You can game every day for a week. Describe what you’d do!
The codicils:
* I actually want to play all week
* I have a steady body of players who are invested in playing at various points
* My other real-life obligations have a guilt-free solution
* I have space near, but not in, my home
So this is actually my mental model for my aspirational PaulCon, which I really do want to run some spring at some point. Dunno that it’d be a week. But! Standard conventions feel kind of short, honestly: one Friday slot, three Saturday slots, usually one Sunday slot. Five slots of games aren’t “enough,” really?
Well, kind of not and for a lot of reasons. But! If I had a week of gaming and all four of my codicils are fulfilled?
Probably I’d run, once a day, a slightly long session (5ish hours), with breaks, of something elaborate and ambitious. Something I’d mentally and emotionally prepare my players for, all of whom would be invested along with me. That’s a big ask. My RL experience says totally-invested-persons for my players is usually X-1, where X = my total number of players. Sometimes I have one total checkout, but mostly I have 80% investment among everyone. Which is fine for a weekly 3-hour thing. But for this thing? That’s some cult shit.
I’d leave lots of room to sleep in late, have lazy lunches, and evening hang-out time. At some point I’d offer non-RPG palate cleansers. Board games, maybe physical larpy one-shots. Things where I didn’t need to facilitate, although I’m inevitably put, orrr put myself if I’m being honest, into a teaching role.
Evenings would be me playing while my friends run their favorite RPGs, ideally one-shots because I don’t know that I’d have the bandwidth to both run a longcon and play in a different one.
There would be an opportunity to get out to great restaurants where we could take over a private room for dinner and chat. Ideally brisk walks in cool weather. It’s all the non-gaming time, after you’ve gamed and shared and maybe gotten a little raw together, where the bonds really form. I have almost no memory at all of players in games where there was no aftergame debrief time, and my most intense memories come from when I’ve gotten that.
If a once-in-a-lifetime week of gaming didn’t leave me with a lifetime of memories, it would have been a waste of a week.
#rpgaday #rpgaday2017
Sounds like a fairly reasonable way to approach it. Also it’s kind of how I find GenCon goes for me. Plenty of downtime between gaming and the none scheduled stuff has always been more memorable then the scheduled stuff. Unless the schedule stuff sucked, that’s memorable and I’ve found mostly true. Which is why I don’t join scheduled events anymore at GenCon, just not worth it.
That sounds awesome. I especially like the idea of leaving time for the game experiences to breath.
I hope you actually do this someday.
I’ll bring the Swords Without Master 😉
Where’s the PaulCon sign-up page?
I can’t even process the concept of being able to game that long! My gut says “GAME ON!” but I know that some breather time is probably a good idea.
Actually, some morning time for free-floating non-RPG gaming would be nice for warm-ups, but maybe I’m a wierdo.
Keith Stetson: I love the idea of people with Swords boxed sets, just doing pick-up games at random intervals.