You find yourself standing in a room with more than a hundred other people. Some you know, some are complete strangers. Every single one of these people is looking to you to establish a cohesive environment, reason for attendance, and their entertainment for the next five to six hours. If you succeed, you will be remembered as a legend and coopted to do this on a regular basis. If you fail, your failure will be on display for hundreds of your peers. No pressure. Running a convention game can be an intimidating prospect.
Even Storytellers who have dozens of games under their belt sometimes shy away from the concept of facing hundreds of players in a single location, all of whom are looking to the Storyteller for their focus and entertainment. Rest assured that you are not alone and, using the tools available to you, you will not be unprepared. This guide is intended to cover the range from multi-location “keystone” games, often used as semi-annual events to draw players together with in-character and out-of-character reasons for gathering, all the way to large multi-national trade shows that can be used as recruitment and retention events..
This essay shares the planning steps and best practices that have been learned from (what feels like) a lifetime of running events large and small. To prepare for your event, you must first consider your position on a grid, with one axis being player advocacy and the other scope. Player advocacy is the degree to which player-characters will be able to influence and change the world around them. Games with little advocacy might be one-shot games with pre-gens run at a trade show.
The characters are free to take settingappropriate actions, but their choices will not have lasting impact on the world beyond the night. Games with total player advocacy might be a yearly convocation event that is the culmination of player-character actions and machinations. Running low-advocacy games allow you to focus on a specific theme or story with a low chance of deviation or surprises. High-advocacy games place the reigns in the hands of the players and, while they might miss out on your carefully crafted plans, can enable players to immerse themselves more deeply.
Scope is the range at which the event will take place within the setting. On the other axis, games with small scope might be set in a single city block, fighting off hunters to try to make it to the morning. Games with large scope may influence the course of the entire game world as a whole. Running a small-scope game allows you to focus on the details of a setting, narrowing your focus to the events surrounding a city block. Players may have more of an opportunity to see their actions have immediate effect in a small-scope game.
Largescope games involve more non-player-characters and influence more of the setting itself, meaning that the player can have an effect on the world itself, but represents a greater strain on the Storyteller to make sure these effects occur through the prism of the core setting and themes themselves. Setting your place on these two axes define the type and amount of work necessary to prepare for your upcoming game. Please note, these scales and requirements are not absolute and they are not immutable.
They are intended to be a method to plan your event. If you find the need to modify or reject their guidance, then you are not making a mistake. The Advocacy Scale:
• Low Advocacy – The Planned Event Increased workload for the Storyteller Prepared non-player-characters and pre-generated playercharacters Prepared interactions between all player-characters Prepared central, branching storyline Prepared learning curve for newer players
• High Advocacy – The Framework Increased Storyteller presence to allow for unplanned player actions. Story arcs ready/prepared with adaptation in response to player actions. Increased preand post-event work to prepare Games with smaller advocacy require that you prepare goals, behaviors, pre-game build-up, and rivalries. Games with high The Dirty Secrets of Running Convention Games Bounds advocacy require that you paint with broad strokes, as it were, creating the atmosphere that the player machinations move within. The scope axis is similar, with smaller scope allowing you to focus on shorter-term stories and quick payoff, while large scope requires strict research on your chosen setting, the background canon, and follow-through to ensure that the changes to the setting are communicated to the affected games. Once advocacy and scope have been determined, you will have a firm idea of the areas in which you will need to focus. Next you’ll need to determine is your expected attendance. For trade-show games, this often can be estimated by games of similar setting or ticket sales, and for yearly chronicle-unifying games, you can estimate based on other similar events or previous events. Getting an idea of possible attendance will give you an idea of both necessary narrators as well as density of stories available. You will want to keep a ratio of about 1 assistant narrator to every 10 to 15 players. This is a greater number of helpers than a local game, but remember that these larger games tend to be where players resolve their own plans and strive for resolution of larger goals. You can also enlist players who can be used as subject matter experts, ready to assist other players with their questions. Best Practice: Large-scale or problematic combat scenes are often taken to the side or to separate rooms, commonly called “killboxes.” Allowing a killbox can prevent a combat scene from derailing your event, especially if it occurs within your main play space. If you decide to allow these at all, make sure you have a team that is very familiar with the rules and empowered to run a complex and potentially emotional scene as quickly and fairly as possible. Best Practice: Identifying your staff will assist players in getting the help they need. A bright-colored bandana tied on a costume works well. Next, you should consult your advocacy-scope scale to determine the lead-in needs of your event. As much as you and your team will spread the word amongst players, you must also ensure that the characters are informed, enticed, and motivated to attend. The biggest opportunities for leadin stories are the characters themselves and the history of the chronicle. Don’t be afraid to talk to the players and ask what their