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Welcome to the club, gang!
As an attendee of Phoenix Comicon for the past four years, and organizer for PFS at PCC 2016, I've learned that not everyone can play at once. What this means is that slots cannot start after previous slots have finished. The higher walk-in traffic we receive means games need to be starting every hour, otherwise you'll miss introducing a new player to Pathfinder when you say "we can get you on a table in three hours". Players aren't going to come back for that! Not when there is so much else to see and do.
This year at PCC 2017, Arizona has moved to a "rolling" schedule to better accomodate people stopping in. Our 5 hour slots start every 2 hours, and every hour has a new 1 hour quest starting. This way, our HQ staff can say "we've got a game kicking off in 10 or 15 minutes, you can go sit down there and the GM will get you ready". It requires a bit more coordination of GMs, as they get locked into a table that removes them from other table opportunities. And you need dedicated quest GMs, who are on a different schedule than the full scenario tracks. Definitely a logistical exercise!
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How do you approach the event? What tools would make your event pop more? As an attendee, what does a group do that motivates you to spend more time in an area? Please comment below with your thoughts!
Honestly, most people from comic type conventions, visuals are a big thing. It was a few years back at Paizo Con, and I think at GenCon that there was the 3D terrain set up with a random encounter.
I remember the PaizoCon one was can you survive it with the pregens (not the best for recruiting but great for us more experienced). Something like that with say a more expanded pregen for those who don't know the rules. Say the back of Mersiel having here's how you search and disable a trap instead of the pre-gen text blobs a new person wouldn't understand. Here's how and why sneak attack works.
Make it fun and memorable, isn't there recordings of goblin songs out there somewhere? Perhaps let the recruits be the goblins instead of the pregens, have Rita, Poog and the rest of the goblins (or new goblins) be the characters. I forget which one it was where you had to impress the tribe, but something like that isn't just here's traps and a monster to defeat. They are used to story and depth, and something like that would showcase that.
I'd be willing to make a goblin village for you all if that's an idea in 3D terrain.
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We just had a mixed sci-fi/fantasy con this past weekend (CoastCon) in Biloxi, MS. We had a lot of walk-ups interested in playing.
4 of the 6 people at my low level scenario table were brand new. None had dice. One guy had a dice roller on his phone. I only had so many dice I could loan out. Also, a couple of them kept getting up and going off to different mini-events and coming back.
So;
- Maybe a good idea to have extra dice sets as boons/gifts/loans for new people.
- Many of the people at these events don't realize a PFS session can take 4-5 hours and only have time for 30-60 minutes at a time. Try to steer them toward Quests, or offer more Quests if they have played them. (We did have a Quest table running but spots were full).
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I notices that the MTG crew is always at the Comic Cons we have here in Aus - and at some of the other 'geek culture' conventions too.
When you turn up to their stand they have a bunch of tables and a bunch of volunteers, and they do a good job of being able to take you through a quick game or two right there and then. People can have a crack at it, and then move on.
From an RPG perspective, I suppose it similarly has to be a quick and dirty process 'rules lite' where they can get into it quickly, but also get out relatively quickly so we can turn the tables over - and I suspect they didn't want to pay $40+ for day entry into a convention to spend almost the entirety of their attendance at one table playing one game they don't know about.
A one hour quest would likely be the limit.
I know there was a long thread in the PFS section about getting new players where these ideas were also thrashed out a bit too.
