombed in this place an hour from now, we shall never leave." Indeed. The whole thing is artificial and that's what makes it work within the con setting, no one signs up for a con session thinking they're beginning a new campaign. It's a one-off by definition, so there's no real reason to pretend otherwise. That does NOT mean that the adventure has to become banal or by-the-numbers; C1 is a great adventure on its own, is easy to change so as to remove the con restrictions, and even within the strictures of the con setting is a ton of fun.
ReplyDeleteThe other end of this spectrum has to be the Drow modules. Do people forget these were tournament modules? G1 Hill Giants was for Origins 1978, nearly 275 (!) players competed in various parties to slay as many giants as they could. Ok, the Giant modules are mostly hack-and-slash see-how-far-we-can-get affairs, and I can imagine running this in a con (NB: I've never run a con table). Maybe even D2 Kuo-Toa (Gen Con 1978)... but D3? I've DMd since the early 80s and I am not afraid to say that the idea of running Vault of the Drow at a con baffles me. Vault was also Gen Con 78 by the way, as round 2 to Kuo-Toa's round 1 - can you imagine running both of these at the same con, back-to-back? Anyway, the reason D3 is the other end of the spectrum from C1 is that in D3, there's nothing to do... and everything to do. It's a location, not a scenario, right? Yes, yes, get through the city, find the Fane, travel to the Abyss, I know. But really, the whole genius of Vault of the Drow (and I think it's uncontroversially the best of the whole series, and one of the best ever) is that it's a vast and deep location which demands careful attention and which is just about as open-ended as a module can get. It's T1 with Drow and everything will kill you.
EGG and Bob Blake have articles in Dragon 19 about running these modules at Gen Con, and I'm tempted to quote here extensively but this has already run on too long. Look them up, they're really interesting. So, I guess all I'm saying is, keep things constrained and yet logical for the time-frame (like C1), and avoid open-ended campaign settings which could lead anywhere and thus (in a con setting) lead nowhere (like D3).
- A different anon
I like the clear cut objective that you had with the dwarven graveyard. I think that time-limited games need very clear and specific objectives, up to three, possibly with a hidden objective (as JB has written about in his Cauldron posts). As noted above you also still need freedom for the players to achieve those objectives by different routes - the element of meaningful choice.
ReplyDelete