Matthew Supert

I had the opportunity to run my game a a Con a couple of weeks ago and I would like to share my thoughts on how that went. 

TLDR

• It’s still super hard to find people who will play and playtest. The RPG Design community really needs to figure something out as the Board game community seems to have a better culture of testing and playing others games. 

• If you can setup a table, that’s great, but it kinda sucks to sit there for hours. 

  • Try and get passive content to have out there. At a minimum a QR code 

  • Free stuff like stickers or a pamphlet work well

  • Board gamers or perhaps “regular” people want to goto a website. Not Itch or Drivethru RPG. 

• Try and Network if you can. I had some good conversations with other game designers.

  • Would love in the future to setup a panel or something.

I had an opportunity to get my table and setup some demo/playtests at a local con this past weekend. It was a super interesting experience and I thought I would share some of my experience that I’ll take away from this and perhaps others will find this useful. 

The Con I was at was in the Chicago suburbs. Not a huge event, but also not small. I would say a few hundred people overall so a “medium” con based on ones I’ve attended in the past. The con has a fairly even presence of TTRPG vs. Board games I think. A lot of scheduled events for both. On the TTRPG side it looked like it was predominately PF2e, Mork Borg (and variants), DCC, and just a little bit of 5e. 

Playtesting

Unexpectedly finding people interested in play testing my game was difficult. I had two demo/playtest sessions on the calendar. One had 6 people sign up (only 3 showed up) and the second had no sign ups. This is understandable I suppose. The event though did have quite a bit of (board) game designers at it. I wish there was perhaps a better way to interface with them before or during the event. I ran into a couple and struck up a conversation. One board game designer was cool enough to come back to my table and even chat with me for about an hour, giving some input on the character sheet. 

There were designers play testing at this event for board games and they definitely seemed to have a better awareness of play testing and supporting each other. Granted, it some cases it is easier to walk up to a table and get a 30 minute board game demo, but it just seemed to me that the designers in the board game realm here seemed to be more active about getting out, testing and then also giving feedback on other people's games.

Running the Game at a Con

If you've never been to a con before just playing a game is gonna be different. The most notable thing will be the noise. You will be in a room with probably 8-10 other games going on at the same time. It will be really loud and hard to hear at times.

The table will most likely be a round table too, in case that matters for your game.

Now, unfortunately for my game, a Con is not necessarily the best playtest setup. My game specifically is designed around a West Marches game, with town creation, etc. That sort of thing can't really be tested so I had to opt for a more traditional "dungeon crawl" sort of adventure, that added some overland travel (to test those mechanics) on the front end. Even those I had to sort of jump ahead through as I could tell the players wanted to just jump into the dungeon crawl to really "start playing".

I feel like in the con setting the only thing I really can test in a meaningful way is combat and some other adventuring related mechanics like skill checks for individual characters. "Macro" systems just won't be able to get tested due to the noise, time limit and interest of the players.

Con Table

I was able to get a con table for free being a designer. The table worked out well, but man did it suck to just sit there. Most people aren’t gonna walk up and just chat with you about your game. If I do this again, I think I will still get a table, but try and just have some more “passive content” at it such as stickers or a free pamphlet people can take. I don’t intent to sit at the table for hours on end. 

My table had a demo setup where I could walk people through character creation and run a quick round or two of combat. I did not get a lot of bites on that. 

Table and Web Content

Get a QR and preferably a business card or bookmark with your info on it. I’ll go one step further and say get an actual website. I do have one, but just from conversations most of the non-ttrpg world didn’t want to sign up or goto itch or DTRPG for a .PDF. When people asked me where they could check out my stuff every single one asked for my website. Now, this could be slightly demographic. It appeared to me that the vast majority of the TTRPG players were 40+. The younger crowed at the event were there predominately for a Catan tournament and for Star Wars Sparks (which I believe is a CCG?)

Had maybe 6-10 people scan my QR code in front of me. 

Seems like handing out and using bookmarks (like for a book) are the new hot thing over business cards. I saw lots of vendors doing bookmarks. 

So that's it. This is just one person's experience at one con, but certainly was educational and gave me some things to think about if I bring my game back to another con in the future.

