Here are five quick(ish) ways that you can make your convention game really stand out. Some might even be helpful for your home games!
1. Use Props
Players love props. If there’s a letter they find, make one to hand out. If there’s a special artifact they find, make a card up for it. Some people go over the top on this and actually create a mock-up of the artifact, which is awesome if you have the time, money and artistic ability, but otherwise, cards work great at making a player feel like they really gained something.
There are many resources on props, so I won’t go too much into them, but here’s some good starting points:
2. Customized Character Sheets
This does take a little extra time, but there’s nothing more boring than a white piece of paper covered in a bunch of stats. Some games have visually appealing character sheets, but most are nothing more than boxes, text and numbers. Not very engaging. At the minimum, find a picture for each of your player characters and find a place to put it on the character sheet. If you can go that extra mile, make up your own character sheets that highlight critical information and maybe have a second or third image on them related perhaps to special gear they have on them or a location they come from.
3. Player Character Name Tent Cards
It’s a fairly simple thing, but can really make your game stand out. Pick up some index cards at your local stationery or dollar store and then make some name cards using almost any word processing software. If you print the information on each half of one side of the index card, you can then fold it over and create your own tent cards. I prefer having the character’s name on it with a picture of the character on both sides, so that the player themselves can see their character and name (a good reminder) and other players can see their name and picture too. It’s a great visual add-on.
I’ve tried in the past having game information on the back, but I think it largely gets lost in the course of the game, while having a picture is a good visual cue for the player. I’ve also tried having a place for the player to write their name on the card, but in practice, I tend to call the players by the character’s names (helping immersion) and this is significantly helped by having a character name card in front of each of them.
4. Player Reference Sheets
A quick reference sheet of important rules they need to know in the game can be a big help. Not every rule, but the key ones. It shouldn’t be more than one sheet of paper, one-sided and ideally only half a sheet. It could even be tips on tricks in the game they could try.
Not all players will read it, but some will really appreciate having a window into the game they’re likely trying for the first time.
On this point, you could have a one-page, one-sided sheet covering key concepts in your game world. This can be useful as well, but again, you want it to be brief and focused on concepts that will apply to the particular game that you’re running. Leave those booklets or books(!) on your game world at home. No one’s going to read them.
5. Pencils, Dice & Paper
I realize that all gamers are supposed to bring their own pencils, paper and dice to games, but we’ve all run into players who don’t. Especially at conventions. Have some extra available and they won’t have to borrow them from other players (which can create its own tensions). It’s just a nice courtesy to the players.
Justin Schmid
Justin started tabletop gaming in 1983 with Basic D&D (red box) and never looked back. He runs and plays in a wide variety of games, including Savage Worlds, Dungeon World, Trail of Cthulhu and many, many more.
He also writes professionally for role-playing games, including writing and creating Night's Edge an Alternate Reality Universe for Cyberpunk 2020. He went on to write eight more adventures and sourcebooks in the Night's Edge line, adding vampires and other supernatural perils to the already dangerous world of Cyberpunk.
As a freelance writer, he wrote The Bermuda Triangle for Call of Cthulhu, Shadows of the Mind, and Psi Wars for Conspiracy X and contributed to Last Unicorn's Star Trek RPG, as well as to Cybergeneration sourcebooks, and many other games.
When he's not creating imaginary worlds for his daughter, he's running games for his friends and writing new adventures or designing new game systems. He currently lives in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.