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REVERB GAMERS 2012, #24: Have you ever been to a game convention? What was it like to be surrounded by so many other gamers? If not, would you like to go to one? Why or why not? (Courtesy of Atlas Games. Visit them at www.atlas-games.com)
Lots of them. I usually go to six or so conventions a year these days. Before we started Hex, I went to a handful of local cons of varying quality and a couple of Dragon*Cons. Once we started making games, we had to go to every con we could in hopes of selling product and it started being work. Since I was also working in a comic and game store at the time, I had by then grown to loathe the kind of people who usually show up at conventions. Sometimes what I called “The Hate” would set in before I even got into the building. After a few years, The Hate gave way to just sort of a dull exhaustion, and more recently it’s actually started being fun again.
Part of the reason that I don’t get The Hate anymore is because Hex rarely runs its own dealer booth (we usually let The GPA or a FLGS like Castle Perilous sell our stuff), which cuts out direct interaction with 75% of the most annoying genetic defectives you find at conventions. Having to listen to some idiot talk about his Rifts character for 30 minutes because it would be unprofessional to strangle him can give you a bad attitude for the rest of the day. Not having a dealer table also makes the whole con less stressful, since you can relax between events instead of having to work the booth.
Another reason cons are more fun these days is because we get a lot more players who are actually interested in what we’re doing. In the early days, we mainly either got your typical hack n’ slashers and mad bombers, people for whom our game was a second choice because their first choice was full or didn’t run for some reason, and people who had heard QAGS was a “funny” game and just did stupid shit through the whole game. These days, Hex has been around long enough and has a wide enough selection of supplements out that (thanks especially to PDF sales) more people are signing up specifically to play what we’re running. That means that instead of every game being 50%+ bad players, each of our GMs might get 1 bad player during the course of a con. When the bad players do show up, we have a lot more experience dealing with them and a lot more good players to drown them out, so it’s harder for them to ruing the game through sheer force of suck.
Also, I enjoy conventions more these days because I don’t go to Origins. For some reason the people at Origins always made me want to call in a nuclear strike.
