One Shot
I've been going to gaming conventions for 25 years now. I've played in numerous convention games. I've even run a couple. But I've always made mental notes about what works and doesn't work for convention games, and checked and re-checked those mental notes.
All of the situations I refer to in this article have actually been witnessed or experienced by me directly at convention games. I've not used any names, but the experiences, both good and bad, are presented undiluted.
The GMs who created the good experiences deserve the truth, unfettered. And the GMs who created the bad experiences likewise deserve the truth, unfettered. (Believe me, that truth pained me as much as it will you reading it. Consider the truth a mutual "ouchie". )
1. Prepare, prepare, prepare!
Come to your game prepared. Have all of your materials, notes, and rulebooks at hand. Have copies of your players' character sheets for your reference handy, as well. Sleep before your slot if you need to. Eat and drink, too. Who knows when you'll get a chance to take a break to gain sustenance?
Playtest your adventure with your local gaming group before the convention if you can. Time the adventure. Ask your playtesters for their honest feedback and adjust your adventure accordingly. Look up hairy rules beforehand if you know they'll likely come into play.
Preparation is the most important aspect to making or breaking your game and many of the suggestions in the rest of this article are predicated on the fact that you've prepared adequately.
The worst case of preparation I ever experienced was showing up at the table for a game and hearing that the GM didn't have the adventure with him. And that we should all commence creating characters in a system that takes at least an hour or two to go through character creation. This was for a game that was listed as "GM provides characters". Nothing gives the convention going experience a black eye faster than something like that. Horrible.
The best case of preparation I experienced was a D&D game where the GM actually had pre-drawn highly-detailed maps on battle mats for every major encounter in the adventure. He just pulled them out of a tube and rolled them out on the table as each encounter came up. Excellent preparation like that makes a gaming experience much more fun.
2. Get your timing down pat!
Design your scenario with modular encounters that you can yank if you need to. A good rule of thumb is to ensure that the critical parts of the adventure take no more than half of the time slot you'll be running it in. Breaks, players getting stumped about what to do next, people checking out of the convention hotel, and so forth can slow your adventure down tremendously. And I think it's always better to end a half an hour early than to try to cram everything in at the last moment, or even worse, to not finish the adventure before the next gaming slot is supposed to start.
After you have the adventure's critical path set, create several encounters and bits that you can throw in if the players don't get stuck, if things run smoothly, if you're ahead of schedule, and so forth.
Pay attention to the pace. Wear a watch. Consult it often. One GM I've played with over the years has hit this mark (finishing within a half an hour of the slot's end) every time on 8 or 9 separate occasions in many different game systems. So, don't tell me it can't be done.
3. Always use pre-generated characters unless character creation is super easy and you want to demonstrate character creation!
Unless you want to demo character creation and character creation is easy in the game system, use pre-generated characters. If players are going to create their own characters, ensure that they don't inadvertently create characters that are useless for the adventure. For example, don't let them create a super social character with a host of urban skills if the adventure consists solely of fighting mindless automatons in the wilderness!
And don't ever, ever, ever let players play their own characters from their home campaign. There's too much room for a broken character to suddenly be sprung on you in the middle of the game.
Moreover, pre-generated characters allow you to place the right characters in the right place at the right time. Which brings us to rule number 4.
4. Never create a character for your scenario that is useless in comparison to the other characters!
To return to our example for rule 3, if you design an adventure that consists solely of fighting nameless automatons in the wilderness, don't include a super social character with a host of urban skills for your players to pick!
If you're in a spaceship that is controlled by aliens with no way of the characters taking back that control during the adventure, a character whose best skills are astronavigation, French, and playing the oboe is probably useless ... unless the characters can actually manage to regain control of the ship, the aliens speak French, or the aliens love the sound of double-reeded instruments.
Sure, you can mix and match character types: Combat monsters, hackers, face guys, and so forth. But make sure the adventure you design has at least one scene in which each of those character types can shine.
Likewise, unless a character has a major set of burdens to deal with in comparison to the other characters in the mix, don't ever make one character better at all the major tasks in the adventure than the other characters in the mix. Sidekicks might be a staple of adventure media, but players don't usually like to play them.
If all of the characters are fish out of water, that's fine. You'll all struggle together. I've played several horror games in which that's the case and it can be a hoot. It is not a hoot, however, when you're the only one who brought a fork to an all-you-can-eat soup buffet.
