thread: 2012-03-15 : Monster Mania Con
On 2012-03-15, Ben Lehman wrote:
I find that roleplaying games, in the abstract, actually have a great deal of cultural pull and relevance: more than we'd been led to believe.
The successes Jake and I have had at anime cons have come from presenting role-playing as just another fan activity that one might do at a convention, along the lines of panels or cosplay. No one but RPG players comes to a con to buy books and, if they do, they don't want our books, they want the actual source material of the convention (horror novels, manga, artbooks, whatever).
But people at fan cons are hungry for activities and open to new experiences. For the first, this is simply because there isn't much to do at a con. For the second, cons are sort of a "festival time" where you might try things out that you're not used to, because—hey—it's a con.
So instead I think it's better to go "we're going to be doing a horror role-playing game in this room. Come check it out!" Just the same way I might do a Segway maze at GenCon, I think that people at a horror con might play Final Girl.
