Last time I talked about some of the difficulties and general thoughts I have being a player at conventions.
This time I want to talk about some of the insecurities I’ve had relating to being a GM at conventions. Like playing convention games, running convention games is something I love to do and I get a real sense of accomplishment when I’ve brought a game along that my players have enjoyed. However, I do find it challenging in different ways to being a player so I wanted to explore some of these here. Like last time this is more dealing with internal feelings rather than anything I think could be improved by convention organisers and players.
GMing at conventions
One pattern I find myself falling into when GMing at conventions is worrying excessively about wasting people’s time. Especially with new groups I hold myself to an incredibly high standard and find myself worrying about everything that might go wrong during the game and if I’m a good enough GM to be running anything in the first place. This usually recedes when I’m running the game itself due to adrenaline but comes back with a vengeance post game where I analyse every little thing that might have gone wrong and why it wasn’t a good game after all. This is particularly true for scenarios I’ve written myself or games that require a high amount of improv. I have these thoughts while GMing for my regular groups but it’s more prominent at conventions as I’m often running for new people.
On the one hand, it’s good to want to run a good game. It shows you care about your players and also it suggests that a good RPG experience is something you value which in turns suggests that the hobby is for you. However, I think there’s a tendency amongst some GMs, especially those of us with anxiety, to strive for a perfection that we’ll never reach out of fear that we’ll let our players down.
A simple point that it helps me to remember is that the GM is a person who is playing the game and it’s equally important that they’re having fun too. They have a different role and may have fun in different ways but essentially, you’re investing your free time in a hobby you enjoy. I first heard this point on Crispy’s Tavern (an excellent youtube channel focussing on mostly D and D but with some good general gaming tips) and it seems a really simple point but, when I started to internalise it, it helped me to re-contextualise the whole experience. My enjoyment became a factor in my thinking, not the only factor of course, but an important one.
I’ve found that players are often very forgiving people. They’re here because they love games so you already have a tailored audience to some extent. Also, many of them have been in the GMing position before so they know how scary the chair you’re sitting in can be. I’ve never been in the position where I've had to ask my players to bear with me while I think through my next steps or have had to call a break because I need a little time to process and the reaction from the table has been anything but supportive and understanding.
I find it useful to have a little chat with my players at the start of the game before the safety tools section to introduce myself, ask how their con’s going and talk a little bit about my relationship to the game. This allows me to gauge my table and get to know them a bit as well as allowing me to express anything I need to up front. For example, if I’m running a new system, I’ll straight up say that this is new to me so if I need to check the rules a bit more often please bear with me. This helps me fight the perfectionist fears a bit I suppose. It puts me firmly in the role of “fallible person who’s also here for a good time” rather than “person who has to know all the things and never miss a beat”.
Another important thing to remember about conventions is that your players might be tired. If someone’s been in one or two sessions before yours, their energy levels might not be what they were at the beginning of the con. This can sometimes feel like lack of engagement when it really isn’t. It’s just part and parcel of the event. There might be things you can do to make the game easier for them but it’s ultimately something to factor in if you’re worried a table might not be fully engaged.
This leads into a wider point about players reactions at your table. When you’ve been playing with people for a long time, you can often get a read on whether they’re having a good time. At the bare minimum the fact that they keep showing up is a positive indicator. At a convention game you’re likely to be dealing with new people who have different ways of expressing their enjoyment of things. I’m not always great at reading people and often my anxiety is hyper vigilant for signs that people aren’t having a good time to the point where I sometimes see signs of displeasure that aren’t actually there.
My strategy for this has been to ask people how they’re finding the game at the half way point when we take a break so I can redirect if I need to and also ask them about their feelings at the end of the session. That’s the easy part, the hard part is believing them if they say positive things. This has been a tricky one for me and to be honest it’s not something I’ve quite got the hang of. I know that when I say positive things to GMs I tend to mean them but the worms in my brain can’t always seem to grasp that other people are doing the same. I’ve been slowly training myself to take positive comments at face value but it takes work so if you have the same problem I very much empathise. If you have any tips for overcoming this, let me know in the comments.
Something that’s always helped me with my anxiety around running games at conventions is booking my game in for the earliest slot I can. This means I have less time to ruminate about things that might be worrying me about running the game. Ideally I wouldn’t be worrying much about running games at all but seeing as I know that this is something I do and am working on this has been a nice practical step to reduce anxiety a bit. It also means that, 9 times out of 10 I have a nice positive adrenaline boost to start my con and on the rare occasions things don’t go well I have the rest of the con to look forward to.
That’s all from me. If you find yourself relating to anything in these posts I hope you’ve found the discussion useful, if only to prove that it’s not just you feeling this way about things. Thanks for listening and I’ll be back soon with more ponderings about mostly RPGs but sometimes things that are not.