Widecons: Advice and expertise?

#1

I’ve played in two very different widecons, both at Dreamation.

A widecon is derived from the term longcon, which is a Christacon which – a Widecon is a bunch of tables in the same shared world, each with a GM and an overarching GM for the event. Call it 16 - 20 players, 4 MCs, 1 meta-MC.

These were run a couple years apart, and were structured very different. The first was Night Witches with @Jmstar. I ran a table, and it very quickly turned into a larp, with players from different tables moving and talking with or without an MC. The second was Masks and was much more structured - after a scene of a predetermined length, we moved to different table with a dfferent GM and different players, with maybe 3 or 4 of these transitions.

Has anyone worked on strategies for these events? Are there evolving norms? What’s the group wisdom?

5 Likes
#2

Alex Roberts and I designed a 10x2+2 (ten tables of two participants, plus two facilitators) wide con for Star Crossed, called Space Station Fobolex. It has run at Big Bad Con and elsewhere and works great. I mention it because of the atypical spread (most wide cons are 4x5+4). There is some show-running advice in it as well.

2 Likes
#3

@BeckyA and I once ran something that I guess you could call a widecon. It was two games run in parallel, set on separate spaceships, with walkie-talkies used for occasional communication between the two. There was a linked plot, so sharing information was useful. But effectively it was two different games. It went really well.

My learning points from this were that limiting the interactions was quite helpful in preserving the widecon format, as opposed to turning into a larp or a single humungous shared tabletop game. Also the walkie-talkies was super fun. Also the linked-but-separate plots made it feel like a really fun interesting interaction even though the games were mostly independent. (It also solved a problem we’d encountered in an earlier game where one table decided to imprison half the players from the other table - admittedly more of a cultural problem than a design problem!)

Not sure how helpful all that is - possibly not all that applicable to widecons generally.

1 Like
#4

I’ve played in three. One was a multi-table, multi-session run of the Annihilation War in Marvel Heroic. One was a multi-table Monsterhearts game where the tables were in different time periods. The third was a multi-table Apocalypse World event with a huge shared map we unlocked as we Adventured and explored.

The Marvel game was fucking epic, one of my favorite con games ever; the war was being fought on multiple fronts, so we’d start the sessions with a briefing/assignments and spend a few minutes figuring out who’d end up where. Then we ran the session and regrouped with 15 minutes left for in-character debrief and reporting. It worked really, really well because we had that common goal to hold us on task even as we went on very different missions.

The Monsterhearts game was an excellent session with great players, but there wasn’t a readily-discernible common plot thread, and characters could get whisked off to other tables mid-game as a result of hard moves. I get what was intended, but we all agreed very early this was an awkward and intrusive system and started to invest effort in playing around it. It did not work. (Part of the problem was that we were playing to uncover the mystery of what was causing these space-time distortions, and that wasn’t really fun in the end)

The AW sessions were a huge bummer for me because we got a couple of players who decided they wanted a different MC at another table, and bailed on our table to go across the desert leaving my PC literally tied to a cross by a cult. Bye, we’re bored here, good luck! The default was that PCs could traverse the terrain and end up at other tables. Cool idea in abstract, disastrous failure in execution.

My take-home from all this was that it works best when you have a strong common goal across the game, a meta-plot like fighting an invasion of cosmic-powred Negative Zone Bug-Warriors. (Or, y’know, Nazis)

A common scene to kick off sessions and a common scene to end them where you can have tables communicate with each other is great. Allowing characters to move between tables between sessions can work as long as there’s balance and you sincerely believe your GMs are roughly equal in terms of skill and pull will players. If you have a single obvious ‘rockstar’ that might introduce tension.

I strongly recommend against letting players swap or move between tables mid-session. I’ve only ever seen this be disruptive, as much fun as the idea of sowing a bit of chaos or doing a run-in might be for certain players. And if I played in something advertised as a tabletop wide-con that ‘turned into a mostly-LARP’ I’d feel furious and betrayed. The table is the first , best safety tool, and if you intend for an element of your session to be switching mid-stream to LARP you owe it to everyone involved to be SUPER clear about that in the event description.

5 Likes
#5

Night Witches works well in widecon format for the reasons you lay out Jim – there’s a hierarchy and organizational structure, so moving between tables can be controlled. And the game itself has a mission structure, so scene length is fairly standard, with communal briefings in between. Int he game that had some weird larping in it, the GMs didn’t initiate or control it - it happened organically around a funeral for a lost comrade. All the GMs were like “WTF is going on?” and in the moment I was inclined to roll with it. I don’t think it did much harm and tabletop play resumed. There was also a lot of informal wheeling and dealing in character between tables, but I didn’t see it as larping so much.

6 Likes
#6

I am extremely interested in that Masks Widecon. It was Phoenix Academy setup, right? I heard just a little about it and I’m intrigued enough to want to play in that sort of Masks game (or run something like it) at a future con. Can you tell me anything more about the experience of playing it, @William_Nichols? I understand the table transitions represented going between different classes and extracurriculars at hero school, correct?

1 Like
#7

Ok, that totally makes sense. We had something similar in that Marvel game when one of the heroes gave their life to take out one of the Big Bads. A bit of freeform between the table is fine, especially at the bookends.

1 Like
#8

I’m not sure how this would translate to a con setting, but…

This was more-or-less how my college role-playing game club worked in 1988-92: We had five GMs running different parties simultaneously in the same homebrew AD&D campaign world. The GMs would meet for lunch once a week to discuss what was going on in our various groups, and to cross-seed events: This allowed actions of one party of adventurers to affect what was going on with another. Once a semester, the five GMs would consipre together to write a big event that would span the different groups. Usually, that meant bringing them together for a one-shot meta-event, which would allow the various PCs to re-assemble into different teams. It was amazing!

(Big downside: I put WAY more effort into our D&D game than I did into my studies…)

4 Likes