Monday, May 07, 2007

Con GMs: a dying breed?

The first con game I ever ran was a little AD&D module I had written called The Iron Trapezoid. An evil wizard laid his hands on the Trumpet of Doom and planned on blowing it at the end of a ritual that would open a gate to Hades. The result would be an army of hordlings roaming the land. The PCs were tasked with entering the oddly-shaped metallic fortress of malefactor and stopping him. Inside the Trapezoid were a bunch of fake-out monsters: ogres in oriental garb who weren't really ogre magi, skeletons in suits of iron armor posing as golems, gas spores, etc. The players were a typical mixed bag of college kids, twentysomething ex-college kids, and a greybeard or two who remembered the bad ol' days of the beige box.

At the time I ran this con event I was 14 years old. My mom had driven me to this convention. The players were not prepared for a kid who knew the rules, had pre-gen PCs ready to go, and offered a coherent scenario with serious challenges for both the PCs and the players. For my own part, I was completely oblivious that anything was out of the ordinary. I was the DM. Gary Gygax and Tom Moldvay had been telling me for years that I was in charge of ensuring a smooth-running, entertaining game. One of the college kids tried to lean on me a bit, asking for some dagger-poison for his halfling thief. In retrospect he was probably testing his ability to manipulate the punk kid behind the screen. At the time I just told him 'no' like I wuld have to any of my regular players.

Fast forward a few years. I was jibber-jabbering on the phone with my pal Don. IIRC, he had just taken over as chairman of Winter War, my nifty little local con. He asked me to run a 2nd edition AD&D tournament for the con. I organized some DMs, wrote the three-round tournament module, and at the con I herded cats, getting all the gamers to their tables. It wasn't the best adventure ever written or the best con tournament ever run, but I was pretty proud of having guided it from start to finish. The next year I did it again.

Looking back at these and other events I've run at cons, I'm struck by how utterly clueless I was. At no point did it ever occur to me that I couldn't run a con game as a snot-nosed kid, or that a college student with no formal writing experience could write and manage a D&D tournament. When I decided to start running niches games at small cons it never even occurred to me that no one might want to play Encounter Critical or Wuthering Heights. I just went out and ran the games I wanted to run. And everything turned out pretty well, except for the recent lack of interest in Mazes & Minotaurs. Even my 3E intro games, which I had no business running, turned out okay. Man, that was stupid. Don't try and teach others a system you don't understand, kids.

Which is all a long intro to try to explain why I was utterly freaked out by my man Don's comments in an earlier Gameblog post:

Actually, Jeff, what I think is more significant for the hobby is an answer to WHY we aren't producing more DMs like you and Dave who can run games with strangers.

I don't have any good answers, and I don't see anyone else even asking the question.

Now I know plenty of people will be ready to jump up and say "GenCon's not lacking for GMs." Don's ten years or more of convention data only looks at out tiny little local shindig, so maybe the problem is a local phenomenom. What do other people think? Is the RPG section of your local convention as vibrant as it was a decade ago?

I know Living Greyhawk and similar ventures look more healthy. Winter War's own LG section has been full of raucous action for the last couple of years. But LG does several things to make things easy and safe for the GM. You don't have to come up with a module. The RPGA supplies those. You don't have to come up with some PCs. The players bring their own. Emphasis seems to be placed on running the Rules As Written, which in a game like 3.5 takes away a lot of the freedom but also a lot of the responsibility of the GM. Not to be dissing on hard-working Living Greyhawk DMs, but that looks like the easy-peasey, phone-it-in way of running a con game. I don't see much art to that approach.

More importantly, the Living Greyhawk structure completely undermines the social aspect of the player/GM relationship. In my games I hand out some PCs with the hope that we'll all work together to have some stupid fun for a few hours. Living Greyhawk puts the rulebooks and module between the DM and the players, some of whom seem to be only interested in scoring points. Maybe I'm mis-characterizing the LG scene here. I only have a handful of run-ins with it.

