John (The_Dunner) covered a lot in his post above, but I'll toss my two bits in as well.

I handlede Tournament and Event coordination for FASA at Origins from 97 through 2000, and Gen Con in 2000 as well, and I continued to do the same for FanPro through '03. I stepped down after '03 as I had reached a certain point of burn out, and needed to take a break. These days I just do some booth demo's for Fanpro, and I filled in for a single Missions game this year at the last minute when logistics and missing GMs clashed.

I also played in round one of the Tourney this year, as I wanted to have some fun and actually PLAY Shadowrun for a change, and I wasn't involved in the Tourney plotting/writing/planning at all this year. Unfortunately, I couldn't make round two due to getting sick I know there was a bug going around the con, and I wasn;t the only one down for the count by the end of the weekend. Another player who was on my team got an emergency call from home and had to pack up and drive back to Wisconson on short notice Friday evening, and thus missed rounds two and three as well

Anyways... Like I said, I wasn't involved directly with the tourney stuff this year, so I can't speak on any specifics or reasons for how things were done, but I can speak from past experiences, and as someone who laid down a lot of the "rules" that the tourney team follows, I can adress those as well.

First off, as John said, everyone there is a volunteer. None of the GMs work for Fanpro in any official capacity, and this year I think we only had a couple of freelancers involved. Most of the rest were strictly fan volunteers.

Compensation basically involves a comped badge, some hotel compensation (If you stay in the FanPro GM rooms), and a free book. For this, you need to work a minimum of 16 hours, and will sometimes get slotted for more (many of the GMs this year worked 20-24 hours). You do get additional comp consideration that you can put toward additional merchandise if you work extra hours, however, that's just the GM time. There's also the work done prior to the convention and any prep time the GM spends getting ready for his events, plus GM meetings and plotting sessions at the con itself.

Honestly? GMing at a con is a lot like freelancing for a game company... you're not doing it for the pay. It's a lot of work, and whether it is actually worth the compensation you get is really questionable. But, it can be a ton of fun and can be very worthwhile. And if you're doing a con on a tight budget, it can help ensure that you can afford the weekend.

That said, it's also not an excuse for sloppy GMing. GMs are always expected to put on their best show, and for those that don't, that gets reflected when time comes for consideration for next years con. I do know that because of some issues, there were a few "last minute" additions to the GM roster. John pointed out that there were 6 last minute cancellations, and there were a few other cancellations in the couple months leading up to the show, which meant the crew was hastily trying to plug holes. Events have to be submitted for the convention by like February or March (And it used to be by early December just a few years ago), and it's really difficult to get people to commit to the con that early, and life happens in the intervening time.

The rotating GM thing is a very deliberate choice, and you'll find that it's fairly standard for a multi-round tournament RPG event. There are multiple reasons this is done:

The biggest is fairness. Everyone has a distinct personality, and some of those personalities get along with each other better than others. I can speak from experience that it's very easy to run into a group that you flat out enjoy GMing for, and it's incredinbly hard to stay impartial when you GM them. We had a regular team at both GC and Origins that after a couple years, I stopped running tourney rounds for because I didn't feel I could fairly judge them anymore. That's even more of a danger when you're GMing the same folks several nights in a row. And likewise, if you have a conflict with a GM, whether over personality of their GMing style, it's going to reflect poorly in your scores overall if you have that GM three nights in a row.

There are some fairly rigid scoring guildelines in place, but there are still any number of areas that are going to have to rely on the GMs judgement. Spreading things out between three GMs, you get more of a balance, and more of an "Average" score acrossed the board.

Plus, the tournament is designed to be a compeition. In theory, it;s designed to test you, as players, and see how well you react to different situations in the game. One of those situations is handling different GMs.

It's not 100% foolproof, but... It's also something that's been refined, debated, discussed, and experimented with for a long time. Every year the event coordinators take the feedback forms that they often hand out (I know we got one after round one this year, dunno if they did em for all three rounds), feedback from the mailing lists and forums (Such as this thread), and comments from the various GMs that year, and look to see if anything needs changed to make it better.

