Paul Beakley​ okay. Not all this will be relevant to your concerns. Also, I happily lifted a lot of the structure from another con run by a friend six months away from “mine” in the same venue.

The Venue
Ours is a series of rooms open to hire for various events in an old hotel with lots of crannies. There is one big room with four tables, a smaller room with three tables, four individual “cells” with a table each, and a room with space for two tables but huge noise problems between the two tables.

So that gives us 11 normal tables, and a further room for a single “big” game (as two normal sized games don’t work there so well). So there’s space for say about 70 people, thinking of an average of one GM and five players per table (with some bigger and some smaller that’s fine; a few people will always have to unfortunately drop out at the last minute, and I wouldn’t fret if attendees climbed a bit above 70).

One point I’ll make is that the Venue and places to stay are separate issues. Obviously, plenty of people coming will want to stay at the venue, but there are other cheaper hotels and bed&breakfast places in the same city. That’s fine. I’d have nightmares about doing what you seem to be, which is arranging accommodation. That’s not my responsibility.

And part of organisation is not thinking too hard about things which aren’t my responsibility. I can give some guidance about local hotels, but I’m not responsible.

Code of Practice/Harassment Policy
You need one, including a procedure for if there is a problem. Probably at a small con there won’t be any issues, but having a procedure in play is helpful. Find something you like at another small convention, and ask the organisers if you can use it with modifications. They’ll probably be flattered and say yes.

Money
If you can, reserve the venue, and only pay when you have a decent number of bookings. Don’t go out of pocket. Work out your likely number of attendees, add 50%. Take the cost of the venue and divide by that number. Round off to get the cost. If coming up to the convention, you find you have spare money, there are things you can spend it on- games for a raffle, badges, coffee in the morning slots, whatever. Do what you can, but these other things are bonuses. Put profits, if any, in a separate account to roll forward for when you do it again!

Attendees/Promotion
Put together a simple website. Give it a PayPal button or similar, and open registrations about 6 months ahead. Bear in mind that most of the people coming will at first be friends, and friends of friends. That’s okay (though it’s what may limit the attendance to around 50 to 70, but you may very well be more popular than me).

The Games
This is the fun stuff, right? So for each table, there are going to be three game “slots” per full day. Nail the times down, with a break of 60 to 90 minutes in between (my times are 10:00 to 13:00, 14:30 to 18:00, 19:30 until 23:00, with room for games to overrun by agreement of those playing).

What I do is a mixture of pre-sign-ups and sign-ups at the event. Each attendee gets to pre-book one game. Each GM gets to pre-book another space in a game as a player for each game they run (a GM award with the bonus of not costing anything).

GMs give their games- system, number of players, a short blurb. I open things up to GMs to give game descriptions at the same time as booking. One caveat…I don’t accept game descriptions from a GM until they’re registered for the event.

Then I keep track of everything on a lovely spreadsheet. A couple of weeks before the event, pre-books are done manually by e-mail. A few days before the event, I print out sign-up sheets.

At the event, 20 minutes before each game slot I stick up the sign-up sheets in the designated area (with spaces filled in for pre-bookings), and hover around to check everyone who wants a game has one. Sometimes a couple of GMs won’t have enough players, but if one GM is happy to play, two groups can be merged.

(Now you can see why I checked before posting all this.)