Conventioneering
A couple times a year I get together with a few tens of thousands of friends-I-haven’t-met-yet at a shindig called PAX. I have the great pleasure of being an [E]nforcer with the Line Entertainment team, which is a great gig if you can get it. Bullying people (politely) into having fun while they wait for a panel? The best way to spend a weekend.
We have a few tricks up our sleeve for this. Trivia. Polls. Conversation.
Or the one thing no attendee can resist: Fabulous Prizes.
In years past one of my favorite ways to entertain a line was to run something vaguely like Dungeons and Dragons. In the first iteration of my design I had a spinny wheel with eight monsters on it of varying difficulty. Roll a d20, hit the DC, win a prize. Use a pipe cleaner to make your “class weapon” and earn a second roll. It worked pretty well, until we lost the d20. And the spinny thingy. And the pipe cleaners.
For the last six months or so I’ve been building a simple SaaS app in Django to solve some of the problems I’ve run into as a Line Entertainer. Not least of which, the missing spinny thingy and d20. It has a trivia module that seems to work pretty well, although I need to cram some more trivia into it. It’s got a polls app that also seems to work pretty well, at least in my testing.
My latest idea? I’m calling it a Grand Campaign, and it’s the natural evolution of my old D&D line trick.
Imagine, if you will, being presented with a choice:
- Punch the dragon.
- Marry the dragon.
- Steal the dragon.
How do you steal a dragon? Exactly.
You choose, you roll a die, and your roll plus those of three or four hundred of your closest friends controls the outcome, and the narrative progresses over the course of the weekend through a branching story that you can check in on any time you happen to be standing in line in desperate need of Entertainment.
It’s not the most complicated game in the world, but it scales to however many people are there. However many want to engage with it. And it’s a lot more interesting than whether or not Kobold B217 dies this round or next. So I’m kind of excited to see how it shapes up.
I’d like to put the finishing touches on this software by the end of next week, so that I can move on to other projects. But hey, if you’re at PAX Unplugged later this year maybe you’ll get to participate. I hope you do. I hope you have the best time ever. Or else.