Okay, here's my take:

I ended up running Panty Explosion in place of Brian Nisbet (because I'd read the book and he hadn't, basically), and came up with a few ideas in the couple of days beforehand. I went with a basic demon that manifests as a mouth in the back of another girl's head which uses hair tentacles to drag kids in and eat them. So far so good.

I wrote out some basic sheets to help people keep track of the elemental dice and what they could be used for, because I knew that would be the slowest thing for me to look up and remember, and I'd need to advise the players on how to allocate the dice on the fly. I also to the opportunity to note down the 5 parts of scene setting for reference.

The game itself went... okay. I came across 2 main issues with running Panty Explosion that day, both of which I feel I can address relatively easily. The first one was simple: the pre-generated character sheets which Brian downloaded from the website aren't really PDFs, but rather images which have been placed in a PDF. As such, they are grainy and, on the whole, very difficult to read. The players had to come to a concensus on what one of the characters was called by referencing the other sheets, and one of them seemed to have the hobby "Sgnoles" (about 10 minutes from the end we realised it said "smokes"). This just caused a lot of distractions, so I'm thinking of taking the sheets, deciphering them and making proper PDFs out of them.

The other thing which could have been done better was my explanation of agendas. I was running the game off the cuff, and I guess I didn't realise just how important the agendas are. They actually drive the whole game - nothing happens in a scene unless either the GM specifically says so or the players want to resolve an agenda. This was only sort of explained in the rulebook, and I only realised that after a scene or 2 had stalled.

Because of that, the players hadn't really resolved any agendas by the time we had to move to the final scene with the demon (killed with a golf club). On the other hand, we totally had the hang of the rival/best friend narration structure, which rocked and everyone enjoyed it. We decided that all of the agendas were resolved by the end of the game, which was cool.

One other point: the elements are very all encompassing things, and the descriptions of them in the book cover a pretty big range of aspects of them. This does make it hard to decide quickly in the course of a short game what to do with your dice. Attacking is a fire things, sure, but talking someone into something? There are elements to cover all stuff, but it would be nice to have a few easy keywords for some of them. Water especially is a bit diverse, so breaking it down to something like "Flexibility and Emotions" might help, and to be honest, if that doesn't cover the whole thing it shouldn't matter as the game will be quick enough it won't cover a lot of ground.

So, for future reference, when running panty Explosion, focus on the agendas and make the character sheets clear, and give simpler explanations of the elements.

Shevaun
-aspiring game author, nothing published yet

Gaelcon, what a mixed bag.

The main problems appeared to be organisation. Or rather, a lack thereof. Tickets were all being logged into a single laptop, meaning that only one group could be processed at any time. This meant that getting registered for the Con required about an hour of queuing. Then there was the issue of signing up for the regularly slotted games. You've guessed it: this required working your way through that same queue and registering on that same computer. Which meant that people were spending ages at the front of the queue deciding what games they were going to be playing and getting the required number of tickets etc etc, compounding the issue.

Then there was the programme booklet. Which was fucking useless in some areas and worse that useless in others. Like there was a history of the hotel the con was being held in, but no explanation of how to sign up for games. I spent a good 20 minutes looking for sign-up sheets before I realised that the same single laptop used to create queues for admission was also used to create queues for games. There was an illegible map of Monday's Marathon route. (Yes, there was a marathon being run in Dublin on the same day as the end of the Con. Not much the organisers could have done about that) Both the games I was scheduled to run had at least two different times listed in different parts of the programme.

Every game I was involved in happened at least 45 minutes late.

On the plus side though, the thing was a very enjoyable experience overall. All the games I was involved in were great fun. There were some amazing games happening (like the crazy-big Memoir 44 game) which I'd have loved to have been able to play (this was a typical "too much to do and too little time problem). The venue was fantastic. People were friendly and enthusiastic.

I ran Agon and Umläut. Both games were well received and a lot of fun to run. I also got to play Polaris, which was fun and got to see Best Friends in action, which was informative and fun.

Plus I got to meet a whole bunch of great people!

...were a nightmare. Fortunately for the Indie Games Track we were far easier to get a place on. Adam had made sign-up sheets on our tables and you just paid 1 Euro when you played. I collected my money after Cold City but the peole on the front desk seemed quite confused that I wanted to give it to them. Still, I insisted that Adam (who was at a wedding on Saturday) had told me to the pass the money to them along with the sign-up sheet and that they really should take it. Sigh.

Anyway, next year and at other cons it might be an idea to do a cross of 1-hr demo/short games and a table of longer "games on demand" type of affair.

Oh, my games on Saturday started out on time, but confusion was spread by the con staff saying everything was an hour behind. OK, your stuff is an hour behind, but our stuff is on track after we didn't get anyone for slot one. Of course, they then spread their lateness to our stuff too. Sigh two.

It's the most disorganised GaelCon I've been at and I think there were grumblings in the Irish Gaming Community about it. Certainly the con director was incoherent at the end of the Auction, fortunately the Auction Host was able to clearly explain where to get bus tickets to the crowd.

Great to see Rich, Claire, Joe, Debbie, Adam, Brian, Shevy, et al. there.

Firstly, thanks again to Gregor, Joe, Rich, Brian and Shevaun for running games. :)

Yeah, the laptop ticket thing was a fiasco! It's sort of a recurring mistake at Irish cons, the smaller cons get away with it (still a bad idea), other big cons (I can't remember which - Warpcon?) have produced huge queues with it, but this is the first time anyone has been crazy enough to try it at Gaelcon. Madness. Luckily it didn't affect us too badly.

As has been mentioned the morning games didn't run, and despite John's suggestion that cancelling them would stop later slots running - I think I'll skip them next year. No one likes them, and with shorter games there's no need to fill every moment of the day. Plus, we can play other stuff in the morning. On the other hand, it was easy to fill afternoon games and I think we could definitely experiment with running two tables side by side in the afternoon.

As to my games:

I had to run the Roach twice to satisfy demand, and both games went fantastically, as usual. We got a really good pace going, and made it through a full three events in each hour.

Universalis got very little interest, and I ended up running late with only two players. We only really got a small amount done . What we ended up with was solid though - a set of low key (zombie free!) tenets defining a horror story about a man trapped in his office during a power cut.

Inspectres was a first for me as well the players. Creating the characters through play worked. (I ran an interview with the Metro and asked them questions and got them to note down the answers.) Once we started play I was stunned by how quickly the players (well, mainly Debbie!) created plot out of nothing. They quickly leaped into the confessional seat too. My only concern is that the result was so silly that I'm not sure how it's supposed to be played over a longer timeslot. (Getting ten franchise dice only takes about twenty minutes.) This is so easy to run though that I'm surprised to doesn't get more attention.

I played in two sessions Umlaut and Shadow of Yesterday, both of which I enjoyed.

I was interested by the differences between Umlaut and Contenders. The main thing is that where Contenders creates a fairly gritty theme through Connection scenes, organised crime related work scenes and the like - Umlaut seems much more geared towards a much lighter style. I also find 9 people at a table a bit much. Still, Rock: Awesome rock!

I'm glad I got to try out Shadow of Yesterday. I was impressed by how easily it ran really, it seems like a system that requires a bit more effort to run. I took a wrong turn with my character in making him a high ranking bodyguard rather than a normal grunt and never quite got back out of it. It was fascinating to see how different people imagine the setting in different ways. One comment is that I'd say the Keys need to be targeted more directly. I would have liked to have some opportunities for compassion and to see some some gold offered to the groom.

Well, I've rambled for too long now. Yay Gaelcon.