As for the adventure itself, and "railroading" and the like...

*sigh* Part of this is a whole discussion about GMing and playing styles. I'm not gonna debate it, because honestly, it's all a matter of style. There is no right and wrong.

However, for the tournament, it's a 12 team competative tournament. You're judged on several more personalized areas, such as roleplaying and teamwork. But you're also judged on more sspecific areas, such as problem solving and reaching goals within the game.

Many players often whine about railroading, but I think theirs a fine line between "rail roading" and "goal oriented adventures". And a tournament walks that fine line moreso than a home game will, because the nature of the game requires that all 12 teams of players are experiencing the same game. This means the GMs don;t get as much leeway to tweak the adventure, and it also occasionally means that there are "scripted" events that will happen. In past tourneys that I've been involved with, we've infected a PC with a nano-virus as part of a plot device and even killed a PC off at the end of the first round. The running gag about getting hit by a bus is in reference to that adventure, as the PCs were being so damn paranoid that the GM simply couldn't logically kill the player with the sniper that was scripted to do it. They got bonus points for teamwork and the like, but the game still ended with "And from out of nowhere, your character gets hit by a bus and dies." Because round two took place 6 months later, and the PC in question gets replaced by the key NPC from round one. (And yes, we could have killed him off screen. It was even discussed, but we went for the Bus thing cause we were tired and feeling silly )

Think about it like this. If you're in a running marathon, the course is laid out for you. You can't take shortcuts, or hop on a bike for part of the race. Instead, you work within the parameters of the race course. An NFL team can't decide to field 12 players, or give the running back a machine gun. The Tournament is designed as a competition. We also try to tell a good story, we try and make sure everyone has fun, but we also need to make sure that everyone has an equal chance to earn all the relevant points, and to find the same information. And occsionally, that means "rail roading" or forcing the story a certain direction.

When I first started GMing events, the Tourney was actually an elimination event. 12 teams on round 1, 4 teams on round 2, and finally 2 teams for round three. Everyone else got thanked for playing and told to come back next year. I dumped this format after a couple years because of several factors...

The first is that we found we would have a bunch of players showing up to watch round two and trhee, even if they lost. (Especially players from round two who didn;t make it into the finals). Generally, the reason was because they wanted to see how the adventure ended. The second biggest thing we realized is that it really sucked to not be able to schedule yourself for the weekend. If you signed up for the tourney, you were obligating yourself to three nights of games, even though you may only be actually playing for one night. So we droped the elimination part of it, for the sake of fun. We also felt that, because some of the teams are "pick up groups", and not everyone knows each other, it would be entirely possible for a team that did poorly on round one, to go on and do very well on rounds two and three once the players got to know each other and learned each others play styles. (I know at least one year, the team that took second overall was actually the lowest scoring team on round one. They came back for round two, and looked like a completely different team).

There are other things in regards to scoring thatw e do to help balance things out, but that's the gist of it.

I'm really rambling here, so I'll stop now

I'll make sure the Tourney coordinator gets pointed to this thread so he can take a look at your comments and criticisms. I'd also suggest that even if the tourney isn't to your taste, maybe check out the one shots and Missions games next year. Missions tend to be a bit more structured, as tehy're fully written adventures for the Missions campaign, but are rarely adhered to as strictly as the tourney, and the one shots (aka, the non-Missions stand alone games) tend to be a lot looser, since they're just for fun and not tired to anything else.

Bull

I think if the adventure was written and completed say a month earlier, and then out of the 20-some-odd GMs, a percentage playtested it with their local groups...then a big chunk of the bugs would be worked out pre-tourney.

