Sign-Up Sheets

[maga]

At the moment it feels as if we're generally not doing an awesome job at sign-up sheets. (The paper ones on the doughnut table. I always manage to fail to get around to the forum signups.)

Facilitators generally do a good job of telling you what the genre touchstones are - but they often don't give you any idea about what's specifically cool about that particular game, they sometimes don't say whether they're in beta, and they very rarely give you any idea of the level of mechanical complexity. At the moment, if I don't already know what a game is, I would always prefer to wait for the doughnut instead; people seem generally better at pitching games out loud, and you can always ask questions.

At a minimum, I'd like to know if I'm signing up for a mechanically-intense or super-dark game. I don't want to inflict my 9AM Sunday self on something that turns out to be an OSR-inspired mental health allegory, or vice versa.

Blurbs are hard! Summarising the important parts of a game while making it sound cool is pretty difficult, especially if it's a game you made yourself that's in beta, and you're trying to write a summary on a single line with a Sharpie. I think it might be useful to give facilitators some better tools for letting people know what they're signing up for. Everybody wins if people are in games that they want to be in.

Silly first proposal, for people to punch holes in: at the bottom of each signup sheet, put a 1-5 score track for Mechanical Complexity, Acting Intensity, and Oogy Dark Traumatic Issues (or, y'know, more elegantly-expressed versions of these) and a checkbox for In Beta.

[Ego]

As a note, we facilitators didn't write most of the sign-up sheets. I know that they were being written up quickly on Friday by the organizers, and just having them there was a bit more important than having them be extensive.
This is not shifting the blame, just explanation. Huge thanks to John and Tony for making those at all, it's way nicer than having to make our own when we get there. However, maybe it would be a good idea to instruct use facilitators to find our sheets and fill out a full blurb so the organizers don't have to take guesses with games they might not know anything about (a frequent occurrence at a con full of playtest drafts).

One place that does a pretty decent job with delivering all the info on sign-up sheets is the big con (ECCC/PAX) Games on Demand sheets. Maybe see how those work and look at them for ideas. One thing we did at one of the cons last year was having a bunch of stick-on labels with things like "playtest" and "Rated Mature" (our signal for potentially heavy sex or violence stuff), and depending on the cost of labels that might be an easy and convenient way to communicate stuff about the games.

Oh, and another note: We should DEFINITELY be asked to use pencil to actually sign up rather than sharpie or pen. Since we slash out the extra slots on the sheet, if people start canceling and crossing their names out, it starts getting pretty messy and becomes unclear if a game is actually full or not.

[tonydowler]

Max diagnosed a good part of the problem there. A lot of those signup sheets were copied from the forums by facilitators, and with the time available we didn't do a great job of it. This is definitely something we can do a better job of next year.

Every year we see changes in the balance of forum games versus at-con signup sheets versus donut, and each balance presents it's own advantages and challenges. This year I think far fewer people opted for sign-up sheets and far more opted for donut pitches. We're thinking of better ways to accommodate that, and possibly a better space to hold the donut itself. Advice and input is appreciated!

[XophRA]

An option would be to host Online Pitch sheets with different fields for game details and slot preferences that they could print to keep the organizers from having to manually write sheets. Perhaps to make this easy, you would want to get rid of online sign up and just have pitch sheets. Then people could join the games as part of the doughnut along with any impromptu ones.