This month, Mike and Roger talk about one-off and convention games.
We mentioned: The Last Province, Powered by the Apocalypse, Everway, Ludonarrative Dissidents on Alien, Assistant to the Villain, Roger’s WWII game, Night’s Black Agents, Dungeon World, Fenian Ram, The Armitage Files, and Marvel Heroic Roleplaying (based on Cortex Plus).
We have a tip jar (please tell us how you’d like to be acknowledged on the show).
Music by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com.
This is a topic on which I have much experience and many opinions. In no particular order…
Conventions in the Bay Area, California are not indicative of conventions elsewhere. Most sessions are 6-8 hours, though 4 hours is becoming increasingly more common with “indie” games.
There is an art and science to writing a game description. In the bad old days, the character/work limits on the description was a fun exercise in minimalist writing. Nowadays with game schedules printed online rather than a physical program book, those restrictions have become more lax.
Unless it was a “special event” with a “special guest” GM, the GM is not included in the description of the game itself. Here is an entry from a convention a few years ago that is typical of what I’m used to seeing:
215 Butterfly Unit
Saturday 9 AM in 508 for 6 hr; ends Session 3
System: Call of Cthulhu; Edition 7th 6 players
GM: Jill Stapleton (Jill)
Level: low
Rules Knowledge: Beginners Welcome
Game Content: Mainstream
All characters provided by GM
Somewhere in the back corner of the FBI, an experimental group is using big data and technology to identify patterns in crime. It has just flagged an international serial killer.
The non-italicized items are part of the game submission form. The GM and Game System are already listed and so don’t need to appear in the description of the scenario.
Here are two that I wrote for a different convention:
For a half-century, social upheaval has been fueled by ruthless privatization of public services and governmental functions, exponential growth of cybernetics and biotech, and the emergence of psychic powers. This is not the story of the cyberpunks, corporate fixers, psionic mercenaries, netrunners, and streaming idols. This is about ordinary folks playing the best they can with the cards they have been dealt from a deck that is stacked against them. Following the loss of a beloved patriarch, secrets emerge that place the residents of an urban neighborhood in the crosshairs of powerful and dangerous organizations.
In a war torn galaxy, the rebel alliance fights a desperate battle against The Empire. A ragtag band of rebels (charismatic rogues, freedom fighters, imperial defectors, aether knights, sapient robots, displaced royals, …whatever the players want) are in a race against mercenaries, imperial troopers, and bounty hunters to track down a missing double-agent and the to key stopping The Empire from unleashing a superweapon that will crush all current and future opposition to their rule.
In my pre-game checklist of Things I must do before heading off to the convention is printing out all the handouts. Everything else can go off scribbled notes and memory.
One of those pre-game handouts is the character card. It boggles me how many GMs do not do this. If they are not provided by the GM in a game I’m playing, I will make my own from a folded index card that is part of my “bring to every game” kit (that is mostly dice). One key trick to the character cards is to print the character name on both sides. That way, players sitting next to you can also read it (and as a reminder to yourself).
I am like Michael in that I do not re-run games, typically. When I do, I find my enjoyment of the game diminishes significantly with each iteration. I know people who enjoy running the game thing multiple times. I cannot do that. I’m a bit envious of them, in fact, because it would mean a lot less work!
The games I run are usually those game ideas that I cannot or would not run for my primary game group (who are usually in the middle of a campaign). Often times, I get ideas for games that simply cannot be stretched to a campaign. Maybe I can think of 1 or 2 sessions worth of scenarios, but not much else. Conventions are were I can stretch my creative wings, as it were, and got those ideas out of my head. And once those brain worms have left my cranium, I have no desire to shove them back in. I’d rather let some other idea take its place.
The scale of the scenario can be anything the GM likes. The stakes can be quite small the world, so long as they are meaningful for the PCs.
If we think of campaign like a tv serial, then a convention game can be thought of as a movie. It needs to stand on its own with a beginning, middle, and end. Having said that, having multiple campaign games follow along from each other like movie sequels is perfectly fine. Over the course of 4 years, I ran a series of 4 games featuring teenaged superheroes. The 4 sessions took place in their freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years of high school. I had 3 players play the same character in each of the 4 games. Having said that, it is really important make new players feel welcome and equal to the repeat players.
The demise of Arcane was indeed a financial decision by the publishers. My understanding is that it was not making a loss, but there were other hobbies that would make a larger profit for the same amount of effort.
“Bait & Switch” Horror scenario
I may have told this story here before - but the best example of this was the Gaelcon 1996 Call Of Cthulhu tournament scenario. - there were several tables in the room running the same scenario.
The GM handed out the traditional 1920’s characters while explaining that the writers had not had time to playtest the scenario properly, but hopefully everything would be reasonably balanced.
The scenario saw us shipwrecked on an unexpected Island in the middle of the night, with no equipment - although we did discover a washed ashore crate containing stationery supplies. Exploring the island we found a mysterious temple with strange engravings, and were then attacked by Cthonians. All around the room, tables were standing up and trooping out of the room as the party were slaughtered.
