Why You Should Write Your Games To Be Played At Conventions

 

    As I begin my prep for running games at GenCon this year, I've been chewing on the idea of how games are presented for running at conventions. My take on how to prep may be slightly different than yours given that basically since I started running games at cons, I've been doing so on behalf of various companies - at this point, I've run games for Hunters Entertainment, Kobold Press, Plus One EXP and Mythworks over several GenCons and PAX Unpluggeds. And here's a little secret - with one and a half-exceptions (I ran CBR+PNK once for some friends, and I was running 5e for KP but with one of their own adventures), each of those events was my first time running and often even playing the game I was showing off. "Why would you do that?" a smart person might say, "Wouldn't you be really stressed and afraid of doing a bad job?" YES! Yes I would. Thankfully I've been running games for close to 20 years so I've developed a lot of the soft skills that can help smooth awkwardness over at the table, but while reading through each of the games I'd be running I found myself trying to hone in on the things in each game that really made them pop, the things that made me excited enough to risk running a game for the first time in front of a bunch of strangers on behalf of a different bunch of strangers that if I did a bad job presenting their game might never want to work with me again. 

    Running games at cons has been a part of the hobby almost as long as both games and cons have coexisted. There are many early D&D modules intended for convention play: the "C Series" modules were functionally what predates modern videogame speedrunning culture, and of course many games will include "quickplay" rules which can help you get up and running for when you want to test out a game before really fully committing to buying the product. In the indie scene, with loads of games being somewhere in the 16-40 page zine format and including both the rules of the game and often a starter scenario, it can be pretty painless to pick up a game and run it with little to no experience after a quick readthrough - and hell, the Mothership scene has gotten so proficient at whittling down information necessary to make a game work that the fancypants boxed set comes with like six trifold pamphlet adventures along with a few zines to show you the difference between what a shorter and a longer adventure can look like in a game designed to put characters through both a literal and metaphorical woodchipper. The thing is, "short games" are not the same as con games despite the limited amount of time you have at cons. Neither, necessarily, are "one shots" necessarily synonymous with con games despite the fact that con games are by necessity one shots (this is a squares and rectangles situation). When you're running a game at a con, the people who choose to invest their time (and, in GenCon's case, money) to sit down at a game are either 1. people who have never had a chance to play this game and want to see what it's like, or 2. are people who really like that game and are willing to play with strangers/have a whole group of friends they're going around and playing with. In either case, it's your job as a GM to be able to pull out a vertical slice of that game to show off all the best parts of it while also competing with those peoples' limited time and limited attention. As designers, I think this is a play format that should be considered when writing rules much in the same way that many games will include a solo mode or how many people will hyperlink their PDFs - both a kind of accessibility solution, in their own ways, and I think writing with convention play in mind is another kind of accessibility concern to keep in mind.

    Before continuing, I should say that this is something I've previously talked about in the third Wassailing of Claus Manor zine, The Pine Tar of Claus Manor. Consider this a much expanded version of that essay. I should also say that curating a game experience to a particular limited time frame is something I have a lot of experience with - One Night Strahd, although intended to be a 12 hour one shot, still required a lot of what I'm about to go into. And finally, I should point out that a great blogger would turn this into a miniseries of blog posts that are in an easily consumable length in order to create proper engagement with their blog. Unfortunately for you and I, I am simply a mediocre blogger and can only be succinct when people pay me to be, so strap in.

Minimum Viable Products, Vertical Slices, & GM Soft Skills

    While I'm not a videogame developer nor programmer, the person I wrote One Night Strahd with is, and so over the many months we wrote it together I had a bunch of videogame design principles thrown at me. Likewise, some of my earliest convention work was representing MAGFest at PAX East and talking to a lot of different developers showing off either demos of their games or lots of proof of concept builds of their games. Through those times, I was introduced to the difference between "minimum viable products" and "vertical slices": a minimum viable product being the absolute bare minimum things a product needs to have to both correctly resemble the end product you're trying to build towards; a vertical slice shows off the project as it is intended to be consumed but only through a very small, curated window. While those things are part of the design process that ultimately leads to a full and complete game shipping, when we GM games we are consciously or unconsciously tearing down the complete product into these two categories and trying to recombine them on the fly based on the ambient factors while running it - how to budget your time for each part of an encounter, how to keep people engaged, how to make sure everyone gets to contribute, what things can be cut for time when an unforeseen event happens or even if players just locked in too hard on some random part of the adventure and now suddenly the easiest part of the adventure has taken half of the play session. Likewise, you're also juggling your (and, if this is a game the players have played before, their) interpretation of what things are exciting about the game you're playing and trying to highlight those things while downplaying the things that are active detriments (things that are unfun, processes that take too long, etc.). Some of you might go "But those things are a part of what makes the game the game!" and to that I would say, congratulations, you agree that some things are required to be the minimum viable version of that game in your mind and some things are not, and knowing how to differentiate is important. For example, check out this post about this person's Minimum Viable D&D - which is great for breaking down what the base constituents of what feels like D&D are both on a tone and rules level, but don't address what it's like to actually play the game. That part is one of the most ephemeral skillsets we have to interact with: GM Soft Skills.

