Terminal City Tabletop Con is this weekend! The boys are back in con!
Last year, we sat in on Proto-Alley to share QuestCrawl with some folks. This year Gabriel will be running the Compose Dream Games booth, and yours truly will be running some games in the RPG room.
I’m a bit of a con newbie. In almost thirty years of playing TTRPGs, I’ve basically only ever played them with friends, or friends of friends. At most, I think I’ve GM’d about two strangers in a group of five. I’m realizing as I get closer to the weekend, there’s a lot of novel angles to consider here. Putting people at ease, running a quick Session 0 style check-in, assigning premade characters — I’m going to have to consider my opening speil!
I’ve had a little more experience on the player side at conventions. Attending Penti-Con a few years back, I got to play in two games. Both were 5e dungeon crawls through a wee dungeon, one courtesy of one of the GMs from QuestKeep, and the other from a very nice Kelowna GM named Kylara who does hired GM-ing and whose contact info I have lost. (Reach out if you’re reading this!) More recently, at last year’s Terminal City Con, I played in a Lamentations of the Flame Princess game run by Semen Tsevelev.
In prep for my own weekend games, I thought I’d reflect a bit on those experiences. What went right? What didn’t work so well? Are the things that make a good module the same as the things that make a good convention game?
Five Rooms for Fifth Edition
The first Penti-Con game was the closest to what I imagined convention games to be like. My beautiful wife and I sat down at a table, where we were quickly joined by an older fellow who boasted about playing in the seventies for a while. He was shortly followed by a much younger person, who was checking out DnD for the first time. Variety! Archetypes! Conventions!
This adventure was focused. The dungeon was only a few rooms, included some fights and traps, and ended in a battle against a vampiric tree. It was a good time, as DnD almost always is, but between playing with strangers, knowing it was a one-shot, and the usual durability of 5e characters, the stakes felt a little low. I feel like the game would have played better as a module for home use; the adventure seemed comprehensible and easy to run, but also relatively railroad-y.
DnD as Team Sport
Kylara’s game was also a relatively straight-forward dungeon crawl, but with three major differences:
1 – This dungeon was points-based. Medallions were hidden throughout, and each group was in direct competition with the other three teams who would play the same module over the weekend. Whoever found the most medallions won! Winning team got some dice (IIRC); only a token, but enough to excite and motive the table. With a little fire under us, we plowed through this dungeon, even though it was over twice the length of the other sesh we played at the con.
2 – Because the stakes were not pass/fail, many of the encounters felt like they had more variable endings. Partial success was not only possible, it was expected. In later rooms, we were able to gamble medallions found in earlier rooms. I lost a bunch of stuff playing the correct answer to the Monty Hall problem; that’s life, bay-bee!
3 – The party was briefly split for single encounter. Everyone got a chance to shine.
Honestly, I think this dungeon would probably have made a bad module, but it was a crackerjack con game. I wish I could have played twice! I need to try writing something in the competitive vein I think. Stop by next years Terminal City Con; maybe by then I’ll have it up and running!
Lamentations of the Zoo Princess
I had a great time in this game. Although we only had three players at table (and one was new to the game and a bit shy) we had a blast romping through the Immortal Zoo of Ping Feng, one of the micro adventures in Vornheim. However, a few weeks after the game was over, I ended up reading the module for myself, and I was surprised to find it’s meant to play quite a bit differently than it did in practice.
A big part of the adventure rests on the conceit that this asshole bird creature is running around releasing various zoo monsters around you, causing trouble and exposing you to many of the most dangerous creatures in the zoo. This didn’t happen. Our quest hooks was to collect animals, so I blasted it with Sleep the moment I saw it and then promptly stuffed it in a sack.
The adventure is fairly explicit; you see the bird as you enter the dungeon, but it flees before you have a chance to catch it. Because this scene didn’t go off the way it was written, much of the adventure didn’t ‘trigger’. We wandered around, saw the sights, took what we wanted, had a briefly difficult moment with an interesting turtle monster, and then left. Which was fun, but also a bit of a shame given what could have been.
Semen ran a great game, but it did make me think: how many modules bury concept-critical instructions in single easy-to-miss sentences? When I’m writing a module, I write it assuming that it’s probably the only four hour RPG session they have booked that day. That is not true when you’re running con games. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve played this much in such a short time since high school! If writing for conventions, should modules try to be more explicit? More flexible?
The Plan
I’m running Fronds of Benevolence, Black Chamber, and Long Bear Valley. All three should be durable enough, if I misread a bit of the module, plus I’ve run them all before, so I expect to avoid all that anyways. Each choice has a bit of variability to it, enough that I hope the games feel like they have a bit of stakes to them, regardless of how many premade characters survive. I’m not sure how they’ll go, if they’ll resolve satisfyingly, or if this is even a good idea.
But if I survive, I’ll post about it next Tuesday!
Like this blog post? Read another! We’ve got some outlaw wizards, trolls, and a sun-eating monster!