Someone asked for a few pointers on running games conventions...
I have a few...
But the first thing you need to ask if you're planning a convention is Why people go to conventions…?
There's only one reason, to do things they can’t do at home…
People will say they come for the games, the company, the ambience,
take your pick, but at the end of the day, it’s always down to things they
can’t do at home.
Why?
If you can do it at home, why would you travel all that way and spend
all that money to go do it somewhere else?
We, as convention organisers, therefore have only one remit…
Make it Awesome, make it something that they can’t do at home...
This is not as easy as it seems, after all, at home, you can do
everything, the food, the game, the entertainment, and you can do it yourself,
because you’re only catering for your friends around the table. At a convention, you’ve got to cover everyone
and make sure that they all get something of what they want.
So there are a few things you’re going to need to watch out for…
Location
and by extension, Travel…
You’ll get more people in a major city than you will in a small town,
but if you’re starting small (and that’s often the best way to do it), as long
as people have travel lines to get to you, then you’ll be fine. If you have the convention in a village hall
that has a train station and regular bus lines running past it, you’ll get a lot
more people than having it in a huge hall where only those with cars can get to
it.
Dates
There are already a good number of conventions on the calendar, check
carefully to make sure that what you’re doing doesn’t clash with something
that’s already established and running around the same time. Doesn’t have to be the same days, usually
within a fortnight of a similar convention will constitute a clash of interests.
Duration
A single day convention is travel down, attend convention, travel
back. All the variables on that are
enclosed within that single day. When
you put a second day (and possibly a third or fourth), you’re asking those
attending to find a place to stay for the night to come back in the next
day. This increases their costs significantly, as well as adding a second day to your
own expenses. For traders this has a
knock on effect in the amount of stock they bring (far more) because they’ll need
to restock overnight to make sure they still have product on the shelves. They'll also have to consider if two days increases their sales very much when a lot of people turn up to buy on a single day rather than two, those coming for the whole convention tend to buy on the last day, everyone else buys on the main day for the convention.
Of course, gamers are inventive, ask about the shut-in that occurred at
Gencon Olympia when thirty odd gamers couldn’t be bothered going home and so
commandeered a cleaning room upstairs with two on watch at all times in case
the security guards wandered past. It’s not likely that you’re going to get a
bunch of gamers hiding in the top of the town hall, but you need to consider
costs for the area when you move the convention to more than a single day.
Volunteers
Volunteers come on a broad spectrum, ranging from “Will do everything
and anything, will keep working long after their shift is done and will call
for more every time”, down to “Give me my free ticket, I’m going to the show,
you don’t expect me to work do you?”
The grim thing?
There’s more on the “Give me my free ticket” end of the scale than
there are on the other end, and many people won’t think twice about offering to
help at the show if it’ll get them a free ticket, but they start bitching when
you want them to carry out their part of the bargain. There isn’t any way around this, I wish there
were, when it happens you’ll have to do the job with whatever good people
you’ve got around you and if there are no good people around you…
You’ll be doing it yourself…
Never underestimate this as an Organiser of Conventions, keep two
lists, one for the people who do well for you and one for the people who let
you down. The good list will be shorter than the bad one, but as
time goes on, both lists will increase, and after a few years, they’ll be about
the same length.
Am I overstating this?
I wish I was…
The other thing about volunteers is that you need to be clear in what
you’re offering people to help at the convention and once that offer is made,
you need to honour it, no matter what, because you only get one chance at that. The usual offer is free entrance in return
for running a few hours of games (Four hours is the accepted amount at most
conventions), although you can offer more if you have provision to do so. Word of advice on that score would be not to
offer too much too early, because when you’ve offered it one year, trying to
take it back the next year is really, really
difficult.
Clear
Advertising
Everyone comes to conventions for a different reason, so be clear when
you advertise the convention, if it’s RPG’s, make it about RPG’s, if it’s about
Board games, make it about Board games.
If you want it to be a little of everything and you’re just starting
out, be aware that you can either do a quarter con for all the attendees and
try to gauge the interest levels for the year following, or you can specialise
to begin with and then branch out in following years. My recommendation would be to specialise for
the first year and then branch out when the people who came the first year come
back to you (which they will) with ideas for next year.
When you’re putting out the word for the convention on the first year,
get it in place six months before you’re going to run the convention as a bare
minimum, and at least two months before you open to take interest from GM’s and
umpires for events. Make the lines of
communication clear, get the website in place and start promoting on social
media as soon as it’s up. In the second
year and onwards, word of mouth will do a lot of this for you, but in the first
year, make sure your profile is up and clear.
Events
One of the most difficult things to organise in any convention is the
events that you’re running, it’s not hard to get people run games, but getting
them to run the right games…
That’s another matter.
You’ll always get someone offering to run their latest homebrew system
for four hours in return for getting in free.
Unless they’re offering something that people have heard of as well as whatever they want to run,
turn it down. Published games make up
more than 95% of the games that will be taken up at a convention, we’ve
monitored the ticket sales at a number of conventions for several years, and
it’s apparent that while there is mild interest in homebrew systems, that
interest only comes when they can’t find anything else to play.
Damning indictment…?
Not really, if you’ve travelled all this way to get a game in, you want
it to be a known quantity rather than taking a risk on something that could be the most awesome game in the
world. Games in the playtesting phase
are a different matter, particularly if they’re from one of the larger
publishing houses, people do have a lot of interest in emergent systems if they
have a chance to influence them.
