Re: After Con Report - ECC VII

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
>
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>