Sunday 20 July 2014

Rights and Wrongs of Campaign Gaming at Conventions.

Over on UKRoleplayers, the question was asked if campaign games have any place at Conventions, and if so, what place that might be?

Thought to post my response up here :)

For myself, it’s become an evolving discussion that ties into the future of both Expo and games in general.  There’s both good and bad in the idea of campaigns being run across several conventions (and indeed in several slots over the larger conventions), and I think that there is a place for campaign games within conventions, but I also think that the one shots and isolated scenarios have as much (If not more so) place at conventions and here’s why.

A campaign is an excellent thing to be involved in, you meet the same people all the time, you have the same adventures together, you get to know those people and that’s one of the primary reason for roleplaying around a table, the adventures you have become part of your characters legend and in times to come, you can all fondly reminisce about the things that you got up to.  The thing is that with increasing numbers of us getting older (I speak for everyone else, I’m still 18), and as a result no longer able to devote whole weekends to catching up with everyone else and playing, the conventions that we go to are the only chance we get to meeting up with our old adventuring buddies and remember those times when we were young.

It all sounds a bit Take That really doesn’t it…?

The problem of course, from a convention point of view, is that you’re not getting new people into the hobby, and as a result, it’s never going to expand and you end up running a very large hall full of the same people for twenty years, and when you all get too old to make the trip, the convention dies and the hobby does not notice because it’s only those people who were there who lament the loss of the hall…

There are some who consider that Pathfinder and similar living games are the equivalent of running campaigns at a convention, when really anyone who’s ever played pathfinder knows that it’s anything but.  Sure, you get a number of the same people who follow the games from point to point and you get the familiar faces that are always first through the door every time, which would be very much like the way a lone adventurer would occasionally team up with others to tackle a larger problem.  The reason why a lot of Pathfinder consecutive scenarios run in slots that follow on from each other is in the hope that the same people will book into the game and allow continuity for the players who are going through that scenario, because while they can always do the scenario again, they’ll never again get the points, items, or bonuses from that scenario and their character will be recorded as going through it with a different team, which I would have thought could have made for a reasonably jarring experience, particularly if you started the three parter with one party, did the second part with another, and ended up completing it with yet another.  Now to be sure, after a while on a limited convention scene (such as England), after a while you know everyone and that’s great because Eventually Zog the Barbarian will meet up again with Blackhawk the swordsman and they’ll reminisce about the time they went searching across time and space and by then, the time inbetween will be things that they can talk to each other about and it’ll serve the same purpose as having players drop in and out of long campaigns over time.

But that takes time, and most people don’t devote that much time to it…

The other problem is the question of exclusivity, and the very real problem that when you’re running a campaign game for a particular group of players, you’re only really looking for those players, and anyone else who turns up will not really have a space at a table.  I played in one such game last year on the great convention trek, and I was the only person at the table who had not had a prior slot at the table, one person had already walked out of the game because they’d looked at the characters on the table (none of which had been already chosen) and was told that the only character they could have was the one I ended up playing because all the other characters were reserved. They went back upstairs, scrubbed their name off the sheet and vowed, loudly, to never again look for a game by that particular game.  This of course got my interest so I took her space and wandered down to play that character.

Good scenario, Good GM, Good Players…

Not good game…

It was apparent from point one that I was very much an outsider, there were expectations placed on the character that I had to play, by all accounts the previous player had been a bit of a cowardly b’stard who had staggering levels of incompetence, and so when I started making reasonable decisions in the vein of what I thought the character would do, the group started rebelling against the nature of their comrade doing such things.  I would certainly have enjoyed the scenario in other circumstances, and I have made a point of inviting the GM back to a number of conventions I do because they’re clearly good at what they do, but on the run up to Expo, I saw the same thing happening with a number of the really good GM’s, the game would go live and the spaces would lock out instantly because one of the friend network was camping on the go signal and would immediately have all the places.

This year I have a quandary, all these games are run by the best GM’s, the ones I prefer to call Professional GM’s, because I know when they’re running a slot, they guarantee to deliver excellent games and have players coming back every time.

The very people any convention depends upon to grow and become bigger and better…

But if all the very best games are being snapped up immediately, what we’re left with are the GM’s who don’t put in all the prep time, who don’t turn up with extra dice and crib sheets, who run exactly what they need to to get the rewards and nothing else, and while they deliver a reasonable game, they don’t deliver the masterclass that the Professional GM’s do, and so the chance of the players coming back again and again is reduced.

I believe there’s a place at conventions for campaign games, I believe wholeheartedly that there should be games where the players are already booked in because that’s their game that year, that’s the instalment of their campaign that they’re playing. 

I believe that in my heart, campaigns are the reason most of us play, and there should be no bar to that at any point. In years to come, I’m certainly going to be directing that as part of Expo policy.

However…

I also believe that those who can deliver those games, who can have a whole table of players rapturously waiting their every word, who play the table like an orchestra, I believe those people are needed now more than ever on the front line of convention play.  There are some who believe that those of us who’ve paid our dues should have the chance to enjoy all the good games because we sought out the good GM’s in advance, and while I can’t argue the sentiment, I can say that if I’d never had a good convention game when I was younger, I wouldn’t have the passion for conventions that I have now, and if we the few, the proud, the grognard, take all the good games for ourselves, it’ll be fine for us, but we’ll be the yuppies of roleplaying, and those that follow us will have nothing left but the dark future that cyberpunk never delivered.

Some of the most popular games that were delivered at Expo this year were the one hour taster sessions, designed specifically with the beginner crowd in mind, allowing people to jump straight in, not lose four hours to a game they might not have liked, and still get to play something new.  It’s certainly something we’ll be repeating, but we still need to have games that are slightly longer and run by the Professional GM’s so when the beginner comes back with “That was excellent!” we can immediately point to another available game and say, “Good, now try this…”

They go to the next game, have an even better game, come back bouncing and wanting to play more and behold…

They look up more conventions to go to and everyone wins…

TL:DR?

Campaign games have a place at conventions, and it’s excellent to catch up with friends, but if all we succeed in doing is making conventions places where most of the rest of roleplaying society stays away because they’re not part of the crowd that’s “Been there forever”, we only end up hurting the hobby…


And that’s never good…