Best Convention Game Ever!

[hartwell]

What are some of your favorite convention games in which you have played? Describe them in as much detail as possible.

If I get enough responses, I'll create a spreadsheet of the results and do a little analysis and share it here as well as on my Labyrinth Lord blog http://www.digitalorc.blogspot.com

Thanks!

Digital Orc

[The Lizard of Oz]

Not to derail or change the op but if it's possible I'd also be interested in reading people's worst convention games. Never been to a convention myself so I enjoy the hell out of reading people's posts and blog entries about their con games.

Have you ever ran an adventure that you weren't all that familiar with? Maybe read through or wrote one yourself but didn't run for your home group before running it at a con.

[gentleman john]

I haven't played a game at a convention since some time in the early noughties. In fact, I've exclusively run games at conventions for many years. Plenty of good ones among those, but I'm biased. I can bore you with the details if you really wish.

As for bad games ... Well, the bad games for me are those games that don't run. I have watched a lot of bad games. The worst, absolute nadir of a game was one that was run at a UK Games Expo in the Sunday afternoon slot. The game was a door-prize as it was being run by someone who had written a major background setting for a major RPG. A number of people had put in to be in on this particular session. I will mention no names to protect the guilty.

The slot was only a four-hour slot. The person running the game had prepared very nice character sheets, complete with graphics and lots of background notes. So far, so good. Then the session started. The players had to sit through a half-hour description of the intricate politics involved in the setting and a history of what had gone before for the last thirty years. Then they were given descriptions of their characters, their motivations and what they should be doing in the adventure. In fact, the person running the game spent the first hour and a half of that four hour slot talking at the players. All this before they had even started playing. The players had come in expecting a good time, and had to spend one third of their time being an audience ...

In my opinion, if you need to spend more than half an hour of a four-hour slot sorting out the PCs and the reasons behind the scenario, you've failed.

[The Lizard of Oz]

Wouldn't be boring me with details. I have to live convention games vicariously through yall's recounts.

[gentleman john]

Well, there are some of my con reports up on this site. To save repeating myself (and because the details are rather vague now) the links are:

UK Games Expo 2011: http://www.goblinoidgames.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=600
ConQuest 2012: http://www.goblinoidgames.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1402
UK Games Expo 2012: http://www.goblinoidgames.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1558

The ConQuest 2011 goblins adventure (one of my favourites) got turned into a comic strip in a couple of issues of Oubliette (6, 7 and 8 actually). If you want to know about them, give me a while to locate the issues and I can write them up for you.

I'm planning on reviving the goblins for another go - their fourth - at UK Games Expo 2014. This will follow on chronologically from the ConQuest 2012 game, with the goblins washed up on an island somewhere.

Actually, the goblin games have been my favourites for quite a while. There is something about playing Chaotic goblinoids that brings out the mania in players. For some reason they go mad, run off all over the place, trip all the traps, cause mayhem, throw tiles from the roof of a burning building, summon acid elementals and forget what they were meant to be doing in the first place.

[hartwell]

Thanks for the links, that's a lot of information I can use.

[kjc]

I've only played in about three con games. I've enjoyed them all, but what made them fun was the other players! It wasn't the GM, or the rules set, or the scenario, it was the social interaction. Fun gamers make gaming fun.

[monk]

Almost all the con games I've been in were at least kinda fun, since I got to see how another DM runs his game AND got to actually play (usually I'm the DM), but some were definitely more fun that others. Of those I can remember distinctly:

OD&D Homebrew Megadungeon: This was a very loose and fun session wherein we played the totally cliched party of adventurers who've come from all over, met in a tavern, and struck out on an expedition into the famous megadungeon nearby. Totally cliche? Yes. Totally fun? Double yes. The DM in this game, like I said, played things loose and fast. Lots of small skirmishes with stirges and other pests. A creepy dungeon where you expected a deadly trap every time you touched a doorknob or inspected a patch of floor. Since it was a megadungeon, and we didn't have some particular mission, we would just have wandered around looking for treasure. Except that right from the start, the DM dropped in some clues about a particular treasure and the monsters that were guarding it, or something like that. He didn’t present it as “this is what you’re supposed to do”, but we got excited about it and independently took it on as our quest. I think, as time was winding down, he may have fudged a few things around to make us come into contact with the monsters. We had a pretty good battle and scored the sweet treasure. Lots of satisfaction with completing something, the feeling of freedom to do what you want, and very loose and FAST rules meant lots of action and a lot of fun.
(Later I played with this DM again in another con game where he ran us through Tegel Manor with OD&D. Again, a huge setting and map, but he managed to provide us with enough hooks that we were able to find something concrete to accomplish and felt greatly satisfied when we whacked some Rump family member and looted his stuff)

OD&D Sandbox: This one was run by a really cool DM and had us plopped into a famous OD&D sandbox map. We rolled up 3rd level characters and he really encouraged us to use the vagueness of the three LBBs to think outside of the box. We encountered some crazy monsters (maybe a demon and some ghouls?) and then eventually went to investigate one of the sites on the map. Not much came of it, though, as time ran out. I found myself a little unsatisfied despite the cool characters, great description by the DM, and the fact that he ran a perfect sandbox where we could do whatever we wanted. In that sandboxyness, though, lies the problem, I think. There was too much freedom. We didn’t know where to go to get the cool stuff—or at least we didn’t have enough time to get into it. This led me to one of my personal opinions about con games: sandbox is awesome for a home campaign, but con games are short and need a focus or your players are apt to run around like psychos, have some fun, but end up unsatisfied.

AD&D 1e Megadungeon: This one was the least fun, by far. It took place in the DMs beautifully designed megadungeon and had about 12 players. We played fairly high level characters and it appeared that he tried to hew very closely to the 1e rules by the book. Unfortunately, in the 5 hour slot all we got to do was walk down a hallway into a strangely shaped room, map it, and then get into a big fight with a group of baddies. That’s it. I was really bummed because I was looking forward to the game quite a bit. I think what made it bad for me was that there was no setting for our expedition at all—no quest or mission, no direction (which again, like sandboxyness, is fine for a campaign but not that cool for a con game); also, and probably even moreso, the rules were a massive hindrance. Everytime somebody attacked, it took quite some time for the DM to figure out if he’d hit. He must have been using the whole weapon speeds vs. armor or something. Whatever it was, it took him forever to calculate so the one battle took almost the whole session. Then there was no treasure. Then we wandered into a couple more nondescript rooms and the time was up. Maybe if we’d been playing LL-B/X we would’ve had more time to do something memorable. Maybe the session needed some focus. Either way it was really weak.

These few experiences have formed in me some pretty concrete ideas about con game adventures, though I’m sure I have some bias. I only speak for myself, and I know there’s lots of ways to have fun, but I do think there’s some merit to these:

1. Even if you don’t normally, play rules lite. Things need to run smoothly and quickly so lots of things get done. This probably doesn’t much apply around here, since I assume most peeps are playing LL or B/x or something similar, i.e. the smoothest game evar.
2. Set a tone of balance between freedom of action and focus. It’s cool to have the freedom to explore and pick your mission, but it’s really important for the DM to provide enough hooks that the players can choose something concrete to accomplish. Con games need to be sleeker and faster than home campaigns, I think.
3. Addition of a cool game within the game, or adventure specific dynamic, is really fun. I’m thinking of a game I watched where the PCs were infected with a mania and each time they drew blood there was a chance for them to go bloodlust crazy. The DM had the players pulling blocks out of a Jenga tower everytime they struck an enemy—if it fell they were gonna go nuts. Or more simply, the dice gambling game that PCs can play in the tavern in your Blasphemous Brewery adventure, Hartwell. Every time something like that’s been included, it was a lot of fun.