    If you're not the person who wrote whatever game you're playing (and whatever scenario you're playing), you do not have the intimate knowledge of what the person who wrote those things wanted this experience to feel like. And to a certain extent, fuck 'em, right? Its your table and your group, so you're in charge of the experience. But I bring up this authorial intent because if you do not have that intimate knowledge, it falls to you as mentioned before to deconstruct and recombine everything to give to the people playing your game, and that means you need to be able to understand what things are fun to interact with, what things need to be interacted with to make the game happen, and what things can be hindrances to both. This is all the more important to keep in mind as a convention GM because it is extremely unlikely that whatever you're running was designed with the constraints a convention places on your time and the attention spans of folks at the table. When you're running a home game, you can reschedule, you can extend it out into multiple sessions, you can take 20 minutes arguing about a rule, you can apologize for triggering your friend because you forgot about their arachnophobia, and ultimately everyone there is still going to get to Do The Thing. At con games, you're battling the ticking clock, the preamble (introductions, safety tools, explaining the initial rules, letting people get their characters set up), the actual playing of the game, and then any number of outside distractions that pull people away, and all the while you are responsible for delivering the best possible experience because you are expected to Be An Authority to these people - after all, if you don't know what you're doing, why are you even there? Now consider all of that, plus the fact that you need to have read what it is you're running before, find all the things that YOU think are cool and mentally bookmark things you think should be highlighted, and then be able to adapt when the players have different opinions about what parts of the game they want to interact with or think are cool which are actively preventing you from concluding the experience in the correct amount of time. That is not a small cognitive load for a GM by any stretch, and being experienced at spinning all those plates doesn't make there be fewer plates to spin.  

    Going Through The Gauntlet 

        In older D&D modules, a lot of the ways the people writing the modules would deal with minimizing the cognitive load on GMs and players would take the form of providing premade characters (skipping the arduous process of character creation) and by either having explicit "win" conditions or by providing a scoring table. One of my favorite adventures to demonstrate this is C-1 The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan (there's a reason it shows up as an Easter Egg in One Night Strahd, after all). 

By giving Referees a list of things that can contribute or deduct from the party's score as well as a concrete "win" condition of making it to a certain room within the time allotted, it inadvertently also provides a list of things that can speed up or slow down play - and this being from the published version rather than the initial version run at Origins '79, this scoring table (and indeed the whole module) also had the benefit of receiving feedback on how the game played across multiple tables. You can look at this and go "OK, these things are what the writers thought would challenge players, this is the kind of behavior they're trying to reward or punish," and so on. It also included pictures to be handouts - when you're on a time crunch, the thousand word value of a picture is much more present when you have to weigh it versus the time it would take you to describe something to your players.

    But people play other games than just the D&D-oids, right? If we remove ourselves one step from this style of play, we get to The Gauntlet gaming community and its publications - namely, Trophy Dark and the various Carved from Brindlewood games. Trophy Dark in and of itself is an interesting game in this context - its direct parent, Graham Walmsley's Cthulhu Dark, was an act of reducing Call of Cthulhu and similar games down to its most minimal, rules-light form. Trophy Dark acts somewhat similarly to dungeon crawling games - I won't go over the whole history of that here, you can go listen to Jason and Alex talk about it - but with an intentionally horror-focused lens as the intent is you should be "playing to lose." In quite literally the opposite approach to Tamoachan, Trophy Dark doesn't want characters making cool, calculated decisions while trying to beat the clock - your characters are all deeply selfish and can, will, and should actively throw their fellow treasure hunters under the bus to try to be the last person standing. On the subject of one shots, the Trophy Dark rulebook has this to say:

Moving down the design lineage, we get to Brindlewood Bay and The Between. Both of them contain more or less the same advice as each other so to save time, here's the version of it from Brindlewood Bay:

Both of these pieces of advice are concise, directly reference mechanics in the text, and provide reasoning behind why this advice is being given. Brindlewood Bay and The Between also both provide an outline with approximate timing on how long each section should take. If you follow those estimates exactly, you'll have wrapped up both games in around 160 minutes - which means you'll be right on track if you have a 3 hour slot or you'll have had to figure something out if you had less time as many conventions stick you in 2 hour blocks (although, understanding how long it takes to run a game is in and of itself a Soft GM Skill to master, so if you're at such an event you might want to choose another game). As an alternative to this, Mike Martens has been working on an another mode of play for his upcoming CfB game Planet Raygun which he posted a video about recently - a duet mode (i.e. one player, one GM) which contains the same structure of play as a traditional CfB game but wraps character creation and the plot of the story you're exploring into one tight package. Mike described it as being somewhere between a Trophy incursion and a normal CfB scenario, which makes sense - when you cut out most of the meta-trappings present in a CfB game, what you're left with basically is the same narrative structure you see in the Trophy games. And critically, what this means is that this duet mode of Planet Raygun is still being designed to hit all the beats of things that make it feel like you're playing the base game, but at the same time it strips away many of the parts that can cause speedbumps and take away valuable gaming time. The fact that some of the things it strips away are...well...other players...is a thing that should be noted, but that's still a choice to design towards - after all, how in the world are we going to keep paying Elliot Davis' rent if people stop wanting solo modes for their games?