characters would be interested in. Just as in the local games, often the histories written by the players for their characters and the history of the chronicle itself are rich for story aspects that maximize buy-in. Once you have the Setting Style Document ready for players to review, you can release it, barring any synchronization with events running at the same time that need coordination. Remember that the Setting Style Document can be used as its own tool to release information, and it can be updated based on the setting and lead-in stories. Your Setting Style Document should be where your scope, advocacy, and any clarifications on actions, such as feeding, that players will need to know are kept. Best Practice: Consider items that players will commonly ask about, such as any feeding restrictions, permitted pre-cast rituals, or limits on clans, when creating your Setting Style Document. These provide not only an opportunity to allow your players to get into game faster, but also a chance to enhance the story and chosen themes. Blood shortages, unique effects, and prepared responses to things like Contacts and Allies can go quite a way towards setting the stage for an event. For networked chronicles, one of the concerns is providing lead-in stories to local Storytellers that give away sensitive plot elements that need to remain secret. The urge will be to withhold these elements from the local storytellers, but put yourself in their shoes when the truth comes out. Any Storyteller will want to be aware of the full ramifications of the stories they agree to run. You can either be up-front that aspects of the plot are missing or withheld, or you can release the elements, understanding that there will be an amount of information bleed. You can also use a small duration and scope type of plot kit called a “teaser.” These are often found in the form of information distribution or limited data exchanges. Couriers give out invitations, rumors spread, or posts appear on social media regarding your upcoming event. Make sure to consider using player-characters as the foci for these kits. Non-playercharacters are easier to plan for, but player-characters can have a significant improvement in interest and dynamism going into your event. Best practice: Sharing sensitive information with the local Storyteller teams, despite the high risk that some of the story for your event will the spoiled, is better than keeping information from those same games. Often sharing some of the “secrets” about an upcoming game with the players can also increase player interest. When preparing your lead-in stories and teaser plot kits, consider all types of media to assist with your preparation. In-game videos loaded to hosting sites (YouTube, Vimeo), recorded sounds (YouTube, Soundcloud) or open documents (Google Drive, Scribd), can have significant effect on the interest in your event. Props at the event can also improve immersion, from a ritual chalice to a crown or even a scepter can assist with player focus and direction. Best Practice: Designate a Stage Manager who can be assigned the responsibility of coordinating props, set dressing, visual themes, and even non-player-character blocking/timetables. Best practice: When using physical props, have item cards ready for players to take instead of the item itself. These cards can detail any information or mechanics associated with the prop and can be destroyed after use in the case of single-use items. Once the day of your event arrives, you will want to make sure you have walked your event space, working out placement of your props, furniture (if any), and NPC blocking (where they will enter and where they will move). Make sure your players know where to arrive and when you will begin your welcoming announcements. In your welcome announcements, you will want to cover your event description (having flyers for this is a bonus), your feeding methods, and how to interact with your Storytelling staff at a minimum during your opening announcements. Optionally you can point out your NPC players, identify your player helpers, or share elements of the upcoming stories of which the players should be aware. Best Practice: Designating a Storyteller staging area and table can help both your team and your players to make sure everyone knows where to go for more information. Helpers can stage here by default so that players with questions can know where to find help. You can have a list of storylines ready for bored players and a computer or tablet ready for rules review. Throughout the evening, you will want to initiate your planned stories, spreading them out to ensure you have a smooth building to the climax and epilogue of the evening. You should also have a number of spare unassigned stories ready to deploy, to adjust and react to changes in the setting and player reactiveness to the presented stories. Best practice: You can have an assortment of small story seeds that can be used to engage players who are bored. The Storyteller who takes the seed can fill in the rest of the details and work with the player to craft a side story that is compelling. When running larger games, reacting to players and pacing is where many Storytellers have the majority of their issues. From “railroading” stories that ignore player reactions altogether or permitting the non-player-characters to take the focus away from the players, the method that you use to implement stories and how well that method reacts to player actions will define the success of your event. You will want to make sure there are enough stories to keep the players occupied, but ensure that any stories that intrude into the main game space, force characters to stop what they are doing, or keep the focus on non-players stay direct, have a clear purpose, and return the focus back to the players in a timely manner. It is very easy to fall into the trap of allowing non-players to take center stage given that their actions are directed and planned. Resist this temptation, and accept that even if the carefully laid plans you have worked on for months take a background role, allowing your players to see their genreand setting-appropriate actions will result in a much higher player satisfaction. Remember that the pacing of your stories is key here. A careful review of Chapter Eight: Storytelling from MET: Vampire The Masquerade and, in specific, Pacing of a Scenario (page 338) can