Best and worst con' practices

[Katana_Geldar]

Local RPG club constantly shows up at a local RPG con and the GMs run games for...their weekly gaming group. No outreach. None. If I were the club president (who is unfortunately also now the RPG director at the con after I quit) I'd tell them to open recruit for God's sake. Quit bringing your weekly or monthly game to the 'con.

I agree completely, why bothering going anyway?

Just returned from my first con and it was very well-run. I ran four three hour Paranoia games, and picked up a trophy and a book voucher. I am so going back next year.

 

[OnlineDM]

I've only been to two cons so far (TactiCon over Labor Day weekend and Genghis Con over Presidents' Day weekend in the Denver area) and I thought that both were very well-run. There were lots of events to choose from, and I haven't run into any situations of tables being way overbooked or GMs not showing up. Quite the opposite, actually - when they've had a bunch of players at the muster area with generic tickets who wanted to game, they found people who were willing to run games for them.

The practices that I find very effective are that the convention organizers are very welcoming to new people and new GMs, they solicit player feedback about the GM at every table, they make sure that the scheduled games run on time, and they make sure that everyone who wants to play in a game gets to play in something. It's a good group running these events.