Favorite games you have run at a convention

[Spence]

So a different type of question for the convention forum.

 

What were the last games you ran at a convention and did they succeed.  And by succeed did you and your players have fun?

 

I had stopped going to cons for the better part of a decade because of life.  I had planned on starting up again just as the C19 hit.  Last year in Oct 21 my local tabletop gaming convention, Dragonflight, opened it's doors. 

 

I had a fantastic time as I remembered what I had been missing.  Of the three planned games I was able to run two.

 

1) Demons of Eldritch Shadow (Star Trek Adventures horror)

 

2) Darkness at outpost Delta Six (Nights Black Agents/modern GUMSHOE horror)

 

Both games were full, 5 players, were fantastic.  The players were great and actually adapted to the genre/game rather than try to mold the game into something else.  Of course they immediately went off script and managed to achieve the missions in a most spectacular fashion.

 

I have run the outpost scenario several times in the past and it usually results in one deranged and barely breathing survivor.  In this case not only did they retrieve the data, but they all survived.

 

All in all I had a rip roaring time and have already started planning for the next con.

[Tjack]

   One of the conventions I was staff for lost some GM’s at the last minute so I ran a Champions game.  It’s a module of my own creation called “Smuggler’s Blues” that I’d run a few other times in the past for different groups and knew by heart.  I didn’t have my gaming stuff with me so it was hand-out characters right out of the Big Blue Book.  It was received OK.  

[Joe Walsh]

Back when I was a freelancer, I ran some T4/Marc Miller's Traveller sessions at GenCon.

 

The sessions were full, I got good feedback...but I didn't really find any of it satisfying as a GM.

[mattingly]

Here are some that I've run frequently.

 

Click through for the full game write-ups.

 

 

 

HERO System Muppet fantasy.

 

 

 

HERO System cerealpunk.

 

 

Dresden Files (Fate System) monster-hunter team-up.

 

 

 

 

The old Marvel "FASERIP" system.

 

 

 

 

[Spence]

Holy Bat-Cons Batman!

So many PC's.  Don;t tell me you run that many players in a single session?

I hit a wall at 6. 

[mattingly]

Back when I was running an ongoing Champions campaign many years ago, I had 14 players with 10 or 11 showing up on any given weekend. 

One of the PCs had two Duplicates (with different DEX and SPDs), and another PC had 8 Multiforms* (with different DEX and SPDs), so my speed chart for the PCs alone was 22 characters!

 

 

* One was a detective that had been hired to find a missing nurse -- which was another of his forms.

[Tjack]

6 hours ago, mattingly said:

Back when I was running an ongoing Champions campaign many years ago, I had 14 players with 10 or 11 showing up on any given weekend. 

One of the PCs had two Duplicates (with different DEX and SPDs), and another PC had 8 Multiforms* (with different DEX and SPDs), so my speed chart for the PCs alone was 22 characters!

 

 

* One was a detective that had been hired to find a missing nurse -- which was another of his forms.

       I had friends in a Fantasy Hero game like that many years (decades) ago.  Sometimes during a fight sequence someone would do their turn, then go out, get in their car and go get dinner bring it back and still be back before the next phase.

       It was a very long running game, so people were having fun, but I couldn’t do it as player or GM.  I always thought the optimum number of players was between 4 and 6.  Fewer and there wasn’t as much good roleplay and the villains had to be scaled back.  More, and combats got unwieldly and folks got bored waiting for their turn.

[Spence]

6 hours ago, mattingly said:

Back when I was running an ongoing Champions campaign many years ago, I had 14 players with 10 or 11 showing up on any given weekend. 

One of the PCs had two Duplicates (with different DEX and SPDs), and another PC had 8 Multiforms* (with different DEX and SPDs), so my speed chart for the PCs alone was 22 characters!

 

 

* One was a detective that had been hired to find a missing nurse -- which was another of his forms.

 

I've played in a game with 9 before.  But I find my ability to run a fun game drops off drastically whenever I have more than 6.  I actually prefer 4 for an ongoing game. 

[Scott Ruggels]

I remember two games that I ran, a Fantasy Hero for 12 players called Shadows over Duncarrin, and a PVP Corporate Defense/ Extraction in Cyberpunk 2020.  With the Shadows over Duncarrin I had Pete Shafer as my co-GM at the time, and he did a bunch of the book keeping and we kept things moving fast.  For the CP2020 game, it was just me, and two teams of 6 to 8 Players.  Those usually came out spectacularly.  In general In my own non convention games I would run between 5 and 8 players, but The Fantasy Hero Playtest, run by L. Douglas Garrett was between 15 and 22 players and would be 12 hours every Sunday.  That game ran for over a decade. He calmed down later and ran for around 8.

