One Hell of a Rant About Aethercon (or Lack of Con) at Skimisher Website

Wow. Simply wow.

You want to read a good rant? Read this by Robert G. Gruver over at Skirmisher LLC.

Want to read about "how not to run a con"? Yep, read it.

It would be amusing if it wasn't so on the money.

Here's a sample:

After tinkering with the “booth” through the day on Thursday, and Friday, ignoring a number of other responsibilities I had, I was still unhappy with the entire experience of using Roll20 as a device to sell product. At 1pm on Friday, I opened our booth to the public, and spent the next 8 hours manning our “booth”, speaking to only five potential customers. I chatted them up, and we talked about games, and life. These were good conversations, and exactly the thing I was expecting for AetherCon, there were just too few. By Friday evening, I was livid at having wasted many hours not only in the booth itself, but in creating something that would only be seen by a handful of people. This was not an uncommon problem however, as games on Friday were being canceled all day for lack of players, and in some cases lack of Gamemasters.

“I'll be honest. It is looking like while we are getting a goodly number of sign ups for Saturday and [S]unday[.] Friday is going to be pretty much a washout for gamers." Holodinksy had this to say in the “Traffic Control” IRC channel during the convention. That was not to be the case. Through the day on Saturday, I was seeing numerous complaints about the lack of players, and GM's for the various events.

Some Further Thoughts on the One Hour Adventure For AetherCon

I received some good advice from my readers out there in "Internet Land".

It was stressed that I should use pre-gens. That was already the idea. Heck, my idea is to go with a 100% Halfling party using the classes I wrote up for Demi-Options. Should be fun. :)

I'm also going to go with first level characters. There needs to be some kind of risk to the PCs, and higher levels probably won't see any in a 1 hr play slot.

I need to get the players involved right away and drop them into the adventure with them already on the move. In this case, a newborn in town has gone missing, and all evidence points to goblins as the kidnappers. A short narration should get them in the immediate vicinity of the cave the goblins are holed up in and then the game is afoot ;)

My intentions were to write this up over the last week, but work has been mostly hell and much of my creativity is drained before I even walk in the door to my home. Hopefully this weekend I can recharge my batteries...