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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pramas" data-source="post: 1408237" data-attributes="member: 995">Article, part 1I wrote an article about this very thing years ago that appeared in Arcane Magazine and later Pyramid. I'll probably post it on my personal site soon, but for now I'll just cut and paste it in here.I Was a Teenage GamemasterThe ABCs of Convention GmingChris PramasCopyright 1997I went to my first GenCon in 1989. I had always remembered those ads in the back of all TSR's early products telling me the wonders of the Con of Cons and that year I decided to find out if it all was true. So I flew out, crashed on the floor of some friends who happened to live in Old Milwaukee, and dove head first into the biggest con in the Western Hemisphere. It's kind of funny to look back at that year, when I knew no one and had no idea what to expect. Now, it's a yearly ritual, something I take for granted. Then, it was much more mysterious. As you might have guessed, I've gone every year since then; I had a great time and told all my friends about it. Many of them came the next year and have been with me ever since. Over the years, I've gone from simple player to GM to aspiring freelancer to publisher. Quite a ride, I must say, and in many ways in all began that fateful year I said, "I think I'll go to GenCon." It should come as no surprise that I've played in a lot games at a lot of cons. A few have been great, outstanding examples of what roleplaying can be that will live forever in my memory. A far larger proportion, however, were exercises in mediocrity or simply downright bad. Over the years I began to notice the mistakes that I saw GM after GM make. When I started running a tournament of my own at GenCon, I tried to implement what I had learned. My game, an Ars Magica tourney chronicling the continuing adventures of the covenant of Castellum Collis, ran for four years and was, I think, a great success. While I was forced to stop running the game due to my spiraling involvement in the industry as a freelance writer, I did learn a great deal about the fine art of game mastering. What follows are some suggestions, solidly based on my own experiences, for how to run a successful roleplaying game at a convention. First, a warning. Running a good game takes a great deal of time, effort, and preparation. If you think you can show up with a few ideas jotted down on a napkin and run a satisfying game, you are wrong. If you can't commit to working on your own game, do everyone a favor and don't run one. The BasicsThe first thing you need to do is pick a system for your game. It's really best to go with a game you know very well. Otherwise, you spend precious time looking up rules, or worse, you end being dictated to by the rules lawyers who infest every con. After you've picked your system, decide what kind of game you're going to run. Will it be a single round game or a multi-round tourney? Do you plan to make this a continuing series or is it a one-off? Both of these decisions will affect the way you develop your game so it's good to make them at the outset. The next thing to do is to sit down and come up with the basic plot line for the game. You needn't hammer out the nitty gritty at this stage, but give some thought to what you're trying to do. Is your game going to be political intrigue, a classic dungeon crawl, something experimental, or all of the above? You should also decide how many players you'd like to have in the game. Commonly, you'll have up to eight, but many cons let you decide. I've found that six is a good number. More than that and the game becomes more like babysitting than game mastering. The CharactersMany GMs leave character creation up to the players. This is usually a big mistake for a couple of reasons. First, spending an hour or more of your game time is a waste of time. People go to cons to play, not to make characters. Second, creating the characters beforehand lets you tailor the plot to suit them. You can write encounters specifically to play up the strengths and weaknesses of particular characters, which really serves to engage the players and to get them to identify with their characters. It also makes things easier on you, since you'll know exactly what each character can and cannot do You don't have to worry about the guy who wants to make a Monk/Paladin/Acrobat if you design the characters. All that being said, there are certain games that are designed for quick character generation that can be successfully run at cons without pre-gens. Over the Edge and Feng Shui are both games of this type. An important thing to remember when designing the characters is that they are not simply a bunch of stats. There's nothing worse than being handed a sheet of paper covered with numbers and then being told to roleplay. You must provide the players with a character's history and roleplaying notes if you expect any kind of meaningful interaction. This is where you'll spend much of your time preparing your games. The first year is usually the worst, since you have to come up with six to ten characters that are interesting and playable. After that, you can tweak and update them in the wake of experience. Another thing to consider when making characters is whether they'll be fun to play. You should try to give everyone a character who is unique in some way. It's no fun to play a character that is second best at everything. I remember playing a Call of Cthulhu game in which I played a high school student. I was under the impression that we were all high school students and that that was the angle of the game. Then about an hour in I realize that two of the characters were in fact professors who specialized in magic. So I was running around with a baseball bat while these guys were slinging Elder Signs and casting spells. Their characters were simply better at everything than all the other characters. This was not fun and I quickly lost interest in the game. Writing the GameNow comes the really hard part: writing the game. You can have the best characters in the world, but people are still going to hate your game if the adventure itself is lame. It isn't within the scope of this article to try to answer the age old question "what makes a good adventure," but there are a few things you should try to bear in mind when designing a con run. First, you should try to design your game so that it engages all of the players and, most importantly, their characters. Games that focus on one or two characters over all the others tend to marginalize the players of the other characters and make them feel unimportant. I once played in a Pendragon game in which I got to play Mordred. It's not every day that you get to play one of the classic villains of literature, so I jumped at the chance. The adventure was based on an episode in Mallory and dealt with Mordred turning from a good knight to the evil knight we all love to hate. Since the adventure was based on my characters, I had a blast, especially given my love of the Arthurian mythos. All of the other characters in the game, however, were lesser knights who were basically my flunkies. A number of my friends also played in this game and expressed severe dissatisfaction with the small role they had played. After all, it was their game too, and I had gotten to have all the fun. An excellent way to avoid the aforementioned problem is to try to plan scenes for each of the characters. These are encounters specifically designed for individual characters, yet another bonus of using pre-gens. Even if the story revolves heavily around one or two of the characters, giving each player a moment to shine makes them feel that their character is really involved in what's going on. These scenes are most often dramatic situations, but can just as easily be based around a character's special abilities or knowledge. For instance, one character in my tourney, a magus named Octavius, had the flaw Demon Plagued. A particular demon was striving to corrupt his soul and Octavius was trying to keep this fact from all of his comrades. So each year, somewhere in the game, the demon would show up (usually in disguise) and make trouble for poor Octavius. Other characters in the game had similar scenes. Another thing to remember is that you're working with a time limit. At GenCon, this is usually four hours. Whatever the limit, you must be sure that you can finish the game in the allotted time. If you don't finish, you can't just get everyone together the next week. If want to send your players home with a gaming experience they will remember, there really must be a sense of closure. One trick that I've used to great effect is to design an optional encounter. This is a scene you can use towards the end of an adventure that is not crucial to its outcome. If the game is proceeding as planned, use the encounter as normal. If you find that the game is running late and you're worried about finishing, skip it and get to the climax as soon as possible. If you're planning on running a multi-round tourney, you also need to consider the structure of each round. Often, GMs get carried away with the grand plan of their three-round tourney. They give little thought to how each individual round plays, but think only of the whole. This is great if you advance to the final, but the truth is that most players won't. You have to make sure that each round of your tourney is fun to play in its own right. The characters should have the opportunity to complete a task that's important in the emerging plot. Thus they'll feel as if they made a difference, accomplishing something even if they don't get to see how the whole story plays out. I actually built this into my tourney by making round one all Grogs and round two Magi and Companions only. The Grogs, common soldiers who protect the much-vaunted magi of the Order of Hermes, always had a crucial task to perform and their triumphs usually set the stage for the game's final round. (part 2 to follow)</blockquote>

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