5. Set the tone early!
Give careful consideration to the opening scene of your adventure. It can make or break the players' experience. Seriously.
Make sure the first scene is engaging and sets the tone of what your adventure is about. If it's a humorous light adventure, make sure that first scene is funny. If it's an action packed adventure, start it like a Bond film with a high speed chase and wild action. If it's an adventure of creeping horror, start with a subtle scene that's unnerving, inexplicable, or disturbing.
Setting the tone early grabs the players' attention. And if you keep that tone and pace rolling, you can keep it right up until the end of the session.
6. Summarize the game mechanics quickly at the beginning!
No matter how often you ask for experienced players at a convention, invariably someone is going to show up who's only briefly looked at the rules system or who has never played it before. That's OK. This is your opportunity to summarize the game system's mechanics.
Try to hit the high points: What do things on the character sheet mean, how you fight, and how you accomplish basic tasks in the game. Practice summarizing the game mechanics in 10 minutes or less. Then, fill in about other rules as you go along. Let the players peruse the rulebook in-session during their character's down time to help expedite the process.
7. Adjudicate quickly, guesstimate, or look the rule up offline if you run into a tricky rules situation!
It's going to happen. With players you've never met playing in your adventure, you're going to run into situations where they want to do something wacky you've never even thought of, let alone memorized the rule for.
If you run into a tricky rules question, adjudicate it quickly in a way that makes sense and move on. Pace and keeping the players attention is more important than getting a rule letter perfect. If you can, look up the rule during a break or move on to other action while another player helps you look up the rule. But whatever you do, don't ruin the pace you've worked so hard to establish with your preparation, your attention to timing, and your attention to tone by looking up a rule. You might never get your players back in the groove again.
8. Don't split the players up!
Unless it is absolutely critical that players aren't privy to what other characters do, learn, say, and so forth, do not split the players up. In fact, even when it is critical that players don't act on information that they know but that their characters don't, consider not splitting up the players, anyway. If they act on information their characters shouldn't be privy to, cry foul, blue bolt them, and spank their fannies ‘til they glow. Almost anything is actually preferable to splitting the players up. If players want to convey confidential information, provide paper for them to pass notes to you or amongst themselves rather than pulling you aside.
If you do have to split the players up, be very, very mindful of the time you spend alone with one player or group of players. Five minutes should be the maximum amount of time players are split up physically during a game.
As a side note, I once played in a convention game in which the GM actually had a couple of players leave the room because their characters were incarcerated for some minor reason and then forgot that they were out in the hall until about an hour later. Not good.
9. Don't fall in love with outrageous results! Or, in other words, "Aren't critical fumbles high-lair-ee-ous?!!"
Many game systems have critical fumble rules which I personally think is unfortunate. I'll tell you why in a moment. Unless you're running a whacky, outrageous game, don't fall in love with outrageous results.
Take GURPS, for example. A critical fumble occurs (mostly) on a roll of 17 or 18 on 3 six-sided dice. That's about 2.5% of all rolls.
If you have 6 players in your game and they're rolling every time they take an action, sometimes 2 or 3 rolls each time you go around the table, you'd be surprised how often that 2.5% hits.
Don't make critical fumbles into Keystone Cops-like events. It ruins the mood. For example, I was playing in a semi-light GURPS fantasy game and was asked to make a Will roll for looking at a mangled corpse of a villager. This was an experienced adventuring mage looking at a mangled body, mind you, not just some yokel off the streets. I failed my Will roll and critically fumbled on the effects of my Will roll.
The GM not only had my character vomit, but had him commence choking on it!! Several players tried to make average First Aid rolls to clear my wind passage and failed. (It's fairly easy to fail a series of average rolls, too, by the way.) Someone finally made their roll and I survived, but barely.
So there's my character, at the beginning of an adventure, pulling a John Bonham before the real action has even started. Much laughing ensued ... not much by me. I wasn't impressed. GMs that fall in love with outrageous results rarely do.
10. Don't be a nitpicking GM! Or "You didn't say you would continue to breathe, so you die of suffocation."
There's a school of GMing that teaches GMs to judge like a perverted genie granting a wish. Like those horrible text-based computer games in which you had to type in the exact perfect phrase to move forward, my wish is that someone would burn that particular GMing school down to the ground.