I know Im not alone in saying this among the con Gms, but a number of us dont HAVE local groups anymore. Thats part of the reason we haul our butts a thousand miles to work our tails for for peanuts. I figured that last year I was comped about 4 bucks an hour for my table time, never mind the work I put in otherwise.

Im half tempted to say "If you think you can do better, why dont YOU come and help next year?" The amount of time and effort that goes into the tourny is staggering.

Dashifen:

As I pointed out in one of my posts, I had no issues with your GMing, personally. In fact, as I mentioned, I thought you were pretty good, within the constraints of the plot.

It goes without saying that players spend WAY too much time on minor or unimportant details, while not spending nearly enough time on the major, plot-advancing points. The problem for players, of course, is that we never know which is which.

I really do wish I had some clear understanding of what the grading scale was for the tourney, but that's only a niggling little thing buzzing in the back of my head. I don't know exactly where our team screwed up, but we obviously did somewhere, at least according to the written standards.

Given how amorphous the initial setup of the plot was, I really don't understand how a GM (any GM) can think a groups of PCs who have never played with each other or with with that GM will act a certain way. You can't fall back on 'well, 'runners would probably do this...' since the plot itself was outside of what is normally covered in Shadowrun.

I had never played in a convention before GenCon. My own playstyle is to stay within the rules as much as possible -- to know them well enough that PCs and NPCs do things that are logical and reasonable within the framework of the rules, whenever possible. I'm QUITE sure that conflicts badly with certain other playstyles. Ultimately, though, I try to be flexible, because the idea is to have fun.

My point? My issues on Night 1 had everything to do with the plot. The feds are fairly infamous for turf battles, but that feeling of 'This is MINE, back off!' or 'Soooo not my problem' wasn't there. It's hard to begin roleplaying without an understanding of what's expected from us. Now...I will also say that I, personally, saw a specific character in our group take charge pretty much from the get-go, and keep the team ordered and on track from the outset.

Though he was somewhat...overassertive on occasion, he was roleplaying a directive person with a high Leadership skill. I was happy to see a plan put together quickly.

I think this should be an object lesson in why Piss Poor Planning Provides Poor Playing.

Though even for piss poor planning, this is pretty piss poor playing. I've pulled off a session where I basically had a start point, a sort-of-complete of characters, PCs that might or might not show up, and was basically winging it the whole time, and the PCs (who showed up) expressed more satisfaction with the game than Ghostfire is evidencing.


And while I'll admit it was an internet game run via OpenRPG, not a GenCon tournament where the players are for some reason being graded (???), OpenRPG has it's own hosts of problems.


In any event, the soloution is simple. PLAN! Think ahead! Not a week, or a month. Two or three months at the MINIMUM for something like this.

Have the module written, reviewed, playtested, revised, etcetera. Yes, it will still be a railroad. But if you're riding a railroad that has a lot of alternate routes with interesting scenery and the destination is awesometown, it's not so bad, especially if awesometown can be altered a lot by what you do on the path there.

If, on the other hand, it's an AmTrak express from Boringville to Sucktown, going non-stop through dingy industrial park and pollouted wasteland that only a Post-Apoc lover could enjoy (and it not being post-apoc), then it won't be enjoyable.


An idea strikes me, if the PCs aren't that important to the plot, and in this instance it seems they were not, prepare more player characters than players. With a generic "Feds from different agencies thrown together" thing, it works.

But above all, have the PCs that they do get be complete. Federal agents who can't do battle with neophyte gangers? People with weapon specializations in weapons they don't have? People who start without ammo?! A federal agent with the Combat Paralysis flaw?!

Also, Tisoz seems to be taking things way too personally. I never intimated that he should have neither participated nor that he should have been browsing for the porn. Though he probably should do that now, since he's getting so wound up and sounds like he needs to relax.


And Adaral, re this comment:

A quick question for the audience:

How many teams out of the 12 were allowed to requisition equipment on Night 1? We're talking stuff like normal ammo, basic gear, etc?

