Post Pandemic Challenges with Convention Running

A game at a Garricon

This is written from the perspective of running four different cons at the Garrison Hotel in Sheffield, UK (Furnace, North Star, Revelation, and hopefully LongCon). They're all different in style:

• Furnace is a generic 'any system welcome' convention ("It's all about the games") which attracted 70-80 people pre-pandemic (and filled the Garrison Hotel's space).
• Revelation is a tighter focused Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark focused convention. A different crowd to Furnace, but some overlap. Typically 30 to 45 people.
• North Star is an 'any game welcome as long as it's Science Fiction' con, which attracts 50-60 attendees.
• LongCon is an enigma, and hasn't run for some time. If we get 30 odd people I think we'd judge it a success (we need that many to cover event costs).

The post-pandemic recovery in numbers has been slow. We've started reaching the bottom end of some of the attendance levels but we aren't quite there yet. The current ongoing rail network strikes don't help us; I know that a number of people haven't joined us in recent years because travel just isn't viable.

We've also seen a huge change in sign ups; people leave it much later to register, to the point that we've actively discussed cancelling a convention at least once; we've never had to do that before, but post-pandemic we now have to deal with a deposit which we could lose.

In some ways, running the cons with slightly less people there isn't a bad thing; increasingly, people are pitching games for four players rather than the five or six that were common before. That's not a bad thing with the size of some of our smaller cons, but it does leave us with a risk that the fuller cons may not have enough player spaces to cover everyone. We usually lose about 10% of people on the weekend, and I think we're possibly seeing more single day attendees than before. What it does mean is that Elaine or I end up asking for GMs to add an extra space in, which may not be used.

I think the four people thing is partly related to the kind of games run. You can focus more on a table of four than six and there's less GM overload.

However, the more worrying trend is a drop off in GM numbers. Normally, we'd cap GMs at running two games in a five slot weekend; this was initially put in to enable more GMs to run because the active folks (our Iron GMs) would pitch four game slots and close the calendar. However, we've increasingly had to open up to three or four slots available for GMs because far less people are offering than before. 

This comes with a risk, one that the restriction to two games addressed previously. If a GM has to drop out at short notice, or they become ill at the con (I've had a migraine develop, for example), it leaves the organisers a challenge to fill the gap. I used to bring the 'big bag of boardgames' but haven't recently as it's not been called on for a while. We do try to get reserve GMs for slots, but often they're already running games. 

Of all these things, the GM numbers part is the most concerning. All three of the core cons have suffered from it. We used to incentivise the higher volume GMs beyond the priority in booking playing slots, but I don't think that this is the solution.

Curious if anyone else who's running conventions has seen these trends. Is it just us, because if it is it may be a reflection on the convention organisation or perhaps geography? What's your experience?

14 January 2024