None of which changes my basic question. Is the hobby doing a bad job of creating con GMs? Back when I was a kid Dragon took the con scene seriously. In addition to the monthly calendar of events, they'd also carry con reports. And didn't the Gen Con program used to appear as an insert to Dragon? Gary Gygax's much-maligned how-to books (Role-Playing Mastering and Master of the Game) talked extensively about the larger social mileu to which the individual gaming group belongs. Does D&D for Dummies even mention the existence of conventions? I don't recall.

Both Gygax and Dragon left young Jeffy with the distinct impression that GMing at a con is simply part of the larger GM experience. The hobby seems to have moved away from that assumption. Is this another issue we can try to lay at the feat of Storyteller? I dunno. My impression is that running a one-shot game for strangers would not be on the list of priorities for World of Darkness chroniclers. But I have even less direct experience of that subset of the hobby than I do with Living Greyhawk.

10 comments:

  1. It was once the case that people who wanted to run a game and didn't really care who played in it could really only do so in limited venues like Cons. With things like Play by e-mail, Neverwinter Nights, and other net-mediated gaming methods, this is less true today.

    I wonder if these people are simply finding outlets other than conventions...

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  2. Anonymous1:17 PM

    I'm not really sure how viable the local-con is anymore. My limited experience of them over the last couple decades is that without a lot of luck in the organizer department, they're doing an absolutely terrible job at welcoming new GMs (and indeed, new attendees). Big national/regional cons have a different barrier to entry - without an established "rep", your odds of filling a slot are low.

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  3. I suppose that with fifteen years of running games under my belt, I can call myself a veteran GM. But that's pretty much all been with people I knew very well. I know my games are idiosyncratic and not what most people are looking for - reading gaming forums tells me plenty about that. And I've never been as confident with rules as with the rest of the gig.

    I'm trying really hard to break myself out of this mindset. I'm excited about my Run Club game. And at this past Winter War I stuck my neck out and said I'd run an event next year. So, next year the local con will have one new GM!

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  4. Anonymous2:46 PM

    Massively Multiplayer RPG Games like Dave Arneson's Blackmoor and Living Greyhawk make con GMing easy but remember, the mods they run are written by players of the system. The games are distributed to local small cons, big cons and used in home games. The GMs are not into scoring points they just enjoy the game and the flexibility of running games anywhere with just about anyone. I have moved around a lot so most my players are strangers initially. The neat thing about the Living Greyhawk games is that people sit at your table and run until the session conclusion. I get frustrated with “online games” because the players pop in and out breaking up the party cohesiveness. I like the RPGA because no matter where I go I can always find players willing to sit down share an adventure. Trying to find home game players in a new town can very in difficulty and it takes time to get a group to sync with the GM’s style of play and house rules. Everyone in MMRPGs knows the rules and that makes it easier to sit at strangers table. Yeah the rules for games like Living Greyhawk can be limiting but they don’t hinder the enjoyment otherwise player numbers would be decreasing at cons like winter war.

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  5. I've been gaming for 20 years and have never once been to a con.

    I don't even know if there are any in the North Texas area.

    I can't offer any insight, but I wanted to thank you for the post. It's given me some food for thought since I'm presently a DM without players (1st Edition AD&D). I've been trying to think of ways to find players for a new ongoing campaign or one-off play.

    I hadn't thought of conventions until I read your post.

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  6. I've had a couple really good experiences running convention games, but almost none playing in them. I think it's very much a matter of my expectations for a game differing from what people want to run, and what other players want to play. This has also been true when I've popped into random gaming groups, so it's not exactly con specific. I'm all for gaming with strangers, but I want at least one half of the equation to vet the other half -- either they pick me because I suit their game, or I pick them because I think I'll suit their game.

    My "random drop ins" are reasonably illustrative of differing expectations:

    D&D game -- We're exploring some dungeon when we see Goblins. Rest of party kills them all out of hand while I'm asking what the Goblins did and why we're attacking them.

    Shadowrun -- I end up playing a mage because "no one wants to play the mage" (whereas the group I used to run games for was almost 100% mages, because mages rock). When we find ourselves cornered by rent-a-cops, I turn invisible and start tranquilizing them. I mean, come on, they're rent-a-cops. The other members of the group start (over)killing said cops with explosives.

    So yeah, differing expectations is a big reason why I wouldn't spend time on a con game instead of one with friends.

