I’m back from Clericon 2024!
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Seems like you had a lot of fun.
The timing thing was interesting to me. Not having much experience with cons (none, actually) these insights are pretty valuable. Our gaming group is somewhat like a convention in that it’s a biweekly gathering of multiple groups for one-shots, but the time slot is the entire afternoon, so about five hours instead of three, and even there we often have trouble with timing.
Sometimes we’re done way too quickly, but mostly (for me) it seems to be that we still run overtime. In my experience (it’s multiple different game systems, rarely even dnd) three big “scenes” seems to be the maximum. Sometimes it’s just two shorter games (mostly when playing something like FIASCO).
Fortunately I haven’t had trouble makers yet, but that probably is because the organizers are pretty good at spotting trouble and keeping things safe.
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The one element that worked in my favor is that the adventure has two very distinct parts and the session ended at the end of the first part. The party got an adventur4e that felt complete and finished even though they didn’t get to engage with the back half.
If there’s a way to segment out an adventure like that-- with a few spots that could serve as finishes, if need be, it could mitigate things. Sometimes though, things just aren’t going to go and we’ve just have to figure out how to work with or around that reality.
I don’t think those players were troublemakers, in a sense. I saw them play at other tables at which they didn’t seem like they were disruptive. I also don’t know that, apart from the start, they were disruptive at the game that I watched. At that one table, in that one moment though, it was an awful confluence of personalities. I think that, sometimes, a combination of players can just energize their worst impulses and I get the sense that’s what happened. Maybe no one of them would have caused any issues but them together, once the door to shenanigans opened a crack, were off to the races.
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