You Will Miss That Really Cool Game
Go Play NW is coming up. If you’re going, here’s a shocking statistic: you will miss 95% of the games.
It’s basic math. A hundred people, with an average of five people per game (or less) means twenty games per slot, and because of those pesky laws of time and space, you’ll only be in one of them. One out of twenty. Five percent.
Feel that twinge? That dread that you’ll miss the good games? Yes, all those other games people are playing may be awesome–or they may be terrible. But either way, it doesn’t matter: in every time slot, your game will be the very best game you play, because it’s the only game you’ll be in.
Cast The Winning Vote
It’s easy to get sucked into the “ah man, somebody else is playing the cool game” mentality. I’ve been there myself. You can focus so much on the imagined glory of the games you’re not in that you don’t give your best to the game in front of you. Lame!
Games are not predestined to be good or bad. What you do at the table decides. You can make any game great, right then and there.
Operative word: you. Don’t show up at a game waiting to be entertained. Show up ready to make it fun. This is not passive media, it’s a team sport.
Decades of traditional games have taught us bad lessons: we show up to the GM’s game, and we see what the GM has prepared for us, and if it sucks we sit back and say “that guy’s game sucked!” Because clearly it’s not our fault. But just as we all have an interest in the game succeeding–who the hell wants to waste their time with a bad game?–we all have the power to make a difference. Fun is a democracy, and every vote counts. We just forget sometimes.
Leave a reply to Noel Berry
Interesting, I’ve never found myself with roleplaying time at a con, but with Pax coming up this year I’ll keep this in mind.
I just wanted to drop in and say that your blog has made me think of how I GM in a completely different and new way, and made the games I play a lot more fun for both myself and the players I play with.
Awesome blog, it’s really inspiring, and contains some great information.
Cheers!
[…] Play NW is coming up and, as Ben Robbins mentioned over on ars ludi, there are going to be a lot of games. I’ve purposefully only signed up for a single game […]
I agree that the non-GM players are hugely important to the fun in a game session. And that they have responibilities and that their attitute can make or break a game.
However, this does not (unfortunately) mean that a crap GM cannot ruin a game. Especially if we’re talking a railroaded scenario and a trad system, a non-inspired or simply aweful GM can easily be a big turn off for everyone involved.
N.B. I mean “aweful” or “crap” mainly in the sense that his approach to gaming is such viewed from the perspecitve of the other players. Whether or not there is any objective measurements as to what makes a good GM I leave for another discussion.
That’s because you are a gentleman and a scholar, Mike.
Considering that 5% of the games is still quite a few games for one weekend, I don’t mind missing the other 95%!