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Confession of a Convention Game Master

In the two decades that preceded the COVID pandemic, I used to run table-top roleplaying games at gaming conventions. In those days, convention organizers would often recruit more game masters than strictly necessary to serve all the players -- you could easily end up with an empty table because other games running in the same time slot attracted all the players. To make sure that I'll get to actually run the games I worked so hard on preparing, I had to get good at writing "teasers": short promotional blurbs that get distributed to convention attendants as part of the programme, which they use to choose which game to attend at any given time slot.

As a young and energetic GM, I came out of every gaming convention full of inspiration and bursting with ideas for games I could run in the next convention. I typically had ~10 different games drafted after any convention, and knowing that I'm only going to run 2 or 3 during the next convention, I had to choose. And I ended up consistently choosing the game ideas that seemed easiest to write a good teaser for. This worked well, in one sense: tickets to my games were consistently sold out, and a convention organizer quoted a teaser of mine in a "how to recognize/write a good teaser" guide.

But in another sense, I shot myself in the foot. By consistently choosing to run convention games that are easy to write a teaser for, I have failed to develop the skills needed to convey (via short blurb) the appeal of a game that is optimised for things other than blurbability.

And the same goes for communication in general. Ideally, I would be writing about the things I care most about, that occupy my thoughts, that are important for me to convey. Instead, I end up writing what's easy to put into words.