Convention Games

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

I had an absolute blast at DexCon and at Origins this year, and I've been thinking that some of the fun I had just isn't replicable with my local gaming group.

My local circle of gamers is great. And there's a lot that a group of people meeting at regular intervals can do that groups meeting at conventions generally can't. I'm taking that for read.

So, what can a group at a convention do that the home group can't?

Meeting with a group of strangers for a convention game is often a crap shoot. But, I tend to select games where my odds of having a good game are higher. That is, I choose a lot of odd little games that don't get played much. They tend to be run by people who are very good at what they do.

And, these games tend to self-select for people who want them. It's an obvious point, but an important one. It's as true for D&D and White Wolf games, but the crowd is bigger, and the odds, I would guess, less in one's favor. I could be wrong about that -- these are the games I tend to avoid at conventions. The biggest thing I look at is probably Call of Cthulhu.

Now, CoC self selects for us sick puppies who want to go up against insurmountable odds and have a real chance of losing. The point is the struggle and the role playing. There's a definite cameraderie among the players of just about every convention CoC game I've played. We're all on the same page. We all like this game, and we all want, I think, more or less the same things from it. And, we know that a lot of other gamers think we're nuts.

Pendragon falls in the same category, I think. Both games I've played were sheer magic. All of us dragged ourselves up at an early hour, and all of us committed 6+ hours to the game.

But, the examples I had in mind are the Inspectres and octaNe games that Todd Furler ran. These were two hour light hearted games. I signed up for these games weeks, if not months, in advance. So did most of the other players.

Think about this. We were a group of people who had been planning to play these exact games for weeks. This wasn't a local group getting together and deciding to try something new. This was a group of strangers willing to commit time in advance for this.

And, we had only those two hours. A local group always has more time, if you can get everyone together. We didn't. For those two hours, we were committed to the game. Oh, we took bathroom breaks, handed out food, grabbed water, and stuff like that. We did not slip out of character to talk about the weather, politics, or anything like that.

In other words, a good convention game has a tightness of focus that an ongoing local game might lack, especially when trying something new.

Part of this might be uncertainty about the rules. Part may be the comedic aspect. I have run a Sorcerer game, and I could see running another. We are having some success with Polaris, although we need to all be less nice and less accepting for things to click, I think.

But, I just couldn't see having the same kind of success with Inspectres or octaNe as at Origins.

I'm not saying it would suck. And, I think it's worth testing empirically. Hm....

Convention Games

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

I had an absolute blast at DexCon and at Origins this year, and I've been thinking that some of the fun I had just isn't replicable with my local gaming group.

My local circle of gamers is great. And there's a lot that a group of people meeting at regular intervals can do that groups meeting at conventions generally can't. I'm taking that for read.

So, what can a group at a convention do that the home group can't?

Meeting with a group of strangers for a convention game is often a crap shoot. But, I tend to select games where my odds of having a good game are higher. That is, I choose a lot of odd little games that don't get played much. They tend to be run by people who are very good at what they do.

And, these games tend to self-select for people who want them. It's an obvious point, but an important one. It's as true for D&D and White Wolf games, but the crowd is bigger, and the odds, I would guess, less in one's favor. I could be wrong about that -- these are the games I tend to avoid at conventions. The biggest thing I look at is probably Call of Cthulhu.

Now, CoC self selects for us sick puppies who want to go up against insurmountable odds and have a real chance of losing. The point is the struggle and the role playing. There's a definite cameraderie among the players of just about every convention CoC game I've played. We're all on the same page. We all like this game, and we all want, I think, more or less the same things from it. And, we know that a lot of other gamers think we're nuts.

Pendragon falls in the same category, I think. Both games I've played were sheer magic. All of us dragged ourselves up at an early hour, and all of us committed 6+ hours to the game.

But, the examples I had in mind are the Inspectres and octaNe games that Todd Furler ran. These were two hour light hearted games. I signed up for these games weeks, if not months, in advance. So did most of the other players.

Think about this. We were a group of people who had been planning to play these exact games for weeks. This wasn't a local group getting together and deciding to try something new. This was a group of strangers willing to commit time in advance for this.

And, we had only those two hours. A local group always has more time, if you can get everyone together. We didn't. For those two hours, we were committed to the game. Oh, we took bathroom breaks, handed out food, grabbed water, and stuff like that. We did not slip out of character to talk about the weather, politics, or anything like that.

In other words, a good convention game has a tightness of focus that an ongoing local game might lack, especially when trying something new.

Part of this might be uncertainty about the rules. Part may be the comedic aspect. I have run a Sorcerer game, and I could see running another. We are having some success with Polaris, although we need to all be less nice and less accepting for things to click, I think.

But, I just couldn't see having the same kind of success with Inspectres or octaNe as at Origins.

I'm not saying it would suck. And, I think it's worth testing empirically. Hm....