An Aside: Do Only Horror Games Care About Time Pressure?

    You may have noticed that all of the games I've mentioned so far are inherently horror-forward. To directly quote Josh Domanski, who explains why much more succinctly than I would have: 

    And that makes sense! But surely there has to be some game out there that both nails presenting the vibes and rules in a self-contained package while also being about something that isn't horror, right?

I mean, yeah, there is. I'd forgive you for not having played it at a con because of the many many issues surrounding its physical release but it's Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast.

Zeeb and the CfB family of games fall into what some taxonomize as Capsule Games (see: a different Josh's blog post for more on that), and removing lots of player choices does in fact remove a lot things that can slow down play and eat up your precious minutes. Josh has another post about designing capsule games and I encourage you take a moment to read both of those, because a quick glance will reveal that each of the other games referenced are also games that are horror-forward (and yes, I count D&D as horror forward - it's a game primarily about solving problems through extreme violence dawg, I don't know what to tell you). Other intentional one shot games that hit all the marks I'm talking about, such as Ten Candles or Dread, are also horror games. Yazeba's does also include horror elements in some of its scenarios, so why is it different? I think it's because each chapter in the book is intended to be its own standalone miniature game intended to take place in around 90 minutes. The whole design process is with that in mind - you (both the person acting as Concierge/quasi-GM and everyone else) are only given as many rules as are necessary to run the scenario, and with each scenario focusing explicitly on certain characters and portraying a specific episode of their life, time crunch doesn't need to be used to add terror - it's used to simply denote a natural stopping point for the story. In some ways this seems like the same advice for the Brindlewood games, but the intentionality is different: rather than saying "just play the game as it's written and change these few things to account for time remaining to get through it," Yazeba's says "no matter what happens, what you are about to do is going to be a complete experience." It's subtle, but an important distinction.

What Wisdom Can Be Pulled Forward?

    For creators, I think it is important to really, deeply understand what it is that you think makes your game cool and then make sure whoever picks up your work knows that too. If you're creating something that bolts onto someone else's game (i.e. an adventure module), it's important to not only understand what makes your thing cool but also what elements of the base game you're writing for you think are the coolest that you want to show off with your own work. No matter what, it's important to understand what components of your game slow down gameplay and increase cognitive load for players and for GMs, and you need to decide if those things add to or detract from the experience - things that slow down gameplay might be The Point of what you're creating, but if that's the case you need to be able to account for that elsewhere. Be mindful of how you want people to use their time - whether that means flagging content that is easy to "cut for time" or just a preamble in the beginning of your writing explaining the intent and potential pitfalls associated with certain parts of the game. Give your players only as much as they need to play, and give your GMs only as much as they need to run the game, but whatever you give them needs to be able to show off all the best things about the game. And finally, remember that "one shot" only means that you intend the game to be played in one go - that doesn't help people understand how long it should take or how important certain things are in the plot, so you can and should consider including the intended play time for what you write to help people make choices about what to run!

    For game runners, it's important for you to understand what YOU like about the game you're running. Make sure everyone has rules reference sheets, even for games that are slim on actual rules. Watch an actual play of the game if and where you can to see what things come up during play that aren't present in the text. Read through the text a few times, highlight the things you feel are the most relevant to getting the point of the game across. Don't be afraid to turn longer parts that could derail the gameplay into cutscenes - con games are probably the only time it's OK to railroad players, and that's because the shared social contract of a convention game is that the players know you're trying to get them to the end in a limited amount of time. If you do cutscene your way through a portion of the game for time, consider letting the players respond to that or otherwise help shape that cutscene (see: Painting The Scene in CfB games). Also remember that for better AND worse, it's likely nobody you're running the game for at a con has any preconceived notion of what the scenario should feel like, which means you're going to be stressed about a bunch of stuff that those players will not even be able to perceive. Keep an eye on the table - if everyone's having fun, you're doing it right, and you can probably let go of the fact that you misread a rule on page 5 which completely recontextualizes the whole module and you've had to absolutely freestyle it for the last 30 minutes. Just be honest with folks after the game about it so they know they got a slightly different experience than intended!

    Overall, just remember: if you're running something at a con you've got about 2-3 hours - give or take for breaks and emergencies - to present a vertical slice of a game you love. Enjoy it, and do whatever you need to ahead of time to make your time at the table go as easily as possible. You're curating this experience - make it as fun for you as it should be for the players! 

Outro & Shoutouts

Shoutouts to Josh Domanski and Mike Martens for chiming in on my original Blooski thread about this. Also shoutouts to Josh McCrowell and Jason Cordova for having meticulously documented their thoughts and opinions on gaming over the years which have helped me build my own GM Soft Skills, certainly around their games but also for others. And finally, shoutouts to Yochai, Brad, & Sam at Between Two Cairns and Chris Airiau of Ansible Uplink for delving into some of the behind the scenes things which can be important to know when running adventures in the systems they frequent in.

Stay weird out there.