I was driving home from work the other day and I was thinking about various things I wanted to accomplish this weekend for hobbies. I have a gaming con coming up in February for the TTRPG I am designing. I want to make some time to play my lute dulcimer. I have a miniature that I am trying to paint, a website that I am trying to build, and several RPG sessions to plan. While all of this was occurring in my head I happened upon a really cool song Night Friends by Switch Angel. I've run into them on TikTok a couple of times and I instantly thought the song was fantastic. They're coding tracks on a platform call Strudel.cc. I thought, yeah I want to get back to making some electronic music. Problem is, I am hitting such a wall to do that. The more that I thought about it, I am also hitting a really wall with just creative writing as well and it go me thinking, why is that?

I had a bit of a lightbulb moment when it occurred to me that the hobbies that I am currently engaged with all have communities around them that I am able to feed off of. Larping, TTRPG, learning my lute dulcimer. Those are all either sort of supported by an active community or they have a specific end goal in mind. The lute dulcimer for example as the goal of learning to play by next year's Hynafol Grand Gathering. My TTRPG has an end date of my convention. My electronic music and writing though? Those have no communities to support me. 

I've been most successful with writing when I was actively participating in Nanowrimo or when I was posting to Scribophile. Unfortunately, Nano is dead (at least for 2025) and I haven't been on Scribophile in a couple of years, if simply because I was focusing on other writing endeavors. My electronic music also has been lacking since online communities died. I used to be an active member in several online forums including Serious-Sounds.net, IDMForums, EM411, and others. Forums have largely died with the rise of Reddit and Discord. I'm not quite sure what it is with Reddit, but I have never found the same sense of community there. Perhaps those communities are just too large and anonymous, but the level of active feedback just doesn't seem to be present. In many cases those genre or hobby specific subs don't want people to post their works for review and critique. I dunno, but I feel like for me that is the genesis of some of my inability to engage in some of the hobbies I used to prior to COVID. 

Discord itself seems to be an interesting beast in all of this. Generally, I find Discord gets too unwieldily once you hit a certain threshold of users and the posts are coming too fast. I don't want to login at the end of the day and see that I have 200+ unread posts. All that being said, our LARP group has really engaged me and perhaps that is because the size is rather manageable to a few dozen active people. 

Had a really good year of reading this year. Let's keep it going for 2026. I have tried to pare back my to read list quite a bit this past year to make it more manageable. I've also resolved to focus on finishing some series that I have enjoyed the first book of. 

Last night we had a raccoon show up at our door step. Literally at our front door, laying on our door mat. We discovered him only because we had a food delivery driver bringing food to us. When we first found him he was curled up and looked like he was sleeping on our mat. 

As the evening progressed on, I found him curled up in some dried leaves just next to the front door near some mulch. From an outward glance he looked like he was healthy enough but his movements seem a bit labored. All evening I felt very stressed out. My shoulders ached, my hear rate was elevated, and I couldn't fall asleep. Perhaps this was in part just because of my stress and worry of having a wild animal literally on my doorstep, but I've also always felt I've had a bit of an empathic connection with animals. Perhaps I was feeling some of his pain and discomfort? 

This morning when I woke up to go check the front door, I work up groggy, tired, and with a sense of dread. I think I knew what I was going to find, but silently in my mind wanted to tell myself there would be nothing there. Unfortunately, I found the raccoon still on our door mat by the front door. I believe he passed away in the night, although I am not 100% certain he is gone. I don't want to get too close at this point and I have a wildlife control company coming later this morning. The raccoon though appears to be unresponsive and as far as I can tell not breathing. 

Thankfully he looks like he is at peace though and I am honored that's he found our home for his last moments. I hope that he at least had a dry and comfortable passing under the eve of our front door and that perhaps our home is in some way a welcoming place for spirits. 

I think I would like to hold some sort of passing ritual this evening. 