I recall the 10,000 nuyen and the requests at the begining, but prior to the gambit at the end of the night you all did get 100 rounds of stick and shock ammo and gel rounds to match. I thought I recalled the Hacker getting some armor, too, but I'm not sure about that.

I think, that what ever the specifics of the situation at ever table, there should -- in the future -- be a way for GMs to allow the requisitioning of gear in the time allotted. For this specific situation, the contacts that any agent would have within the federal government would probably have created all hell for further nights if any night one GM went overboard with the requisitioning. Thus, I was loathe to hand out gear that would be too powerful for the next three nights.

And I can /certainly/ understand your reluctance to overpower and/or twink out a group of characters you would no later have any control over. This goes back to what I was saying -- it should have been clearly communicated to the GMs what they could do in this regard since, as you point out, it has such far-reaching effects.

From what I heard after the fact, other GMs were more liberal in what they allowed. This is not intended as an accusation. Rather, I'm simply saying that due to the format of the tourney, some groups were given a head start, resource wise.

It's a lot easier to concentrate on roleplaying and enjoying the plot when you're not scratching your head saying 'this doesn't make a lick of sense....'

If I recall correctly, the stick and shock ammo we got wasn't through the government but through a side contact using basic book rules. The armor for the technomancer was purchased in the same way.

The GM from the first night(Poster above me) was a lot of fun but the situation/plot was lacking especially after the beginning of night 2's retcon extravaganza. It was here that the railroading started. The Night 1 GM for Team Shoot went with what he was given and is a great chap. He's communicative and explained what was going on during the run.


People can call it what they want, but Uber Bad Guy that can do anything without following rules = Bad. Ignoring rules = Bad. Having a plot that is almost 100% scripted = Bad.

I would like to state that I am very sorry that some of you didn't like the tourney. I know from being a GM for several years that the tourney has always been the hardest event to run. The actual tourney is usually not given out until the day before the convention starts and so usually only gets a quick read through. Unfortunately, that means that there may be issues that aren't covered, potential decisions that aren't planned for and missing or contradictory information on character sheets. However, even if we are given weeks to go over and even playtest the tourney (which we hope to do for next year) the creativity of some players still amazes us and all possible outcomes can never be predicted.

Within the guidelines of a module, there are only so many avenues that can be accounted for and that requires that sometimes the GM must make decisions that leave players feeling frustrated. I know that my team (god love ya) decided to go on wild goose chases wherever possible and while I chose to allow it, it also meant that we ran way behind schedule and I had to do a fair amount of railroading to force the team to where they needed to be by the end of the night. To that Im sorry, but Im sure that we all had fun not withstanding.

I think it's great that everyone cares enough to submit feedback on how the tourney could be improved, but my girly sensitivity is a little hurt at a lot of the flaming going on. The GMs there put in a lot of time and effort to try and make the game as enjoyable as possible. We didn't write the tourney, nor did we make the characters. The choices we made were all done with the goal of trying to help the characters complete the mission successfully and have fun doing it. The whole reason we volunteer is because we love SR, we love the players and we want to help provide as much fun as we can. We are NOT paid. We get some compensation as far as badges and a bit of help on hotel costs, but please do not think of us as paid either by GenCon or FanPro.

I've run games for GenCon both Indy and SoCal for a number of years now, and can tell you that this tourney was actually one of the better written and the characters were more fully developed then past years. It's still not perfect, but we're improving year by year. I truely believe that a lot of your perception of the tourney comes from your decisions on how to approach it. It's not a home game where the GM is there to just provide a rough outline of the world and external events and let you run wherever you want. It's a competition and as such has more limitations on where you can go. You are expected to do the necessary legwork, follow the story and accomplish a set series of goals. Any other method would make impartial judging impossible. If you don't like that, we offer MANY other games with no competition involved where the game has much more flexibility. Missions are kinda an inbetween mix, where they are set modules with limitations as far as where the story can go, but without the majority of the railroading. If you want to play in a flexible SR game much like a home campaign, look for non missions one shots. Heck, this year we even offered a LARP style game. Our goal is to offer many different style choices so you can always find the type of event you would enjoy most.

