On Mar 12, 2007, at 3:32 PM, SuperFRED wrote:
but it was unprofessional and embarrassing. Bad Rabbit.
...
All in all, a very disappointing event for me.
Hey, don't be so hard on yourself. We're Rabbits not because we're professionals, but because we're amateurs; we love Looney Labs and their games, and it's that love that drives us to do cool stuff like demoing the games, doing rabbit crafts, and being enthusiastic about it all. Sometimes the enthusiasm gets ahead of our knowledge of the games, or our ability to get other people excited, but that's not bad, that's learning.
Some specific advice: for things that absolutely need everyone to be in one place at one time (like Werewolf), just set a specific time to begin with. Don't say "oh, yeah, stop by in this two hour block," but say "Werewolf starts at 10, be there or be square." And take into account the schedule of the con; there are some popular events (like the masquerade), that pretty much everyone goes to, and so if you have something scheduled for those times you need to understand that you'll just be picking up stragglers.
Also, you might want to try a floating tournament instead of a fixed one. That way people can just drop by, play a game or two, and then go to whatever other scheduled event they had. I think part of the reason that doing events at cons is so hard is that everyone there has 20 things they want to do, and only the time to do 10 of them. If there's a looser structure, where people can just drop by and play, it might fit into their schedule better. Of course, it means that you need to make sure there is always an opponent available for them to play; this can usually be done by running continuous pickup games for some large block of time. It helps if you can get another rabbit or two to help out, and switch off with them.
Anyhow, thank you for demoing pyramid games, giving such a long an thought provoking report, and being willing to discuss and analyze what you did. This all makes me feel that we really ought to try and get the Rabbit Wiki that we have discussed up and running, so we can actually document whatever suggestions and conclusions we reach about the best ways to run events.