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  7. Anonymous10:39 PM

    I do think that the current hobby is less respectful/admiring of the efforts of GMs, and so there's less social incentive to become a great Dungeon Master/Game Master (running for strangers or otherwise).

    The social incentive isn't _gone_ by any means, but it's muted. There's effort in some circles and in some game designs (both small-time and very-big-time) that marginalizes the judgment and creativity of the GM to some extent - usually in a well-meaning effort to reduce the negative impact of poor GMs, without much thought given to the almost unavoidable corollary. I think this is one factor that contributes to others in making the whole concept of the great GM a less sexy one.

    I haven't personally noticed convention GMing, in particular, descending any _more_ rapidly than general GMing ... but I've definitely observed the more general trend.

    My own approach to fighting it is the same approach I use for everything: teach lots of newbies how much gaming -- including great GMing -- rocks :) And of course, my work tends to be very pro-GM because - in my own little micro-gaming-universe - the great GM is still the very top of the gaming pyramid. Inasmuch as game writing is a "service industry," the GM is still who I'm here to service (no naughty jokes, please, unless you're sexy).

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  8. Anonymous10:42 PM

    Also, in response to one of your other questions: _everything_ is regional in gaming. General trends are always sharper in some regions and flatly contradicted by others.

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  9. I'm another 20+ year gamer, and I've been to one con in that time, but I don't think it's a question of GMing cons, but a question of GMing in general. I think that (in d20) Wizards has gone to a lot of trouble to make GMing easier. Living Campaigns, combat with clear miniatures-focused rules, and recent layout changes to Wizards published modules are all designed to make GMing an easier process.

    I don't blame Wizards for this, in fact, I applaud them. They did this because they did the market research and discovered that GMing is HARD. So they're doing what they can to fix that. If that makes GMing less creative, that's not Wizards fault. The GM's who want to do it themselves still can.

    Where is the problem? I work 50+ hours a week, and I have a wife and child. Creativity isn't as easy as it was a decade ago. My players and I love the Red Hand of Doom module, and it's kept us going for almost a year now, and we're not done yet. That's how much we play these days. For those with plenty of time, there's Warcraft, Neverwinter Night, and dozens of ways to enjoy a fantasy roleplaying experiance without all that work. Miss the experiance of chatting with like minded Geeks? Hey, log onto Jeff's Gameblog or RPGnet or . . .

    I guess I'm saying I love creative, personalized, idiosyncratic gaming experiances. I think most gamers feel this way. But idiosyncratic is always going to be on the periphery. That's almost the definition And lets face it, enjoying D&D is idiosyncratic enough to start with.

    Back in the eighties, gaming was new and we had to do it ourselves. It was a lot of work, but it was cool, and we had no choice. Now, there are tons of mass market options and most GMs and most players will take the easier or the slicker option. WE built this market, us and fans just like us. It's quicker, easier, and glossier. Maybe it's not quite as deep, but hey . . .

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  10. First, I completely agree with MarkW's statement; too many new local cons flop in two years (or less), mostly because of the organizer(s) and their organization.

    And people brave enough to stick their neck out for the first time (like kathleen!) are hard to find.

    s. john ross's comments on the lack of social incentives is hobby-wide, and it does have an impact. Perhaps what I've been seeing in con RPGs for the last 10+ years reflects that.

    The fact is, I don't have a good answer for why, but I see a trend. GMs for conventions were always a small group, but the cream of that crop was a small set of very creative people who could always be counted on for great games. And in the past 10 years at Winter War, I've seen that cream pool expand by about 2. And it's shrunk by people moving away or leaving the hobby (or passing away) by a factor of 10 the other direction.

    This isn't about the success of local cons. I've got my own thoughts about that.

    This is about the pool of GMs for such events.

    I can't point at 3E/3.5E and blame it -- this was happening before that. And I can't blame LG either, as my numbers indicate that as LG has expanded at WW, we've had a related expansion of the other RPG events (smaller, but it's there).

    I just wonder if the hobby isn't producing the type of person who can run games for strangers like it did 20 years ago, and how that bodes for our hobby's future.

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