A couple of weeks ago our Sunday afternoon play group played Ten Candles. Ten Candles is a narrative focused RPG where the characters in the game will all die. If you have played "Alice is Missing" before there is a very similar game setup and mechanic between these two games. Your players will create some players, establish a handful of relationships between each other and then setup some sort of personal goal. In Alice is Missing this is facilitated through the cards with the locations in the game and through the inherent relationships defined, such as someone being Alice's brother. Ten Candles handles this approach a little bit differently where players have notecards and have to write down some adjectives for their character. One is positive, one is negative and one sort of serves as a trigger that would make them lose hope in the world. The thing is, those aren't your character's motivations. You end up passing those to the players to your left and right. It was a cool mechanic and took everyone by surprise, while also establishing some "knowns" about the character next to you. 

Conceptually Ten Candles is storytelling game where the players at the table need to setup scenes, and everyone needs to collaboratively play the scene out. Ten Candles uses a candle mechanic where after each scene or each failure in the narrative a candle is put out. These candles work as a sort of countdown to the end of the game where everyone has to eventually narrate their death. Our game centered around an unknown horror (known as "Them") that had been unleashed from a mountain by a railroad company that was drilling a tunnel through the mountain. That was the premise we started with and that is it. The game specifically instructs the GM and players not to prep the game in any way. From there I facilitated several scenes where our players were trying to escape the town. 

The game played wonderfully at our table and there was a constant tension as our players had to make difficult decisions through each scene. There are a couple of caveats though to this game that I think need to be spelled out for players looking to play this game. First, I think there needs to be an understanding and level of comfort with everyone at the table about the emotional weight of this game. This isn't something you will be playing with people in a FLGS. Players can be hit with some pretty heavy stuff and there is emotion at play. I was on the brink of tears while playing Alice is Missing and we had several who had similar emotional reactions here as well. Second, everyone needs to be on the same page with playing the game. The game rules are incredibly loose; some people need to understand the assignment and come to the table to play cooperatively. 

Comparing this game to Alice is Missing, I like it more, but I think it is a bit hard to facilitate the game. There are some good prompts in the back of the book, but there were a couple of times where I was struggling to make sure, I queued up enough scenes to go through all of the candles. I would highly recommend just straight up asking your players to suggest or craft a scene with you. Specifically asking also helps to make sure the players can try and hit the narrative points on their notecards. 

As the game progresses you will burn off your notecards with your traits and also put out candles. The end of the game is narrated in the dark and is very impactful. If possible, I would highly recommend that you setup your game session where everyone gets up and quietly leaves without saying anything. 

Overall a wonderful a experience that shared a lot of similarities to Alice is Missing. 

The world is weird sometimes. I feel like this across the board are kinda shitty right now, but I had a nice extra does of shininess this past couple of weeks. Those of us in the northern Illinois region have been hit with some pretty heavy storms. I think we had 3-5 storm events that dropped +2" of rain in less than an hour over the course of about ten days. I experienced seepage in my basement for the first time from these storm events. Thankfully the actual amount of water was minor and just amounts to mostly wetness under the flooring. 

I do have pull all of the flooring up however. The benefit and bane of waterproof vinyl floors is that the water has probably spread to a larger area than where it actually seeped in, so there is going to have to be some investigation as to where the water is coming from. I have my first meeting with a company next week to take a look at the foundation. 

Megan thankfully has talked me off my panic attack this past week, and I am slowly coming to realize that while the basement might be impacted for the next couple of months, we thankfully have not had any real damage. 

Just when I was getting a handle on the situation though, I saw a mouse today in the basement while pulling up some floorboards. The cats are on high alert, but my anxiety immediately spiked back up after this incident. An exterminator is I guess also now on our list of things to do in the next week or so. 

I've been playing Citizen Sleeper for a little over a year now, popping on to play it in 20 minute bursts. This game was so delightful and hit the same sort of melancholy vibe for me that Spiritfarer did. This is a narrative game with a delightfully dreamy ambient soundtrack, that is perfect to play in the dark late at night. The stories told here through your experience as sleeper are very heartfelt and personal and are designed to showcase each of your direct impacts upon the people and places that are around the Eye, which is the space station you inhabit. 

Play this game and go ahead and IV drip it in slow increments as it is just pure bliss with some fantastic storytelling.