 

[mattingly]

21 hours ago, Tjack said:

More, and combats got unwieldly and folks got bored waiting for their turn.

 

It must depend on the group. We once had two four-hour sessions in a row without a single die roll.

I'd set up a situation, and they'd all talk it out.

 

And I got pretty good at running quick combats.

[dsatow]

I hit the wall at 8 ppl.  I always do the minimum players for the Con which for RPGs is 6.  I then allow for one person who first shows up and one who won't give me trouble and is acceptable by the group.

[rjcurrie]

Probably the most fun convention game that I had a part in running was the Champions 30th Anniversary that I co-ran with Dave Mattingly at Origins 2011. In addition to the 6 slots for regular players (playing the Champions), there were 3 special players: Steve Long playing Robert Caliburn, Darren Watts playing Doctor Silverback, and Jason Walters playing Caveman Cortez (from Lucha Hero). Steve, Darren, and Jason chose which of their characters they’d play. 

 

Foxbat had come to the conclusion that he was a character in the Champions RPG and traveled back in time to Origins 1981 to kidnap the game’s creators and have them rewrite the universe to make him a hero.
 

In the rewritten universe, the Champions were now Foxbat’s Amazing Friends and the players had a lot of fun with the idea that Foxbat was now the world’s greatest hero. Meanwhile, in Vibora Bay, Robert Caliburn sensed the rewritten universe and along with Caveman Cortez, who had just finished helping him wrap up an adventure, headed to Millennium City. 
 

The heroes eventually figured out what was going on and thanks to the genius of Doctor Silverback, they all headed back in time to Origins 1981. There they found Foxbat and a team of villains from Enemies 1 that had not yet appeared in another Hero book standing over the unconscious bodies of the Guardians. The heroes defeated the villains, preventing the kidnapping of George MacDonald, Steve Peterson, and Ray Greer and restoring the timeline.

 

 

[mattingly]

The whole table was running on all cylinders that night.

It really came together perfectly. 

[Spence]

On 9/3/2022 at 1:05 PM, mattingly said:

The whole table was running on all cylinders that night.

It really came together perfectly. 

 

Outstanding, it is great when that happens.

 

I ran three sessions at Dragonflight. 

1st was a Star Trek Adventures (STA, 2d20) game titled A Small Matter of Glory.

2nd was a Hero 5thR Fantasy game titled Shadows over the Darkwood

3rd was a Fall of Delta Green (FoDG, Gumshoe) game titled Containment.

 

All the games went well and once again I was surprised about the current quality of players.  One of the many reasons I had stopped GMing at cons years ago was that players seemed to have been replaced by, for lack of a better term, "munchkins" who weren't interested in actually role playing as they were in just messing with things.  Last year when I decided to return to conventions and even run I was pleasantly surprised at how different the experience was with the players actually playing the pre-generated character in their actual role while still giving it their own flavor.  It took me back to the 70/80's when players wanted to be part of the story rather than trying to twist it to be all about one player. This year the con was the same and the players were great and conquered the challenges in very interesting ways.  Most of my adventures, especially one-shots, don't have written endings.  I usually bullet out a few general outcomes and any possible NPC reactions if needed.  But a good group of players will always resolve things in a way you didn't think of. And this years players didn't disappoint. 

 

I felt they were far more comfortable with STA and FoDG than Hero.  I run my games more on a narrative angle than maps & math meaning I only have them role anything when it would be dramatically appropriate. All three games were pretty similar in play until we hit the action.  Hero was different enough it took a little longer to click, but everyone had a good time and there enough laughs and jabs at the table to show it. 

 

All in all a great time and I will need to do some tweaking to see if I can come up with an easier presentation for Hero 5thR at a con table. 

[Christopher R Taylor]

I ran three different con games over the years, with varying success.  I did a Days of Future Past X-men game, a Vietnam vets meet vampires game, and a Stronghold game that I hope to convert over to the Escape from Stronghold rewrite.  Cons are tough because you have no relationship or knowledge of the players so you never know what's going to click and what won't.

[Spence]

4 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

 Cons are tough because you have no relationship or knowledge of the players so you never know what's going to click and what won't.

 

I think that is why the Star Trek and the FoDG games seem to go so well.  Even if they are not fans of the shows most players know enough about Star Trek and super spies along the line of Jason Bourne to be able to get into the game.  SuperHero games are hard when there has been so little superHero and some much People/Killers with powers in the last decade or so.  I'm sure you're not shocked when you ask someone what their favorite superHERO is and they reply with something like Venom or Deadpool and then look puzzled when you tell them they are not heroes.

 

 

[Cygnia]

I did an off-the-books 7th Sea game at Origins about 14 years ago called "Caligari's Angels" that will live on in infamy