Re: After Con Report - ECC VII

[Tony Francis <tony@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've been involved in the running of a number of participation games at UK shows over the years. Punters at our events are far more shopping oriented and are less inclined to spend time at a game, so we catered for that reduced concentration span by making our games time driven so that the players had to achieve their objective in a given time frame (we always set our games to be 55 minutes - we cycle round every hour with five minutes to reset the game). The best example was our 'Berlin or Bust' WW2 game that had the participants playing the US forces and effectively all they had to do was get to the other end of the table in their allotted time. Because the game is driven by real time, not game time (ie number of turns) there is an obvious incentive to get on with it. We found that, especially towards the end of games when the objective was in sight, players would deliberately hold back from time-consuming but unnecessary actions (you know the sort of thing - "I'll just take a speculative pot-shot at that church tower, you never know if there's a sniper in it !") because they just wanted to get on with the next turn.

This works fine for GM'd games where the participants are only playing one side - obviously there would be massive potential for time-wasting if participants were on both sides.

Jerry Acord wrote:

On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, Jon Davis wrote:

  

Playtesting and GM preparation are key to running a well timed event.
    

I think staying on top of the action and being an actively involved GM is
important; I really tried to keep up the pace in my game (Zombie
Smackdown, Part 2) by making sure it was clear whose turn it was, applying
gentle pressure to make moves and keep the game flowing, and overlapping
the end of one side's move with the beginning of the other's when there
was no direct confrontation involved.

Cheers,
--Jerry