I've never been a big convention person. But in the past few years I've finally gone to a few. I still haven't been to Dragon Con even though I live in Atlanta, but that's mostly because I've never known why people go to cons and every year something comes up that gets in the way.
So now that I've been to a few cons I have to say, I still don't get it. I thought you went to cons to meet people to game with. But that hasn't been my experience at all. A friend of mine was even the gaming director at Timegate Con this past week and put me on the schedule to run two games, but nobody showed up to play the games that she put on the schedule.
They weren't old, obscure, difficult games. I wasn't trying to get people to play Traveller, The New Era. They were new exciting games. One was Cold City, with the setting from Mark Vallianatos' Joy Division. The other was generic space pirates using PDQ#. As far as I knew these were both games people were excited about. I thought people were really excited about PDQ#.
But other than Munchkin and trivia, the gaming was really dead. I recall I had a hard time finding gamers at Stellarcon the year I went and at that time I was in charge of the gaming sign up sheets. Maybe I should invite my friends to the con to game with me, but then why not just game with my friends at one of our homes?
Maybe the scheduling was off. My space pirate game was at 10 AM. I think I mentioned that it was based on Treasure Island which just meant that it was a quest for treasure in which the players were supposed to spend style dice to create dangers to face to earn more style dice in order to create NPCs who would be their followers when they eventually mutiny and take all the treasure. PCs would not necessarily have to share the treasure if they had enough of their own followers or had converted enough of the other followers in duels of wits. I even had prizes. To the gaming director, "based on Treasure Island" probably meant kid friendly.
By 3 PM I had finally met some kids and we snuck around playing in the part of the hotel that was under renovation, but the gaming room was being used for a trivia contest so when we wanted to play a game we just ducked in there and grabbed Lord of the Fries and played in the hotel lobby.
In the early evening I was supposed to run my Cold City game and you know how that goes. Split 8 points between action, influence, and reason. Tell me 3 good things about your character, and 2 bad things. We're done with character creation so you start getting the creepy disembodied emails from paraplegics unwilling involved in experiments to encode their personalities into the internet. You meet the other agents from other countries who were getting similar emails, and assign trust to each one based on a short introduction, and I pass out cards that have secret agendas written on them. One guy had signed up for that, so we waited to see if other players would show up. I didn't want to drag the kids into the game because the only alternate scenarios I had thought up were teleporter devices attract dimensional shamblers from Lovecraftian horror, or a villain very much like Khan Singh runs a fertility clinic and cloning bank where he grows mutant superbeings in vats. By the time we gave up, I couldn't find the kids to maybe play in the space pirate game, and when I got back, my first guy was in a different game.
At this point I realized in order to have fun I would have to decide my goal was to learn as many good games as possible. So I went to the back of the room and pulled down one game after the other. I played a bunch of different ones. I was going to play Munchkin but couldn't find players, and the Steve Jackson rep spent so much time talking about how much SJ Games paid him for working conventions that the people I was sitting with lost interest.
We played a few rounds of Tsuro, a few rounds of Treehouse, Mwahaha (at least I think that's what it was called), and a game kind of like Yahtzee where you have to gather medieval figures like laborer and noblewoman by rolling certain sets and those figures help you roll better in future rounds so you can eventually get the king card and possibly win. I describe it because I can't remember what it was called for the life of me.
Role playing games that you would think would be perfect for conventions, like Fate 2e or In a Wicked Time, people didn't even mention.
The convention was going on the evening before I showed up, and it was going on the day after I was there and I thought about going back for the last day but I ate so much junk food and saw so many bad movies in the convention suite that I was really sick the next day.
So that's my deal. I have no idea how to get people to play specific games at conventions. If any of you were successful was it because of luck, or because you had been going to that convention for years and knew people who attended and thus had friends there, or because you roped your friends into attending, or what?