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…
