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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6447528" data-attributes="member: 42582">A side-comment on convention games: for me it's nearly 20 years (basically since I ceased being a full-time university student), but back in the day sessions were 2 to 3 hours (my recollection is 4 sessions per day). The "plot dump" consisted in a mixture of general framing plus PC-specific backgrounds, distributed in advance of play in documentary form.The best sessions, at least in my experience, were generally RQ, CoC, Pendragon and Stormbringer (ie the various RQ variants). This was for a combination of reasons: those systems attracted the better GMs, had better scenarios written for them, and lend themselves easily to play even by the unfamiliar because the mechanics are so transparent. A good GM in this context is one who is skilled at setting the scene and at RPing NPCs - these things help bridge the inevitable gap of unfamiliarity with and lack of long-term investment in the characters or the game. And also who will take player action declarations and run with them. A good scenario is one in which the PCs (via their prescripted motivations) have a mixture of reasons to cooperate, but also elements of tension, and the scenario gives scope for these tensions to emerge in a natural way.A poor tournament game, by contrast, is characterised by lacklustre GMing in respect of narration, and by blatant railroading with no ingame rationale (contrast CoC, which lends itself very well to the convention format, because the railroading makes sense in game, and it is a lot of fun to play/emote your increasingly crazed PC and otherwise just go along for the well-GMed ride). To the extent that the PCs have pre-scripted conflicts, those conflicts don't really get brought out in play except perhaps in arbitrary or heavy-handed ways. (In other words, it's not radically different from what makes for poor non-convention play.)I've played convention sessions where, due to not getting sufficient sleep overnight, we completely forgot the clues gained in the previous sessions, stuffed everything up, and TPKed royally. Those are dissapointing, but better than a session in which everything is railroaded into a forgone climax, so that our choices really make no difference.</blockquote>

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