How my game prep for jackercon went horribly wrong.

[HourEleven]

Ive never prepped a one shot or a game for strangers before. I made several crucial mistakes. Now that I've stepped back from it and looked at it - I learned a lot.


Time management.
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I assumed (still rightfully so, I think) that it would (read:should) take less time to prep a one shot than it does a campaign. I had ten days and figured that would be plenty.

Then, I proceeded to prep exactly how I normally would have for a full campaign. Approximately 45 hours into game prep, when I realized I was barely half done, it became apparent this was not the right way to do it. Even if I managed to finish it, a 30 to 1 ratio of prep to play time is the stuff of madness.


Plot
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I wrote a plot that was 98% focused on PC interaction between each other, not taking into account the amount of time it takes to learn a character and grow comfortable as that character. This is a campaign style plot where the stakes come from investment in the interior life of your character. Not suited to three or four hours. This part has to be reworked. It's too fragile, a passive player (or a player who takes awhile to sink into a complicated character) who doesn't want to focus on expressing what the character is feeling and thinking to the other player will collapse the game completely.

I'm also second guessing the idea of a total sandbox game at a con. Theoretically, since I almost have the sandbox I can add some gentle rails - they aren't there at the moment, but I should have them just in case.


Characters
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Having had only female players for the past 15 years, I reflexively prepped only female PCs, not thinking about the fact I should probably have options (as cross gender play isn't everyone's preferred gaming, and sometimes does t work well at all). But I also entwined these PCs backgrounds so much into the plot that I have to change a lot to make a slightly larger PC pool with options.


My usual crap
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I usually illustrate all of the primary locations so that the mood and art style is consistent across all the visuals. I only managed to get sketches of half the locations done before I realized it was insanity to generate a dozen full illustrations in ten days.

Not to mention major NPCs head shots...


Going forward
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I'm far enough along I think I can fix it and finish it to some degree. Possibly it'll be runnable in a few weeks. I'd like the prep I've done to not go to waste. I need to separate con prep and campaign prep as two very different things...

[D.T. Pints]

I wrote a book length response to this that involved some prosaic prose about me building sand castles near low tide while tomes built a Taj Mahal...but then I was attacked by the proboards wandering damage bear and it was lost. Anyway, I will come back to these points soon just know that the prep work isn't for naught. Jackercon VIII (Cthulhu. 'Nuff Said or I'm a Motherfuckin' Monster! ((working title))) is coming in November and some idiot is soon going to suggest a bi-weekly Jackercon game night that will be filled with GMs and players WEEKS in advance...It will be just one slot...one time...twice a month...if you can't make it...if you live on the other side of the world?...too fuckin' bad .

Working title...

One GM, One SHOT and Some Beer.

[HourEleven]

I'm convinced it can be a fantastic game. I just went about it ALL WRONG, haha.
It will be run, and hopefully soon. Possibly outside any con business and just scheduled on a regular weekend. But I'll be much better equipped for building one of these next time.

[tomes]

Glad to hear you learned lessons, but also that your time wasn't wasted!

On a similar but separate note, I personally have spent over 30 hours preparing for each of my con games: Distress on LL928 (the Star Frontiers one for this year), and Dungeon of Yendor (the dungeon crawl from last year).

In each case, I knew I was spending a rediculous amount of time for prep (partly the game, partly the props). So, I also knew that I wanted to run it many, many times. But, I needed to ensure that I wouldn't get bored running the "same old" scenario.

Now, I know that every game has new players, however even then, if the characters are pretty much the same ol' pre-gens, it'll get stale.

In my case the solution was to make character generation part of the game, but in a manner which is limited enough so that players wouldn't be overwhelmed, and also so I had some control over the outcome.

For both games I used a shared pool of resources the players can choose from. This meant that not only was each set of players different, but each set of characters were vastly different. However, I was able to control to some extent the set of skills, edges, weapons, classes / builds, etc. based on what I made available in that shared pool.

So far I've been pretty happy with the outcome. Players get some play with character generation (some are new to the system, in this case Savage Worlds), and get some more serious ownership of the character. I get a variety of games so that I can run this over and over again, and so I've now played 7 sessions with Distress on LL928, which easily exceeds 30 hours of play time.