As you may already know, I spent the Easter long weekend down in Melbourne, running and organising D&D Adventurers League games at the Conquest games convention.

It was the first time I’d managed to get to the convention since the early 1990s; I’d planned to attend a couple of years ago, but an inconvenient bushfire almost destroyed our house about a month prior, but finally, the stars aligned.

Compared to the attendance at PAX Australia, this was a small convention. And, as it was our first time running games there, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I planned to run a maximum of 3 tables, and we got between 1 and 4, depending on the time slot. (People weren’t always happy about getting up to play at 9 am, it seemed!)

We were DMing a different type of player than PAX. At PAX, most of the players are new. At Conquest, the players knew what to do (for the most part). They understood the game and knew what they wanted. The trick was to give it to them!

No DM is good at everything. Players don’t all want the same thing. So, how do you give the players an enjoyable time?

The answer is obvious: You pay attention. You observe how the players react to various elements of the adventure and your DMing style, and you try to give them more of that.

If there are a puzzle and the players are struggling and getting frustrated, you help them past it, and minimise the puzzles in later sections.

If the players are enjoying role-playing with each other and the NPCs, you expand on the role-playing sections in the adventure.

If one player is creating a Pathfinder character at the table during the role-playing parts (which the other players are enjoying) but comes alive in the combats? You let him, especially when he’s not distracting the other players. And you try to make the combats interesting enough so that player enjoys those bits as much as possible.

The point is to enable the players’ fun. Pay attention and react to what the players do.

What are the other parts of it? They’re the usual bits of playing D&D. Read the adventure in advance. Know where your dice are. Don’t spend too long looking up rules. Keep things moving. Finish the game in the time-slot! That last may require some people management, especially if the players are spending a lot of time arguing about what to do next.

One of the trickier bits to consider is whether you use miniatures (or tokens) or not. In general, I would advise using them. My home style may be primarily Theatre of the Mind, but in a convention setting, the players don’t have long to get used to my way of playing. That said, for an adventure where every fight was against at most two monsters, I didn’t bother bringing out the battle map. If there had been a more complicated fight? Then, I would have used it.

One significant benefit of running games at a convention – besides just allowing more people to enjoy the game – is that you get exposed to more players and more play styles. It helps expand your ability to DM. For those reasons, it’s worth giving a shot once you’re comfortable running games. See what else you can do!