The other thing about events is the
special events, the one’s where rather than just costing you an entrance
ticket to get the game running, it’s actually costing you cold hard cash. These have the potential to bring in a lot of
people if pitched at the right level, but you have to balance the draw against
the cost. When you’re doing this, you
must think not only about the cost of the event but for the number of people
who’ll be attracted to the con by this event.
If you’re running something that might only seat fifty players, but
you’ll get a hundred just to come and take a look, then you’re on to a winner,
but when you’ve done it once and people have liked it, you may find that you
have to do it again.
Layout
There are those who think that this doesn’t apply to smaller cons, and
when you’re dealing with less than a roomful of people, then it’s less the
case, but you still need to look at it for several reasons.
Noise – Putting a loud dungeon crawl next to an atmospheric Cthulhu
game isn’t going to endear you to the Cthulhu players, the dungeon crawlers
won’t care as they’ll be the ones making the noise but you should consider
quieter games near quieter games if possible.
Board vs RPG – You’d think that in this enlightened age, we’d be able
to co-exist with each other, but every year I see people arguing “These are
BOARD tables, these are RPG tables” when in actual fact…
They’re just tables.
When you get to a certain size and you’re not just moving things around
one room (says the man who just came from the NEC), you need to consider
layout. If you have something that’s
going to be really popular (Bring and Buy for example), then you need to put it
away from everything else if you possibly can, there’ll be crowds around it all
day and they’ll filter around so that they impact on everything else going on
in the con. If you’re selling space to
the trade hall, consider your entrances, exits, and thoroughfares when you’re
offering the stands out, it may be mercenary, but the understanding has to be
that all the traders are there to make money, so should you be.
Feedback
Let me save you the time on this one…
Attendee’s – We want more
games, more variety in the games being offered, less players per game, more
players per game, bigger tournaments from bigger companies, smaller tournaments
from bigger companies (how are we supposed to win when the field is 500
people), more prizes, bigger prizes, free dice on the front desk, in fact,
shouldn’t you be paying us to come next year?
Traders – We didn’t make any
money this year, we’ll have to look carefully at if we’re coming next year,
can’t you lower your prices, can I have that space for free, it’s your fault
that my stock went missing, get rid of all the open gaming space and give it to
me for demo tables, can you put all my old stock in the bring and buy so I
don’t have to buy trade space to get rid of it....
You can’t please everyone all the time, it’s a melancholy truth, but
it’s the truth. When people ask for
things, they’re asking for themselves, not for the convention. When you gather
the feedback, if 1% said they wanted more space around tables and 20% said get
more games in, don’t leap in on the 20%, look at the space you have, the space
you’re going to have next year, make the decision based on what you can do, not what they want you to do. Many times the things requested will clash
with each other and there won’t be anything you can do to please all types, so
do the right thing, do what you want
to do as the convention organiser. If
you forget why you’re putting all this hard work in, then you’ll put less hard
work in and before you know it, you’ll be putting no hard work in, and that’s how good conventions collapse.
Conduct
Have something in place in case someone behaves badly, stupidly, or in
some way contrary to how you want your convention to run. Most people believe that everyone is like
them, and as an organiser of conventions, you’re doing this because you want
people to have fun.
Not everyone is like you…
Bitter lesson to learn the first time some irate know it all comes
pontificating over the front desk at you, but one that you’re better being
prepared for. Most conventions have an
Anti-Harassment policy, every
convention that got past year one has a code of conduct, even if it’s just
notes on their website to say that they can and will throw out people who are ruining it for everyone else. I could fill the rest of this issue with
instances where people weren’t as nice as I’d hoped they would have been, but
in every case, it’s been dealt with because there’s been words to back me up
when I needed to make those difficult calls.
Finally, and perhaps most important, even though I’m listing it last
Finance
Some conventions are commercial ventures, some are just gamers getting
together to have fun together, but whatever the reason, at the end of the day,
there’s the bill to settle. If you’re
looking to have fun, just want it to remain the same size and you can afford
the hall every year, no problem, you need read no further.
For everyone else…
The first year of a convention
may break even, if you’re done the research and PR ahead of time, been all
over social media and built a solid presence with keeping people up on what
awesome things are going on at your convention, then it may break even.
But don’t count on it.
The number of conventions I’ve seen that have failed in year one because
the organisers presumed that it’d make money and had nothing left over to make
a second year is beyond count.
Many people don’t come to the first year of a convention, the usual
attitude is that they’re already doing several conventions and don’t want to
extend to another one just yet. Better
to wait till the reports have come in from the first year and see where it goes
from there. In the first year, be
prepared to make a loss on the convention, it’s almost universal that this
happens. A break even on year one should
be considered a significant victory, so don’t be downhearted if this is all you
get.
Year two is a different matter, if you’ve continued to build the
profile and keep people informed, then year two will almost surely be a
breakeven point as all the people that missed it last year will come in for it
this year. Year three and onwards should
be (if carefully managed) growth years.
There’s a million things more I could tell you all about, but every
convention is different, and every convention
makes mistakes, no matter how long they’ve been going, no matter how well
planned they are, every convention
makes mistakes. When you make yours,
learn from them, there’s few mistakes that will kill a convention stone dead in
one hit.
Except not opening the doors…
Always open the doors…