If I'm playing a character who is an adventurer going to a remote island, do I really need to tell you that my character is bringing food and water with him? I mean, as long as my character isn't Forgetful Jones or braindead? Sure, if I tell you I've brought along my portable ballista, you should cry B.S. from the rooftops and throw the pointiest D4 you can find at my head, but are roleplaying games really supposed to be elaborate games of picking nits?
GMs are often overly obsessed with control at a convention game. Remember, even if a player starts busting your world, as long as it doesn't derail the adventure or upstage the other characters, roll with it! If the players are enjoying it, roll with it! You don't have to borrow trouble and worry about how some precedent is going to ruin your campaign several sessions down the line because after this adventure, you're done. If they leave the game world a smoking husk afterward, that's fine. Because there is no tomorrow!! Free yourself to embrace the fun while still challenging your players.
No one wants an adventure to get seriously sidetracked because they forgot to explicitly say they were going to bring the rope necessary to climb the Mountain of the Dragon King. Boring!!
11. Engage in dialogue, don't deliver a monologue!
Storytelling is a vital part of being a good GM. But when the story telling takes over, you don't have a game anymore. You have an audience listening to your creative work of fiction.
If you ever find yourself stomping on player questions and observations after five minutes of describing what the wall paper in the room looks like, unless that's a central clue in the adventure, chill out.
Pay attention to how much time you're spending on exposition during the session. (Active character interaction back and forth with NPCs doesn't count.) If you find yourself continually describing scenes or characters for more than 3 or 4 minutes, it might be time for you to go home and type up your adventure as a novella, because that's what you're really shooting for.
An adjunct of this rule is having NPCs steal the characters' thunder. If the NPCs save the day at the critical moment or every critical moment, what are the characters even there for? In fact, what are the players who are running the characters even there for? Believe me, the players will be asking themselves that same question in no time.
Just as bad is when the actions of the characters have no bearing on the outcome of the scenario. Player characters in RPGs should make a difference, not simply there to witness a fatalistic and inevitable parade of unchangeable events. The worst case of this kind of storytelling I ever saw was a GM who actually told the players what their characters were doing and did so continually. And we're not talking about characters who'd gone insane in a Call of Cthulhu game. Just characters trying to move through his adventure.
He was having a great time crafting an interesting story. The players, however, looked ready to find something to crash in Open Gaming, instead.
12. Don't let one bad apple spoil the whole bunch!
No matter how well you follow rules 1 through 11, it's going to eventually happen. You're going to have a player in your game that's a tool.
Whether it's a player who usurps all the action, stomps on every action by other players, and generally tries to strong arm the game--or it's a player who tries to bully you and the rest of the players with his knowledge of the game system rules or of the subject matter of the adventure--or a player who just doesn't get the proper tone of the game no matter how clearly you establish it, it's going to happen. If you run convention games, eventually you're going to run into a player who is a pain in your collective rears, GM and players alike.
This is where you need to be firm but diplomatic. There are numerous GMing resources out there that discuss in length how to deal with problematic players. Consult them and consult them often.
One suggestion those resources give that doesn't apply very well at a convention, however, is kicking the player out of the game. They've paid for their convention membership and unless they're assaulting someone, you don't have much ground to kick players out based on aesthetics or opinion. (Some conventions have expanded the GM's authority to do so, however, which is a welcome change.)
If worse comes to worst, freeze them out. If you can't get them to change their behavior, the least you can do is minimize their impact on the game. You owe it to the other players to minimize their shenanigans' impact on the collective experience.
And, as a note to players at convention games, this is where you can help, too. Don't leave it to the GM to handle the difficulty alone. I always try to counter bad apple actions when I can. If they try to usurp all of the action, stick up for your own role in the adventure and the role of other players. If they pontificate about esoterica that isn't "accurate", counter with "Yeah, and besides the werewolves and the fireball-tossing wizards, it's all very realistic." If they start arguing about rules, remind them that the pace of the game is more important than getting the rules absolutely correct. And if they don't get the tone of the game, keep setting the appropriate example yourself as best you can.
If you find yourself as a player falling into these traps, do what you can to corral yourself. I have one friend who is a very knowledgeable historian, and I actually saw him in a game say "OK, time for my one history geek moment", share the historic trivia he couldn't hold back any longer, and go right back into character. When a fellow player later asked him about the historical veracity of some other aspect of the adventure, he quickly and politely replied "Sorry, but I've already had my one history geek moment for this adventure." Fantastic.
In the end, RPGs are shared experiences, and all of us, GMs and players alike, have to do our part to make it the best experience it can be.
