Last weekend I went to KublaCon with the intent of finding a way to bring enough revenue to Big Bad Con that we could afford more private rooms for RPGs.
Considering PFS
Pathfinder Society (PFS) is a good candidate for bolstering the con. They work in large meeting spaces (and could put our big rooms to use) and are largely self organizing. If I brought PFS to the con, I could afford to move some of the existing RPGs out of the meeting rooms and in private spaces.
To get a better feel for it I played several Pathfinder Society games at Kubla. Unfortunately these are the things I noticed that indicated it wouldn’t work well at Big Bad:
- There is very little crossover between Organized Play (PFS) gamers and non-Organized Play (everyone else). While I’m savvy that LARPs and tabletop RPGs crowds don’t always intermingle, I feel like that separation is very slight in comparison to the divide between the PFS audience and other tabletop gamers. One of my goals at Big Bad Con is to foster a sense of community and I think that adding a PFS games area would be counter to that purpose.
- In every game I played there was at least one (if not) several gamers that were under 18. While I’m a huge fan of the next generation of gaming (raising two myself), Big Bad has always been an 18 and older event. I think we’d run into one organization or the other (BBC or PFS) having to change the way they operate, which I don’t want to ask either one to do.
Looking to GMs
I went back to the root of this. Why are more private rooms needed? This is something that I primarily see GMs asking for. Either because they are loud, or they want the room quiet, or because they like to use music in their games, or their content is very mature. There are a plethora of reasons (all of them good) but most originating from the GMs wanting the freedom and flexibility of having their own space.
After crunching some numbers, we realized that if GMs bought their badges, the con could afford another nine rooms, which would mean more private rooms for games and even being able to further reduce the games in the board rooms from three to two. So, it begs the question…
