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.
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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.
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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.