That's just what Michelangelo wants you to think.

No, the only way it is satisfactory in my mind is if there's *more* Shadowrun games that BT. And only if I can play in every one. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Seriously, they don't have to be equal, just not this inequal, to make me feel like they're supporting the game lines equally.


I've played a lot of BattleTech. A lot of four-hour games of Battletech, in fact.

But let's use your MtG example. One round of MtG doesn't take that long. However, a tournament takes hours-- and a tournament is equal to an event. Right now, down the street from where I play D&D LFR, there's a MtG tournament that goes on at the same time. It starts earlier, ends later, and has about the same number of players. But the fact is, there's an equal number of events: one per week. That's not what we see in the CGL Origins schedule.

If you could respond to this comment please, Cain.

Because, the way that schedule works, long events are broken into multiple events, for purposes of ticket-taking, bookkeeping, etc. This has already been explained.

[Post deleted for excessive snarkiness]

I could see two-to one, maybe even three-to-one worth of events explained that way. Seven to one? Sorry, maybe it's just me, but I'm not seeing it.

If you are looking to find reasons that show CGL favouring BT over SR, you are barking up the wrong tree, and everyone else is just watching you get further lost in your forest of madness.

What is so hard to understand?

Battletech games are played against other players. The only time you need a gamemaster is in a rules dispute. You can actually have entire games go off with almost no GM participation. As such, a single GM can oversee multiple tables. The events are often short as well, increasing the number of tables a single GM can oversee in a game day.

Shadowrun games in contrast are played 'against' an adventure scenario run by a GM. The GM cannot leave the table, so can only oversee a single table at a time. The evebts are longer, further reducing the tables per day a single GM can oversee.

The GMs are the primary "resource" used at a convention. Given the same amount of resources, of COURSE the Battletech games will get a lot more tables off than Shadowrun.


-karma

Shadowrun is getting the lowest billing in that lineup. That may not be how it truly is, but that is how it is presented, regardless of reason.

I could see how that might ruffle some feathers on the part of long time fans of Shadowrun.

I see that, I really do. But I don't see that explaining a seven-to-one differential.

Now, I'm not the one who suggested that the folks at IMR/CGL favor Battletech. However, they were founded *for* BT, and apparently Shadowrun was an afterthought. But as Adam pointed out, that way lies madness.

I live in a small town, and I know that if I were running a major convention, I could lay hands on four Shadowrun GM's in a pinch. I could probably find more, if I promised them swag and loot. Assuming two games a day, times three days per convention, that's 24 events-- roughly the same number as the events listed at Origins. BattleTech lists about 149 events in that same time frame. I can't see any way of finessing the numbers so that four BT refs can run 150 events in a weekend. They'd need to run 12.5 events per day to keep up; which at two hours an event, means they're running 25 hours a day.

The only way to make the math work is if there's a lot more than 4 BT refs running tables. And that's fine. But it does make me wonder about which game is getting more resources.

Or maybe it could just make you wonder why the SR community isn't stepping up with more volunteers. A point from Bull, Adam, and a number of others you chose to ignore. Again.

Wait, what? A tournament is one event? So even though every single of those win/loss scenarios corresponds to a complete game of MtG, it's not actually a complete game of MtG? Heck, if we're going that simple to say a single tournament is one event, then problem solved. There's one Battletech event that weeked. There's one SR event that weekend. Equal. Yay!

Sounds correct to me. It is a complete game but a single game doesn't equal an event, the tournament is the event.

Edit: Nevermind. Data points will continue to be ignored selectively. Sorry for the thread-jack folks.

Cain: Just to reiterate, the only reason there are so few events, is that there are so few GMs.

I actually had a longish post about this yesterday, but my Computer crashed about 3/4 of the way through it, and I decided against posting, as I was a bit snarky and cranky when I typed it...

The long and short of it is... We have 8 GMs for Origins. Those GMs are responsible for not only 40 Shadowrun events, but 8 Cthulhutech games and 6 Eclipse Phase games. Everyone's doing at least 5 to 6 games, on top of possibly filling in to do pick up demos and the like. We have between 4 and 6 events running at any given time as it is.

If we had more volunteers for the convention, we would have more events.

Southpaw is lucky enough that he's got a pretty good pool of local Battletech players that can go up and run events. And, as has been pointed out, they can run more events in a shorter amount of time, with less prepwork and effort.

I take a LOT of offense at you bitching about a "lack of SHadowrun games" going on, and insinuation you made that we weren't running more games because we "didn't care about the game enough". I've damn near killed myself at the conventions over the years doing this (and I mean that literally and figuratively). And I do this for a free 4-day badge, partial room comp, a T-SHirt that rarely fits, and a free book or two. I still have to make my own way to the con. I still have to cover my own food. And I come away from the con exhausted, aching, sleep deprived, malnourished, unable to speak any longer, ad usually sick because I've spent the last week destroying my immune system.

So, yeah. You want to keep complaining?

That's curious to me. Wildfire seemed to be looking for GMs for Ctech on their own. How is it that you're running events for two games that CGL no longer has?

