Frozen_Feet
2018-09-16, 01:38 PM
I'm interested in hearing how many other people here hold games at conventions. How has it worked for you? What kind of games you've held? What have you learned?
I started convention GMing in 2011. I jury-rigged Lamentations of the Flame Princess to work for an urban fantasy game where all the player characters were ghosts. Worked better than you'd think. Since then it's become a twice or thrice a year activity, with average of two-and-half games per convention, with average playtime of three hours.
Lamentations of the Flame Princess has been my main platform for convention games. I've also served as a contest GM for scenario design contests and ran those scenarios as part of games-on-demand routine. The name's a bit misleading; "scenario" in this context basically means a mini-RPG meant to run in 1 hour or so. These games have covered a dizzying array of styles both content-wise and mechanically.
The standouts have been:
- a short LotFP campaign based on artefact retrieval from a megadungeon (4 conventions, 11 games, 60+ players)
- a still on-going LotFP campaign, wide-open sandbox (7 conventions so far, 15+ games, 70+ players). Two of the sessions have also been streamed on the net.
- LotFP horror one shots (Death Love Doom 6 times, **** for Satan 2 times, Joop Van Ooms 2 times)
A lot of my players have been complete beginners (approx. 40% of the total) , so I find my activity to be important when it comes to introducing new people to the hobby. I know at least two play groups have their origins at my game table.LotFP is also pretty rare, though OSR in general is quite well represented. So when I find myself wondering, "is it worth to run gory horror games?", the answer I keep drifting to is "well who else is running these sorts of games?"
I keep rough player statistics for my campaigns. So far, roughly 25% of players have been female. The proportion rises to roughly one third if the one shots are included. Gory horror is bizarrely popular with cosplay girls.
I've gotten a lot of positive feedback for open-endedness and amount of player agency in my games. Specifically, my games have been compared favorably to adventure paths ran by Pathfinder Society.
On the flipside, I've been told my games are hard to start with, often lacking an obvious hook (or having too many) and requiring greater player initiative than usual.
The structure for my campaigns is tailor-made for conventions. The main idea is that each player group makes and leaves their notes for the next, so even if there are no returning players and characters in the next session, there is still continuity, with every group's efforts building on the last. This borders on unique in the local convention scene, I know exactly one GM who does things roughly the same.
The campaigns have turned into an interesting study in group psychology and emergent storytelling. Starting out, I did not quite expect the level of deliberate misinformation, trolling etc. that players would inject into the games. Many mysteries and red herrings are a result of nothing but frustrated players trying to one-up each other, but this has largely enhanced actual game play, as it greatly reduces the burden on me to come up with new events.
I started convention GMing in 2011. I jury-rigged Lamentations of the Flame Princess to work for an urban fantasy game where all the player characters were ghosts. Worked better than you'd think. Since then it's become a twice or thrice a year activity, with average of two-and-half games per convention, with average playtime of three hours.
Lamentations of the Flame Princess has been my main platform for convention games. I've also served as a contest GM for scenario design contests and ran those scenarios as part of games-on-demand routine. The name's a bit misleading; "scenario" in this context basically means a mini-RPG meant to run in 1 hour or so. These games have covered a dizzying array of styles both content-wise and mechanically.
The standouts have been:
- a short LotFP campaign based on artefact retrieval from a megadungeon (4 conventions, 11 games, 60+ players)
- a still on-going LotFP campaign, wide-open sandbox (7 conventions so far, 15+ games, 70+ players). Two of the sessions have also been streamed on the net.
- LotFP horror one shots (Death Love Doom 6 times, **** for Satan 2 times, Joop Van Ooms 2 times)
A lot of my players have been complete beginners (approx. 40% of the total) , so I find my activity to be important when it comes to introducing new people to the hobby. I know at least two play groups have their origins at my game table.LotFP is also pretty rare, though OSR in general is quite well represented. So when I find myself wondering, "is it worth to run gory horror games?", the answer I keep drifting to is "well who else is running these sorts of games?"
I keep rough player statistics for my campaigns. So far, roughly 25% of players have been female. The proportion rises to roughly one third if the one shots are included. Gory horror is bizarrely popular with cosplay girls.
I've gotten a lot of positive feedback for open-endedness and amount of player agency in my games. Specifically, my games have been compared favorably to adventure paths ran by Pathfinder Society.
On the flipside, I've been told my games are hard to start with, often lacking an obvious hook (or having too many) and requiring greater player initiative than usual.
The structure for my campaigns is tailor-made for conventions. The main idea is that each player group makes and leaves their notes for the next, so even if there are no returning players and characters in the next session, there is still continuity, with every group's efforts building on the last. This borders on unique in the local convention scene, I know exactly one GM who does things roughly the same.
The campaigns have turned into an interesting study in group psychology and emergent storytelling. Starting out, I did not quite expect the level of deliberate misinformation, trolling etc. that players would inject into the games. Many mysteries and red herrings are a result of nothing but frustrated players trying to one-up each other, but this has largely enhanced actual game play, as it greatly reduces the burden on me to come up with new events.