With that said, it took convention games for me to work on my player-management skills: working the table and every player, keeping them involved, at regular intervals. Even the ones who were playing for no other reason then there were no free chairs around and they wanted a place to sit and organize their HeroClix. (True story!)

When people are paying to play in your game—or sponsored by a company—there’s some real pressure to make sure everyone is having a good time. That’s a mindset that gets lost at the home table.

As a player, it was GenCon where I realized what a great game Buffy is.

Have fun!

Oh, the stories I can tell.

Tell, tell!

When people are paying to play in your game—or sponsored by a company—there’s some real pressure to make sure everyone is having a good time. That’s a mindset that gets lost at the home table.

I’d never thought of that, and I can see why it would be a whole different ball of wax. Have you ever found that pressure to be bad/too much, as opposed to just being a useful spur to GMing well?

I’ve been to two GenCons so far. Unfortunatley, I’m a bit over leery of playing (just too many bad experiences), so my only play experience so far was a demo of Riddle of Steel (which was awesome and sold me the game – though I just can’t see running it with my current group).

I have learned some from running games (I was running Evil Stevies Pirate Game, a pirate miniatures game using LEGO with role playing elements). We had games with up to 30 players (with co-GMs).

The experience reminded me that one really needs to look carefully at reward systems. The game mechanically rewards players for not engaging, which is bad. Fortunately, most players seem to have fun because of course the social rewards come from engaging and wiping players out, even if one of the guys sliking around outside the engagement swoops in and takes your weakened ship out.

Sadly I don’t have the vacation time to go this year. Next year I really do want to work harder to play some games (and actually, I have to admit that my favorite play experience was in a convention game).

Frank

Amen to that — some of my most intense gaming experiences have ben at GenCon.

Now that I’m back, I’m going to quickly run through my own tips and see how things came out:

1. I tried one new setting — DragonMech, for D&D — and two sessions of Burning Wheel. I’ve played Burning Wheel once before, and for both games I’ve read most of the material, but I still consider them new.

2. The first BW event, “The Gift,” was fantastic — even though I had played the scenario before (actually, partly because I had played it before). This year I played one of the two linchpin roles, and about halfway through I realized that my heart was pounding, which it did for the whole four hours — this was a very intense game! I would love to be able to translate some of that intensity to other games that I play at home, but part of it comes down to the fact that BW has intensity built into its mechanics.

It also proved that a) it wasn’t a fluke that BW was great the first time, and b) that different players would have the same fabulous experience. It made me want to play more BW, in other words.

3. Apart from a boring board game event, I didn’t play in a single crappy game this year. Weird.

4. My second BW event had 20 players and 1 GM, and it was okay — not bad, just okay. From a player’s perspective, I had a lot of trouble with the structure of the event, and the constraints that having 20 players placed on our use of the rules — including one of my favorite aspects of BW, the social conflict rules.

My DragonMech event started off very slowly, which was too bad. To my mind, if the central feature of your setting is “we have cool mechs,” you should be doing fun things with those cool mechs within the first 15 minutes of a four-hour scenario. It took us 2 hours to reach that point, and the adventure wasn’t built around us having a mech at all — it was almost a fluke that we got one.

This comes back to the guideline that if you have cool stuff to show off, show it off right away — and don’t sit on your best ideas. I hit on similar topics in “More Fun, Less Work” here on TT, and this event helped me solidify my belief in that approach.

6. I wasn’t feeling burned out before the con, so this tip didn’t apply this year. Even so, getting some good time in as a player got me even more jazzed about gaming than I already am, which is fine.