Because the GMs are, by and large, volunteers who signed up to run events months ago, and because Chuck, the Shadowrun (And general RPG) event coordinator scheduled those games months and months ago, before any of this crap started. Because by the time things shook down for CT and EP, it was too late for them to get events in the pre-reg book. So, as far as I know (and from what Chuck's said), we're still running those events. We still like Rob and Adam and Matt Grau, so we wouldn't leave them hanging for events or GMs regardless.

I imagine they're looking for folks to run booth demos or additional events though, as is obvious we're badly understaffed this year.

(For reference, last year we had a couple more GMs, and ran 54 events).

Um. Three days. 150 Battletech tables. 4 GMs.

BT events last a couple of hours. You can probably run five slots or so a day comfortably. That works out to 10 tables per slot. Divided up among four GMs, each GM oversees two-three tables each slot. Each GM is running 10 hours a day, 8 hours if you have three judges run the ten tables in each slot and give each judge one slot off, rotating the "off" judge.

It's basic math.

You seem to be missing the point that a Battletech judge can oversee multiple tables AT THE SAME TIME, whereas a Shadowrun judge cannot.

In order to run that same number of tables for Shadowrun, you need literally FOUR TIMES the number of GMs. 150 tables, at most four 4-hour slots a day if you cram. That means 12 tables per time slot, each needing it's own GM. 12 GMs total.

And that's cramming, each judge will be running events for 16 hours a day and likely be exhausted because GMing Shadowrun requires a LOT more personal involvement every minute of the game than even running 3-4 tables of Battletech does. Additionally, there's a TON of setup that Shadowrun needs that Battletech does not, namely the writing of adventures.

A single Battletech GM can oversee 6-8 tables in a four hour space if he's good, 3-4 tables a slot in two hour slots. A single Shadowrun GM can oversee just ONE table in that same time. There's your seven-to-one difference.

What you run at a convention isn't based on the number of tables you have, it's based of the number of judges.

If you split your judge pool in half, the Battletech judges will ALWAYS run vastly more tables than the Shadowrun judges. Even if you give the Shadowrun tables TWICE as many judges as the Battletech tables, the Battletech judges will STILL run twice the number of tables than the Shadowrun judges.

This isn't even hard math. Is Dread Moores right? Are you just selectively ignoring stuff?


-karma

Link

Here's what made me ask that Bull. I'll quote the relevant section from Matt.



I realize that is for GenCon, so that could be a completely different story. Makes sense about the time constraints though.

Yeah, I'm not entirely certain about Gen Con and how things are being handled there. Chuck's just not getting the GM schedule in order, so I don;t know yet what all we're actually running, but for GC, we usually have a bigger GM crew to play with. I imagine though that for GC, both companies are going to watch to try and make a bigger splash, and will be more likely to handle their own events. Like I said though, I don't know...

And, just to head this off for when the Gen Con schedule gets posted... Keep in mind that there's a Tournament, which is a two day event. So while it's a single "event", it requires 12 GMs per night, for two nights. THere's also the SHadowrun Scramble, which is a combo Tabletop and LARP event that lasts for 8 hours, and requires 6-8 GMs. THere's also the "Who's RUn Is It Anyway?" event that involves a handful of GMs as well.

I have doubts that will head anything off. But thanks for the info. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Heh, yeah, me too. Which irritates the hell out of me, because I know how much work I've put in over the years, and I know how much work and effort everyone else who's GMed has put in.

If someone can show us a way we can run more than one table at a time for half the work, I'm sure we could easily double the number of events we run...

Bull

A theoretical question for Adam, Bull or anyone else with experience putting to together BT and SR events for Cons. If you had one GM for Shadowrun and one one GM for BattleTech who were willing to run as many 'events' as they could reasonably handle. How many 'events' could each one handle?

It depends upon your definition of "reasonable." It also depends upon the person's physical health and stamina.

The theoretical maximum for SR is four 4-hour slots of SR Th, Fri, Sat, plus two 4-hour slots on Sunday. So, a grand total of 14 slots. This ignores a number of important things, like still having a voice (con halls are loud, GMing loud enough to be heard over the con hall is tough on your throat). Then, most folks like to eat, and there usually isn't time between slots. Most folks also like to have at least a few hours to hit the dealers room, and time in the evening to relax and snatch at least a few hours of sleep.

When I was coordinator, I strongly recommended folks take no more than 20 hours of GMing, so five slots. A few folks insisted on doing more, but I'd never schedule for more than 24. (Some volunteers /did/ run extra tables, though, I don't think I remember anyone exceeding 32 hours, though, or 8 slots. I'm sure McQ will pipe in here about exceeding that, though.)

The theoretical maximum for BT is higher. One GM can usually run several tables, which need not be running the same scenarios. So, let's say 4 tables, each with a different scenario, per GM. Those events can also be two hour events rather than four hour events. So, you're talking about a theoretical maximum of 4 events * 8/day on Th/Fr/Sat plus 4 events * 4/day on Sun or 112 events. Again, that's a theoretical limit. The most I recall anybody actually running was about 60 hours, which was sufficiently excessive that I think he needed hospitalization for dehydration after the con. (not joking)

I am unfamiliar with how con 'events' are set up (total newbie). You've used hours, slots and events apparently interchangeably. Could you please clarify?

As for the GM I'd like to assume equal physical and mental stamina. (I know this is not the case... but then this is a theoretical question)