assist you. Of course none of this is to say that you are an order-taker who is required to provide the result from any and all player-based actions. One of the main roles of an event Storyteller is to make decisions for what will meet the needs of your attending players, even if that includes telling a player that her actions are not suitable for the session. This issue can come up often with combat scenes, or killboxes. These scenes can often add to the tension and setting of your session, and they allow players from different locations to play their characters through a combat session. Be careful, though, that these combat scenes do not take a disproportionate amount of resources away from your players. It is perfectly acceptable to tell a player that her killbox would take half the game away for hours while it is resolved, and it cannot be run. The player may be dissatisfied, but the game as a whole will not suffer for it. Best practice: Remember that your event will run on economies of attention and cool. Players want their characters to have more of the cool-economy (which is different to each character) and there is only so much currency in the form of Storyteller attention to go around. It is almost a guarantee that something will go wrong during an event. Your NPC staff will go off-script, players will completely ignore your stories, a fight will break out (in or out of game), or the host character won’t bother to show up. No matter what goes wrong, the most important thing is to remember that the players are watching you for their cues. If you become visibly agitated and upset, the players will mirror your behaviors. If you remain calm, adjust as needed, and keep the focus on the player-characters, then the game will run smoothly. The biggest thing to remember is that the game runs at the pace you dictate. Players will push as much as they can for speed and immediacy. Resist the urge to automatically accelerate your behavior to match. It is much more effective to ask for a moment, consider your choices, explain your reasoning, and then deliver a decision, than to give a quick answer that you may regret later. One of the last considerations for your event is the climax and epilogue. Climax does not mean explosions or epic fights (but those are not necessarily bad options), but is the payoff for the characters attending. As much as having a demon burst forth from the flooring is grand in scale, consider how much the actions of the player-characters have impacted the game and how much the players, as well as the characters, get to interact during the event. An effective climax is planned, but molded by the events leading up to your event and the actions of the players at the event. Consider the reveal of a player-character’s true affiliations, the combination that leads to an understanding of an upcoming adversary invasion, or the chill of discovery that accompanies finding out that the players may have been on the wrong side all along. These events are not explosive, but keep the focus on the players and avoid locking your main room in a narrated or mechanic-heavy event. Whatever you choose, be prepared to run a wave of investigatory challenges to find out more about the climax. Characters will use oracular, occult, and plain investigation challenges to see if they can be more informed than the common character. Having responses for these ahead of time will save you time and energy. Even in low-advocacy events, you will want to make sure that the decisions the players make at the event have a realistic impact on the outcome. Even if it means your plans do not unfold as you envisioned, showing impact from player actions can go a long way to improving satisfaction. Best practice: Players have become increasingly aware of tropes in all kinds of media, including LARP. The ten o’clock monster is often used negatively, but you can also use those expectations to your advantage. You never want to make the players feel foolish, but keeping what the players expect and, separately, what the characters expect, in mind can help you with your pacing. Following the climax is the epilogue. Far from a time to slow down, this is a time to maximize satisfaction for a range of players who have not gone off to their own designs or are lagging behind on their character goals. The last few hours of your event will start to naturally slow in pace, allowing you to focus on smaller groups of players. Make sure you have a few small closed-ended stories to seed or lead in to events in the future. Best Practice: The epilogue is the perfect time to drop a few hints about a later event, even those happening months later. You will have to provide closure, but having a few outstanding questions and unsolved mysteries can be a strong motivator for players. Be prepared to handle investigation after the event. Immediately following your event, you will want to extend your thanks to the volunteers who helped you. In addition to the gracious thing to do, it will make it easier for you or other Storytellers to get help for your events. If your gaming organization provides benefits for service, make sure those are turned in quickly. You will also have a number of afterevent reports to pass to the local and administrative Storyteller groups in an ongoing chronicle setting. Again, finishing these quickly will ensure that the ongoing chronicle runs smoothly and your fellow Storytellers are not caught by surprise. Running a large event can be one of the most stressful, demanding, crazy, and rewarding experiences in a Storyteller’s career. Despite the enormity of the task, remember than your fellow players are your best resource. Designing your plan, focusing on your players, adapting to events on-site, and staying true to the themes of the source material will allow you to craft a setting and a story that can keep players coming back for more. Rely on your community, your support network, and your fellow players and you will have an event that will be talked about at “afters” for years. David Bounds is a member of several gaming organizations and has run local and global events for the last 15 years. When he is not running LARP events, he works in IT. David lives in Atlanta with an old pug and the grumpiest cat in the world.
Originally published in Mind’s Eye Theatre: Storyteller Secrets by By Night Studios. Presented here under Resources for chronicles and live play.