I'll second the sentiment that if you think you can do better, volunteer next year and prove it.

As fully legal and licensed members of society, is there a reason you couldn't drive to Wal-Mart and get some ammunition? Or Guns-R-Us if you want special stuff like stick-n-shock?

I've had shadowrunners go to real stores, why not government agents?

Perhaps your Shadowrunners need to be refreshed on the definition of a Shadowrunner, a Shadowrun, and the Shadows in general.

Nah. Why bother contacts for things you can get on your own? I know if I was a fixer I'd get really pissed if Joey "Too Legit to Quit" Styles kept calling me up to get him some duct tape, Applesauce, and bullets.

There's a big difference between duct tape and applesauce, and bullets.

People don't look twice at you buying duct tape and apple sauce. Buying ammunition, now, that will get you noticed. It will get your face on camera, and most importantly it will leave a trail.

From all I have been reading, it seems like a breakdown in multiple areas...although I believe them to be minor, when they all happen in the same session, the entire experience in magnified.

As a player, going into a tourney format, you have to realize the game is going to be different than normal home play. Now maybe that should have been discussed a bit more from the start, to get everyone on the same page, but seeing you are given a pre-made set of characters and all 12 tables are running the same adventure...you have to take into account that you will have some limitations.

As a GM, why wouldn't you know the whole adventure and realize where your major plot points and stop points would be? Heck, the vast majority of my home adventures have certain objectives and goals for a successful mission. There are plenty of ways to make it through, so I don't see why the GM in a tourney wouldn't be expected to do the same. Railroading is part of being a GM and I think it is a fine art to railroad your players while they are thinking they are actually calling the shots.

It just sounds like you GM on the first night didn't take that stuff into account. He might have been the most fun, but he obviously didn't get you setup for the next night and I think he should have.

As an event planner, the only fault I can see there is some incomplete character builds and potentially some vagueness in what they wanted the GMs to allow for resources...unless you have 12 GM robots, you have to figure each table is going to go about the session differently each night, and you would expect that each GM, knowing there were three nights, would try to wrap everyone up in the same place to get ready for the next session...

To me, it sounds like a tourney game would be fun, but it wouldn't be the same kind of fun I would have at home games...but I would think I would be able to give the tourney format a chance and not expect as much out of it. You are dealing with limited characters, a mission with set objectives and scoring plus a limited timeframe to play in...everyone, including the players, should have been aware of that and worked to move the game along...

So? You're not wearing your own face or using your own SIN. And even then I don't think you'll get noticed much. If you walk into a gun store and buy ammunition you're just one of countless people that walks in and buys ammunition every day.

And all that is beside the point. These are licensed government agents. Going to a store is something they do every other day of their lives.

Well, you can't walk into a gun store and buy ammo when you don't have any cash. It wasn't until close to the end that we managed to get the 10k nuyen and go to non-governmental people to get ammo/armor. The characters didn't even start with a single nuyen to their name. Once we got the 10k nuyen and went to non-governmental people, we finally had ammo for all guns.


In the future, when dealing with governmental/corporate agencies in a tournament, the best bet would to say, "PCs get a max of 2 trucks, 1 car and 10k nuyen. That nuyen can be in the form of requisitioned equipment up to Restricted. Forbidden items requires a Charisma+whatever check with a threshold of # to get permission."

I'd have asked if I anyone had a credit card. If told no I'd have walked away.

Ok, I probably wouldn't have walked away, but my odds of having an enjoyable evening would have plumetted.

I understand the reasons for swapping GMs. They are, in fact, basically in line with my assumptions why GMs were swapped to begin with.

