A Day of Games
Despite the recent lull in blogging things have been pretty busy on the geeking front, not least of which was my desicion to run a small, one day RPG con a couple of months ago. The reasons for this were two fold.
- There are heaps of fantastic small print games out there that I wanted to have an oppertunity to play.
- I thought that the Wellington gaming scene would respond well to an event mid year.
So I stole an idea from New Zealand’s biggest RPG con, KapCon (which is held every January), and based my Day of Games on the Games on Demand room. The deal here is that there are a group of facilitators who each agree to run certain games that they’re really excited about and then people come, vote on which games seem cool and go play. Sounds easy right?
Well as I found out this supposidly easy concept needs (not surprisingly) more organisation that I thought it would. Choosing a date in mid-May which was roughly half way between KapCon and the one of the other main RPG events in Wellington, ConFusion which is held in August was easy. As was picking the old faithful, Turnbull House for a venue. I pimped my idea on the NZRag boards to get people to come and run games and even made fliers to go into the FLGS. I kind of forgot to set up a Facebook event until a few days before but dispite that lapse the day arrived an we had a pretty good turn out, even a guy who was from the US and travelling around NZ. After some discussion I decided to do a slightly different time table. Rather than the traditional 3 hour slot I split the day into two 4 hour slots and four 2 hour slots. This way if you wanted to play in a game that required more set up you’d still get time to play.
This was kind of where my grand idea fell down a little. I had a big white board and session times/lengths all worked out, but I felt there was too much standing around waiting and discussing what would happen next. Also a number of the GMs didn’t get to play in games that they wanted to due to having to run games. So I’ve been thinking about how to smooth out those waits and give everyone the oppertunity to play if they wanted to. So here is what I’m going to do next year, assuming there is interest:
- Get a clear list of games from each GM so other GMs can indicate what they’d also like to play in.
- Set up the whole day’s timetable to begin with so if people finish their session they know where to go next and time isn’t eaten up in the short sessions with arranging things.
In terms of my own Day of Games experience it was good. I ran an awesome game of 3: 16 for three Americans who really got into their roles as Space Marines. Then I “ran” an utterly terrible session of Capes (a game I’d never read, played in or even come across before) which I thought would be an easy supers pick game but confused me and all of the players with it’s unusual conflict mechanic. However I did really like the way characters were generated. Finally I brought out Hot War and actually got to run through game creation. This was my most satisfying game of the day and made me want to play in a multi-session game of this even more.
All in all it was a good day and the comments from others made me think that it could continue to grow in the furture. So I’m thinking that Day of Games will be around for another year yet.
5 Comments to A Day of Games
“i “ran” an utterly terrible session of Capes (a game I’d never read, played in or even come across before) ”
How is this even possible?
A very good question. Essentially there was a group of people keen to play it, Steve was pulled into another game, I asked him if it was “an easy pick up”, he said there was a tutorial that worked really well from him, so I risked it. Bad, bad idea. I’ll never do it again and I felt really bad for the players. Biggest, flop, ever.
SteveJuly 16, 2009
Wow, a bigger flop than my run of Bacchanal? Which I am still processing two months later?
(I know: we sort of talked about this in the car, but sorry for not making my reservations clearer. I reckon I was torn between “Capes will probably kind of work if they follow the tutorial” vs “I guess we don’t want to disappoint a whole bunch of people who’ve chosen to play a particular game.” Something I’ve learned for next time.)
I think your pre-scheduling idea is a good one … or at least roughly scheduling, and keeping a little bit of flexibility to move things around on the day?
It possibly was a bigger flop. At least in your game one person around the table had a rough idea about how this was meant to go! But never mind, we live an learn.
Yeah, that’s a good call. Roughly work things out, have a quick re-shuffle before first round and see how that goes.
CurtisJuly 17, 2009
Y’all are too hard on yourselves. You’re both great, outgoing gamers and I bet the sessions were at least educational which was at least half the purpose.
I think rather than focus on time slots, it might be easier to plan around game tables… Each table runs for a set time. So if you have 6 game tables maybe two of them run 4 hour games and four of them run 2 hour games.
You might add a bidding concept where attendees are given tokens to “buy in” to any particular session so if demand is tight for one table, players can spend effort once to make sure they get in. The act of bidding might be fun in itself.
But it seems a good secondary goal of this game day is to try new things and that should be probably mentioned up front.
July 16, 2009