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Gencon was good, but exhausting.
This summer has been the summer of experimentation (not that kind, get your mind out of the gutter) — usually it’s just us four guys in The Impossible Dream who run games at Origins/Gencon. This usually means that each of us runs 4, 4 hour games for 6 players — the bare minimum to get our badges refunded.
However, as our popularity grows, we decided to branch out and have other people run our games in addition to the ones that we can run. This makes me very nervous — without any product to sell, our reputation is solely based on the fun that people have while playing in our games. Origins went really well, but GenCon was...complicated. All told, we were managing 31 4 hour games, split among 8 Game Masters. Two of our GMs were a boyfriend/girlfriend pair, who split up in the beginning of July, had apparently planned on being able to split the cost of the trip between them, and the breakup meant that neither of them could afford it. That was OK; we had enough time to reschedule and find two replacement GMs. However, another one just didn’t show up. We only had an email address for her, and she stopped responding to email about two weeks before the convention. But, we figured she was still reliable — she had run BESM D20 games for Guardians of Order the previous year, and they’re all established and shit. But come con-time, no Amanda. Cue panic.
We finally did end up getting things run right, but not without a lot of strife. 16 hours of game-running at a convention is my limit, and we were very lucky that a couple of our games were no-shows, and we could spread out the extra game mastering duties amongst us.
On the other hand, the con went really well apart from that. Our swag that we were giving away as prizes (buttons/bumper stickers) and wearing ourselves (t-shirts) went over rather well, so hopefully we’ll get some $$ rolling in to fund publishing our other games. Now I just need to prettify the store layout (probably just steal code liberally from our real site).
And I have to say that when they go well, running games at conventions rocks on toast. I can imagine it’s a lot like being a rock star, only on a much smaller scale (6 people at a time, rather than hundreds). But that’s all I need. I’ve given thought many times to just quitting the RPG designer gig, since there are many headaches involved that I’d rather not deal with. But being able to provide a couple hours of entertainment to complete strangers pretty much rocks my world.
Now, I just need to find time to devote to writing — I think we really need to get Advanced Dimensional Green-Ninja Educational Prepatory Super-Elementary Fortress 555 done by next spring, published by next GenCon, and done with.
This summer has been the summer of experimentation (not that kind, get your mind out of the gutter) — usually it’s just us four guys in The Impossible Dream who run games at Origins/Gencon. This usually means that each of us runs 4, 4 hour games for 6 players — the bare minimum to get our badges refunded.
However, as our popularity grows, we decided to branch out and have other people run our games in addition to the ones that we can run. This makes me very nervous — without any product to sell, our reputation is solely based on the fun that people have while playing in our games. Origins went really well, but GenCon was...complicated. All told, we were managing 31 4 hour games, split among 8 Game Masters. Two of our GMs were a boyfriend/girlfriend pair, who split up in the beginning of July, had apparently planned on being able to split the cost of the trip between them, and the breakup meant that neither of them could afford it. That was OK; we had enough time to reschedule and find two replacement GMs. However, another one just didn’t show up. We only had an email address for her, and she stopped responding to email about two weeks before the convention. But, we figured she was still reliable — she had run BESM D20 games for Guardians of Order the previous year, and they’re all established and shit. But come con-time, no Amanda. Cue panic.
We finally did end up getting things run right, but not without a lot of strife. 16 hours of game-running at a convention is my limit, and we were very lucky that a couple of our games were no-shows, and we could spread out the extra game mastering duties amongst us.
On the other hand, the con went really well apart from that. Our swag that we were giving away as prizes (buttons/bumper stickers) and wearing ourselves (t-shirts) went over rather well, so hopefully we’ll get some $$ rolling in to fund publishing our other games. Now I just need to prettify the store layout (probably just steal code liberally from our real site).
And I have to say that when they go well, running games at conventions rocks on toast. I can imagine it’s a lot like being a rock star, only on a much smaller scale (6 people at a time, rather than hundreds). But that’s all I need. I’ve given thought many times to just quitting the RPG designer gig, since there are many headaches involved that I’d rather not deal with. But being able to provide a couple hours of entertainment to complete strangers pretty much rocks my world.
Now, I just need to find time to devote to writing — I think we really need to get Advanced Dimensional Green-Ninja Educational Prepatory Super-Elementary Fortress 555 done by next spring, published by next GenCon, and done with.