From my point of view, while swapping GMs isn't ideal, the problem is how it interacted with this particular plot. It was a linear path with various waypoints. Though the PCs might head down a side street or two on the way, the expectation and compulsion was to hit each waypoint squarely each night.

It would work a whole lot better if the PCs were completing specific blocks each night -- interconnected, one-shot runs that affect each other but which are ultimately entirely different adventures. The overall /metaadventure/ would be the summation of the three nights.

The only handoff that needs to take place from a continuity standpoint should be: The PCs completed A, B, and C. NPC X was killed by the PCs. NPC Y escaped. NPC Z was mortally offended by the runners and is now hostile to them. I'm speaking in very general terms here to convey my meaning.

With this sort of setup, the GM coming into night 2 and night 3 will have a checklist of stuff that night 2 and night 3 take into account. I recognize that in some cases (all?) the PCs will go in a direction not taken into account....but, ultimately, the question should be, at the end of the night, did the PCs accomplish the following goals {insert checklist}.

My view of a three night tourney is this: It should be like watching the Lord of the Rings or Star Wars trilogy. Each one is a different movie, and is watched independently of the others. But at the end of the last movie, all the other stuff that happened in the previous nights comes to a head.

GM conferences in night 3 could be done BEFORE the players arrived to discuss how to fix where they've veered too far from the path. If they've veered so far off that they can't win...fine! That's what happens sometimes in RPGs, and especially Shadowrun. Sometimes, survival is its own reward, especially when the PCs have fun and feel like they worked for survival and feel lucky they lived.

This next bit is me speaking from very limited experience (I GMed one night of a tournament at GenCon a while back). When I ran we did have a pregame session prior to each evening with questions along the lines of "what if the players do X?"

A problem with having nights 2 and 3 be freeform with no chance of winning for those that veered too far is that not all GMs are comfortable with or good at freeform games. If someone is the type of GM that prepares for each adventure with a specific run in mind they're going to be worthless when they show up and get told "and oh yeah, they shot their boss and started an organlegging operation."

I'm not saying a total retcon is the best route every time, but sometimes it (or something like it) is necessary.

Now I understand. Thanks In fact, I like that concept a lot.

It really sounds like you got doubly screwed. Once by being allowed to go past the end of phase 1 and then again by being given someone who couldn't handle that, and also couldn't handle stepping out of the bounds of the run (or perhaps didn't think he was allowed).

They didn't get past phase 1, they didn't get to the end of phase 1. Nitpicky, I know, but that was the issue.

Sorry, must have misunderstood. So they were only screwed by being given someone that would not react to prior changes.

I guess. I hate to vilify someone who's not here to defend himself, but their GM2 does seem to have deviated after our meeting. Whether that was because I failed to impart the situation effectively, he failed to effectively react to that situation, or he just didn't like the situation I created and decided to re-create a new one (for what ever reasons), I don't think I'm able, or willing, to say.

The first time I played in a tourney I had no idea how they were run. My group ended up being pretty much moved through the module as each DM pleased because we were so lost, and we were certainly annoyed. In the end a Drake leading a Seider Krupp Ultra Rape Squad ™ waxed the floor with us, thanks in large part to our characters' lack of gear. First times at anything often suck.

That out of the way, I've had a great time at every tournament including that one, and so has anyone I've had the pleasure to play with. There is a good deal of railroading, and sometimes DMs don't make the best choices. If what you care about is winning you can take solice in the fact that everyone is dealing with the same problems. If you don't care about winning, then you pretty much can't help but have some fun because that is what everyone is there to do.

Changes should always be made and things should be improved. Ghostfire makes some great points, the DMs also have good reasons for why some things have to be done. We all agree. Anything else that needs to be said?

I played the tourney. It had several flaws, but I had a blast anyway. The GM's worked well with our group, when we had reality glitches, we just worked it out. Could it have been done better? Yep. With that being said I still had a great time playing my character and interacting in the story. It was a really fun three nights and I look forward to doing it again next year.