Con Conflict Characters

I was asked at a Con recently how I got conflicts into my games – so much happening from three or four statements. Not sure if it’ll translate to text well, without the full demo, but here’s a stab at giving people the first go at getting some intra-party rivalry into their convention games.

Mwar Custom Character Sheets

Its definitely a Good Thing to add your own customer character sheets to a game, it can make all the difference. For starters, they look better generally, they can have all the information on you need and none of it that you don’t… flavour text, bits of rules, things specific to each character, images, the list goes on.

Ennie More For Any More

The Ennies are up for voting now, so get yours in.  I can probably write down on a piece of paper who’ll win what and then post it up here when the results are out, but I shan’t.  All I will say is that if you’re wondering what to vote for in the (9.) Best Setting category then you could do a lot worse than going for The Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor, by Arc Dream Publishing.  If you don’t believe me, run off and buy it now, and then read it and you’ll convince yourself to vote for it.  Its halfway between trad and hippie, superbly written and immense fun.  Have I ever let you down before?

Creating Con Characters

When making characters for your convention game, then the first things to bear in mind are :
Make them appropriate to the scenario (not just the setting).
Ensure they’re different enough (in feel and statistics) to give a broad flavour and give everyone their moment to shine

So, with that in mind, here are a few pointers:

Scenario Building

So how do you write a scenario for a convention or one-shot?  Simply don’t know where to start?  Well, if its 4e there’s a ton of things you can buy or download, so just boiler plate one of them and change the baddies round.  If its a left field hippy game then you probably make it up with the players along the way.  But if you want some on advice on how to knock something together, with some interesting bits on the way then you might find the following useful.  Its a method I’ve been using for some time, maybe it’ll help someone else with a place to start at least…

Background Noise

Actually I’m a fan. Some people want silence in their games, no distractions, abhor the convention gaming hall and anything other than character interaction. I on the other hand like a bit of hubbub. Not to much, so you can’t hear or talking is a struggle, but I like something to be there. I played a game at Conception last year and we got a large room to ourselves. It cut out most of the sound from anywhere else and left us focused on the game. But you know what the issue was? In the words of many a hackneyed film, it was *too* quiet.

Tentacular Preparation

It was with an invasive sense of horror that I realised I’ve less than a week until Tentacles and my preparation for four (count ‘em) Pendragon games is not even really started, never mind complete. I’ve got characters to write out, baddies to stat, plots to configure, props, maps, all sorts I could do… so why have I waited so long? Laziness? Partially. Hoochie leading me astray. Sort of. But mainly because I know it’ll all work out fine. How do I know this? Read on dear readers, read on…

Pick A Pocket Or Two

Why volunteer to run something?  You’re going to a convention and want there to be good games on that you want to play, but somehow there never seems to be what you want.  The solution is to pick up the gauntlet and run it yourself.  If you expose other people to your New Favourite Game, the chances are more people will buy it, play it  and run it and by extension, there’s more chance it will appear at a convention somewhere near you.  If delegates don’t volunteer to run things, its going to be a pretty shoddy convention…  but how do you know what to run?

How Much Is Too Much?

I went through a phase at conventions of writing stacks of info for players, big ass descriptions, things they thought of the other characters, world background, organisation information etc.  But frankly, that’s all too much.  Anything over a side of A4 just ain’t going in, with the best will in the world.  Typically I’ll have some flavour on one side and the stats on another.  I’ve even been paring down to A5 in some cases for things like Savage.  On the other hand I’ve also just given people the raw stats.  Now, in things like Pendragon, that’s fine.  You’ve got personality traits and all sorts right there.  In other games though, you might be selling your players short, especially if they’re new to all this.

Bill and Ted’s excellent adventure?

Following my last post about linked games, I’ve been mulling it over a bit more. I think there may actually be potential there, even if I still believe it’s not an easy road to take.