Earlier this month I attended 1d4 Con held in Charles Town, WV and, for the most part, had a smashing time. I just attended one day, but I played in three games, including running my Alien game “Games without Frontiers” (more on that below), met old and new friends, including James who runs the con, ate amazing tacos at a roadside stand, and generally just had a pleasant time hanging out with other gamers for the day. All great except…

Except the one player who came really close to ruining my Alien game (and my second ad-hoc game of Into the Odd/Sytgian Library) – he has triggered numerous conversations about how to set up convention games for success, as well as getting me to sit down and write this post where I’ll attempt to put some new rules in place for when I (and maybe you) run convention games.

The situation is not new – you sit down to run or play in a convention game and while most of the table is collaborative, friendly, and focused on creating a safe and fun space for everyone else, there is one player who starts sending up yellow and red flags early that they are not willing or able to think of anyone but themselves. Maybe they are extremely juvenile in their humor or engagement, maybe they are super-distracted with their phone, or maybe (like in my case) they quickly show that they are at the table to highlight themselves, their character, and their fun – at the expense of everyone else.

I have discussed table safety extensively on MUP (especially in these two episodes that I’m very proud of) and how safety tools make sure that everyone at the table gets on the same page at the start of a game to have a fun time. But what I’ve never really discussed or even thought about was what I’m calling “table fun rules” – a set of upfront expectations detailed at the beginning of a game that give the GM and table clear boundaries and actions to take to make sure everyone is supporting the table and the collaborative story that we build together.

(This topic also merges with something I’ve wanted to discuss for a long time around building a “Gamer Hierarchy of Needs” and I begin to wander in that direction, turning this into a multi-part post and helping me realize I do need to put down those thoughts. Warning – this post goes long.)

So I want to develop a set of tools that GMs and players can bring to their tables that bring the necessary conversations front and center to the table, just like Table Safety, and start weeding out troublesome players up front.

Let me use my Alien game at 1d4 Con to illustrate why we need these tools.

Our table of five players – all of whom were new to the Alien RPG – was very dynamic and different, with widely varying player personalities, styles, and experiences. The first yellow flags came early when our troublesome player Larry (not his real name) took the one PC that holds a key narrative element and began using that narrative to set himself apart from the other PCs (to my later point – I need to take care in who takes this PC because they own an important part of the story and they need to be willing to share the story).

While there was a little friction with him setting himself apart from the rest of the table, I let it ride because the first hour of the game is really just warming up. I re-greased the narrative skids and kept the story moving until, at the halfway point, things went sideways – fast.

I have run GWF about a dozen times, including multiple convention runs, and I’ve never had anyone ruin the narrative like this – I was caught off-guard so dramatically (and I continued to trust the player to do the right thing) that I let it go too far without correcting and that ended up really challenging the other players to play their own roles.

Larry jumped past any “figure out what’s happening” actions and directly tried to instigate combat between the other players and NPCs multiple times, attempting to use his PC’s in-game authority to basically upturn the whole narrative (literally saying “Kill him,” “shoot him,” and “take this gun and destroy him”). There wasn’t discussion with the other players, there wasn’t discussion with the NPCs, there wasn’t consideration for what the purpose of the agenda was that he was using to attempt to instigate combat – he just tried, repeatedly, to get PCs to kill the NPCs, and when that didn’t work, tried to get the NPCs to kill each other.

The table was very unclear on where to go with this – mostly because I was unclear on where to go. I had never had someone take the agenda so literally, so quickly, and try to get into combat in the second act. Technically the PC was following his secret agenda, but it really went against the spirit of the game, and I worked with the other players to bring the narrative back on track – offering many options that did not include killing the NPCs – but Larry wasn’t having it. He tried every way he could to instigate combat and was visibly frustrated when everyone else at the table worked around it.

I even mentioned at some point as the table was getting frustrated, “He is technically working within the bounds of his agenda,” which he was. But – and this is the important part – he was wayyyyyy outside of the bounds of the table’s fun, and his continued efforts really challenged the rest of the table, including myself, to have a good time. (Also – very important – this is where I should have said something more direct to Larry, but did not. More on this below.)

All of this friction took time, and the table fell behind the allotted pacing for fitting into the four-hour slot. I pushed the group to engage with the final act, but Larry would not follow the very clear action his PC needed to take to move the story into its final stage. Every single player that has played this role has moved the story into its third act because that’s what the story expects you to do – because they were playing with the table’s story and not their own. I even explain this goal multiple times as part of the mission briefing. This is not a matter of miscommunication or unclear agendas – this became a player refusing to play the game in front of him.

It all boiled over when, about 15 minutes from the end, as the final scene spun out of control (with gunfire and panic in the true Alien way), the PCs began to retreat – because Larry’s PC has not done was is needed for the group to be successful – and another PCs runs past Larry’s PC (who has been critically injured and is having trouble moving) and Larry says, “I shoot her” (meaning the other PC). There was no narrative reason to do this – Larry was just frustrated that all of his shenanigans have spun the narrative and table against him and got him injured.

I said, “No. You can’t do that.”

That’s a really big deal for me, and that’s when I realized that I let the story get too far out of sync and that Larry was now ruining everyone’s fun. I told him he needed to do something else other than PvP –it was now acceptable to shoot the NPCs per the narrative – and I pushed the story hard back on track. But the damage was done.

Shortly thereafter the session ended, and the players left, except Larry who asked to play another game with me later. (To which, strangely, I said yes. More on that later.) And with that, my table walked away frustrated and confused with a game that didn’t need to go sideways.

All of this drama has led me here, and I needed to write down what happened to give detail and merit to the idea that Larry never wanted to be a part of the group, and never had collective story in mind during those four hours. I talked with other players at the table, as well as players who were frustrated with Larry’s behavior in earlier games, and all of these discussions lead to the idea that I needed to do something earlier about making sure the table – including myself – had the right guardrails needed to keep one player from ruining everyone else’s game.

Because that’s what happened, and it’s not fair to everyone else who shows up to do that, including me.

And while this is not something that happens to me regularly, it’s enough of a thing that anyone who goes to cons has experienced this in some way or another, and it’s bound to happen again. I think it’s time to set some ground rules to help myself and other GMs prepare for it.

But this means we need to do some real work on ourselves and be willing to have hard conversations. Like Safety Tools, though, it’s really important to get this right. More in Part 2.