Convention Season: DunDraCon

[This is the fifth in my series of game convention retrospectives, in an attempt to draw general conclusions about improving attendees’ and organizers’ convention experience.]

The One that Got Away: DunDraCon

(San Ramon Mariott, San Francisco Bay Area)

DunDracon, held every February during Memorial Day Weekend from Friday through Monday, has seen 36 editions — making the oldest in the list.  It has a solid role-playing focus with a good amount of all types of other games, Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) presence, costuming, and panels.

Every time we have been at this convention we have run lots of role-playing games and the occasional miniatures or RPG tournament.  This used to be my favourite convention, my benchmark for what I hoped a convention would look like.

(Things that went well, things that went poorly: after the cut.)

Convention Season: What Works, What Doesn’t

[This was going to be a very long post, so I’m splitting it into linked segments.]

Things were a little wild for us this year, convention-wise.  It was entirely unexpected too, because we’re so broke that we have no money at all to attend convention, so how did we attend four???  Answer: we have fantastic friends, we worked our butts off for all those conventions, and three of them were close enough that we could drive home at night and save hotel costs.  I’d like to review state-of-the-art game “conventioneering” and share some thoughts.  In addition, I’ll add some considerations of conventions we’re choosing not to attend, and why.

That means there will be criticism; if it’s your convention, your work, your friends, or your ideas I’m criticising, please know that it’s in an effort to draw general “con”clusions (haha), not to pick on you.  You probably have very good reasons you did things a certain way, reacting to crises as they arose; I’m talking about a general approach here.

The Line-Up:

• Dragonflight
• Pacificon
• Big Bad Con
• Convolution
• Bonus entry: DunDraCon
• Con-clusions: What works