(I also posted this on the Gen Con Indy Facebook page.)
Last week someone posted on the unofficial Gen Con Indy Facebook page. They were angry that players weren't showing up for an event they had purchased tickets to, and wanted to know why people would no-show an event.
While a few of the comments agreed that not showing up for an event you signed up for was rude, the majority of the response seemed to be blase' about it. "Life/stuff happens." "I do what I want."
I'm not writing this vilify anyone who doesn't show up for an event, and I can't speak for all event GMs. I just want to tell you about our group's experiences running single table RPG events at Gen Con: what we do to put an event together, how no-shows can affect an event, and how those no-shows influence our decisions about running future events.
I'm with Evil Fleet Productions, and 2018 will be our twentieth year running events at Gen Con. One of our GMs has been running events for almost thirty years. We've qualified for Premier Event Group status every year Gen Con has awarded that designation.
We're not part of a gaming company. We don't have "GMs for hire". We're a bunch of friends who have home campaigns in a variety of RPGs, just like a lot of you.
We start planning for next year's Gen Con before the current Gen Con is over. We have a traditional lunch the Sunday of Gen Con to review how our events went, and start brainstorming on what to do for next year. The first weekend we're home, we expand this discussion with the other members of our group that weren't able to attend Gen Con that year.
We'll start writing our events in September. By January we're just a couple weeks away from the beginning of Event Submission. By early February we need to finalize our slate of events if we want to qualify for Early Bird Status which gets preferential location placement.
We usually start playtesting after the hotel registration melee has subsided. The number of new events we run varies from year to year, but double digits is not uncommon. Work and family commitments make many weekends unsuitable for playtest scheduling, so some years we don't finish until July. But we playtest every event we run at Gen Con - no exceptions. We need to find out what works, and more importantly what doesn't. If the GM needs to makes enough changes, sometimes we'll even do a second playtest of the same event.
Months of preparation go into each event: the writing, the playtesting, creating the characters, doing the maps, miniature figures, other props. I like to say that when your run games at Gen Con, it becomes a year round experience.
It's never cheap, and can be really expensive when we pull out all the stops. One time one of our GMs wanted his Cthulhu event to have a scene where the players hear "Silent Night" sung in German with creepy sound effects. I knew a professional singer who spoke German and had access to a recording studio, but it would cost a few hundred dollars. Our GM's response: "You know what? Let's do it."
Despite the expense of the events and the prizes we give away at them, we've never charged more than the minimum for any event. "Recoup our costs" has never been part of our mission statement.
We do all of this because we love to run the kind of events that we would want to play in. Nothing beats the rush of happy players thanking you for your game, or telling you that your event is the reason they come to Gen Con.
The events that we run are almost all single table RPGs for six to eight players. One no-show is not a problem. Two no-shows can make it challenge for six player games. Three no-shows means you probably have to make major changes for seven and eight player games, and you have to consider cancelling your six player game. Four no-shows is an almost definite cancellation for six and seven player games, and possibly for eight depending on the scenario. In general, the more roleplaying driven (as opposed to combat driven) the scenario is, the more likely it is that the event will have to be cancelled.
We'd never expect anyone to show up if they weren't feeling well, or had some emergency or crisis to deal with because yes, life does happen. But you can really affect a single table event when you just blow it off. And if you and a couple of friends all signed up for that event and just decide to skip it, you can cripple it or even force its cancellation.
It's especially frustrating when there was very high demand for the event. GMs can request wishlish data to find out how many people were trying to get into the events they were running. We ran four Paranoia games this year that had a total of 31 slots. There were a total of 326 requests for those slots. They sold out in seven minutes.
Ten of the event ticket holders were no-shows. It's unlikely that a third of the players all had unavoidable issues that caused them to miss the events. A lot of people would have been happy to take their place.
"Then they should show up with generic tickets and try to get in!" You might think. That's not as easy as it used to be. They probably already purchased tickets for another event. And even if they left this spot on their schedule free, they have to weigh the time it takes to get to our game (which can be considerable with how far the convention is spread out amongst locations now) in what might be a fruitless attempt. If "life/stuff happens" is enough to keep an event ticket holder from showing up, it's even more likely to keep someone away when they aren't guaranteed a seat.
"What about when GMs don't show up? That's even worse!" I agree 100%. When the GM doesn't show, there's no game. However, Gen Con can track the GMs who no-show and take appropriate action as long as even one player reports it. They can't track players since tickets can be bought for and/or given to other people.
So where does our group go from here? Last year I told our GMs that our twentieth anniversary was two years away, so if they had any big events in mind we should pull out all the stop for 2018. Yesterday at the brainstorming lunch I told them I was having second thoughts. Why risk spending a couple hundred dollars or more to make your event better if it might get cancelled? I really wish we didn't have to take that possibility into consideration.
I don't think there's a solution to this and I'm not looking for one. I don't think this post is going to start a change in the Gen Con culture. I just hope that if you stuck with this post this far, you'll carefully weigh the decision to skip an event.
And if I may be so bold as to suggest: Ask yourself "Would the reason I'm blowing off this event be a satisfactory reason for the GM to not show up?"