Westercon 74 gaming notes
Jul. 5th, 2022 07:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petrea_mitchellAfter the Friday afternoon item couldn't be held because I wasn't there, every other scheduled item in gaming had enough people to run. Nothing hit its maximum, but with 158 people on site (more were attending online), getting 3 players for a PFS game on a Monday morning means 2% of the available convention decided to spend their time with me. Scale that up to a more typical con size, even for a Westercon, and that's pretty encouraging.
My biggest takeaway is that people just couldn't be persuaded to sign up in advance. This led to no end of nervousness, especially with one of the Guests of Honor running two sessions, and me wondering both times if I would have to deliver the news that his games wouldn't be able to fire. And then enough people just showed up, every time, which is good as far as it goes, but if I did this again I'd really want to avoid the nail-biting part. Must think about ways to improve messaging about signing up.
Games mentioned that were not specifically available to run at the moment:
Not having the game library available on Friday had an outsized effect on use of the game room; multiple people mentioned to me having checked it out Friday afternoon or evening and concluded that there would be nothing there throughout the con. I wouldn't have guessed there would be much traffic there outside of a specifically scheduled event that early in the con, so there's another lesson learned.
The most-used things in the gaming library were the pencils and notepaper. They were provided mainly in case someone wanted to try one of the gamebooks, as all but one of them require some level of note-taking, but people found plenty of other uses for them.
My biggest takeaway is that people just couldn't be persuaded to sign up in advance. This led to no end of nervousness, especially with one of the Guests of Honor running two sessions, and me wondering both times if I would have to deliver the news that his games wouldn't be able to fire. And then enough people just showed up, every time, which is good as far as it goes, but if I did this again I'd really want to avoid the nail-biting part. Must think about ways to improve messaging about signing up.
Games mentioned that were not specifically available to run at the moment:
- Three people asking if enough people had turned up for bridge, saying it had caught their interest but they weren't able to make it.
- One person asking on two different days if there was any formal or informal Magic:the Gathering action happening or which had happened. (There wasn't any.) If I was at a con big enough for outreach to organized play groups, that would certainly be one of the games on my list.
- One query about Roll Player when it was mentioned that Cartographers was related to it.
Not having the game library available on Friday had an outsized effect on use of the game room; multiple people mentioned to me having checked it out Friday afternoon or evening and concluded that there would be nothing there throughout the con. I wouldn't have guessed there would be much traffic there outside of a specifically scheduled event that early in the con, so there's another lesson learned.
The most-used things in the gaming library were the pencils and notepaper. They were provided mainly in case someone wanted to try one of the gamebooks, as all but one of them require some level of note-taking, but people found plenty of other uses for them.