Once all the groups had been finished off, and the players were all gathered in a second room, the organiser announced “OK - that was the prequel. It’s the 1990’s, your new characters are all FBI agents assigned to help agents Mulder & Scully handle the backlog of “X” files. You will be investigating the mysterious loss of an ocean liner. Anything your previous characters wrote down is available to you - otherwise your new characters know nothing of what you have just played…”
If you think it’s hard to get sign-ups when advertising GURPS demos, try announcing a HARP game at a con.
But anyway… I never think of it as very hard to explain the setting when running Transhuman Space demos. If you insist on describing the entire solar system in 2100 it could take a while, obviously, but no scenario I’ve ever run has required that. “It’s a fairly optimistic hard SF version of the world in 2100, with lots of AI and quite a bit of biotech, including biological androids called bioroids” probably covers it if I feel the need. Then I can provide some specific context for the specific scenario, whether that’s “You’re the idealistic members of a Japanese global disaster response organisation, based on a space station in low Earth orbit; you get to emergencies in a really impressive hypersonic shuttle” or “You’re a small specialist security and bodyguard company, and you’ve just been hired to handle a music festival in Columbia” or “You wake up feeling very odd and seemingly wrapped in cellophane, here are your individual character backgrounds, so far as you can remember”. A lot of games have really big, complex setting-worlds (and TS is far behind, say, Runequest for wacky complexity), but demo game runners just have to remember that their players don’t need to know everything about the setting, and dumping too much info on them would just be counterproductive.
Not to mention printing out the Summary for New Players on p.4 of Changing Times for players who are willing to read a bit.
I do this a lot, as GM and player, probably 3-4 times a year of 4-5 scenarios.
I suggest that an introductory scenario for teaching players is best mapped as 3 hours - and if one uses the 5 Room Dungeon approach, where the Rooms are best thought of as nodal points - then be ready to sacrifice a scene.n
So I adopt:
Intro
Journey
Node 1
Node 2 - sacrificial
Finale
Small groups eat plot at speed, larger groups will go slow.
I really DO NOT support the ‘Bait and Switch’… unless you explicitly state what it is.
Many players are very very prone to ‘analysis paralysis’ - I suggest that framing the whole adventure as ‘flashback’ can be great - ‘So you succeeded. Whatever you do will lead to this moment, it will add nuances and details, but now let’s go back in time 3 days and see how it all started…’ I use this with all and any rpg, it need not be one that’s built around that mechanically.
Never do character gen at a con UNLESS you are running Microscope… which I have seen and is utterly cool and I must actually run it.
Got to small cons like Furnace or North Star or Concrete Cow where the majority are roleplayers to playtest your scenario before running it for a more anonymous con like Games Expo or AireCon.
Any con scenario should explicitly tell the players - you are not playing next week - burn all your resources - try everything - be foolish!
In a game like D&D be aware this means they will NOVA any final combat! That’s fine, let them have the joy. I know that EvilGaz finds this quite annoying and spoils con games for me… for me it allows full campaign ending ‘burn all the bridges’ climax in a 3 hours slot.
Some players really find PVP or hidden agendas triggering. People who you may have played with for years. People who have maybe kept quiet about it forever but it upsets them. So CLEARLY STATE either PVP or NO PVP, ALL PLAYERS ARE ON THE SAME SIDE.
Re ALIEN… got to agree - it’s lovely for con games as long as you roleplay the characters from the tropes, but I tend to agree… it would be quite a different campaign…
I have a problem with con games starting with novice characters. The real joy of most rpgs comes just after novice and just before veteran. So 3rd level in D&D [any D&D], and two advances in most other rpgs. For BRP that’s probably 6-8 skill advance rolls. For Savage Worlds that’s Seasoned.
What I do very poorly is recruit players with a well written abstract. 
I generally agree with this. Many years ago, I had a bad experience with Over The Edge. It is a very simple system for creating characters, but players were stumped on concepts, not the mechanics of making characters. If possible, allow players to customize their pre-made chracters such as adding in traits or allocating some skill points or picking a magic item from a list.
Games like PbtA that use easy-to-digest templates and “pick a, b, or c” options is good for con games. (It’s about the only think I like about PbtA games.)
I have a visceral negative reaction to PvP. It’s in the name: Player vs. Player, not (Character vs. Character). If I wanted a competitive game, I’d play a board game (I don’t like co-op board games). Hidden agendas are fine so long as they don’t result in PvP.
Agreed on Savage Worlds–I have done that many times in the past. However, I have also had fun with PCs who are teens or ordinary folks thrown into extraordinary circumstances.
I think it is not the being a teen or ordinary person I have a beef with, it is underpowered characters who can’t achieve anything. Playing a ‘realistic’ teen with only 10 to 20% in every skill would be non-fun. As would playing a ‘realistic’ teen with 80% in GCSE Geography, French and English Literature if the skills you need are Karate, Lion Taming and Telepathy.
I remember playing a judge in Judge Dredd who according to the background had spent 10 years in training then 3 years doing the job. But on the character sheet they were underpowered and couldn’t find their bum with both hands and a map.
I just want to say “couldn’t find their bum with a heat seeker”…
And this scales with the campaign. I mean, if it’s “normal kids investigate the spooky house at the end of the street” they shouldn’t need or have a whole lot of adventuring skills. But if the campaign is going to ask the hard-bitten experts to go up against the steel-jawed monsters and the global conspiracy behind them, they at least shouldn’t find their routine stuff a major challenge.