My esteemed convention co-organiser, Dom, has already summarised the development and delivery of North Star in his recent blog post here: https://delta-pavonis.blogspot.com/2020/05/north-star-online-2020-last-best-hope.html
A few observations from me to round off North Star and plan ahead for Furnace and, perhaps, others…
I was really glad to see such good feedback from our attendees. Lovely to see that you all had a good time when you were with us. All the games I participated in were engaging and great fun. Everything from a simple Google Meet through to Lets Role and Roll20 served very well indeed.
The convention was pulled together in a few weeks, building on the existing anticipation of a real life ‘meet-up’. That’s a remarkable achievement in itself. Some of the back stage work can be refined for further conventions but the structure and tools are there for more to come.
It was a good move to disperse control to GMs to organise their own tables within the slots they had allocated. This devolved the effort to bring the players to the virtual tables and allowed for a multiplicity of login options to get to the games.
The tech out there is now really good. There were some audio missteps from Discord and one I saw reported from Google Meet, so having a back-up option to switch to is a good idea for GMs. Have it ready if the planned communications let you down. You can’t do anything about a player or two who is struggling with a wet string connection or other issues, but on the whole people connected and played just fine.
Guy’s idea for us to see if The Mitchener Arms could be open on the Saturday night was a nice idea, and we could look at that again. Thanks to Dr Mitch in his landlord guise. I have one or two other ideas for some supoorting pieces to add to any future events we might put on.
I got to work out how Open Broadcast Studio (OBS) worked and had most of the right kit to use it for a virtual video welcome. It was fun to play with the tech and there will be more opportunities to use it down track.
Furnace will happen on October 10th/11th. I will consult and listen, and ultimately make a call on whether we are physically meeting or online. Asking me today, I expect that we will be online. Between myself, Dom and Elaine, we’ll consider the best game organisation options for Furnace.
There’s a lot going on at the moment. We are all working our way through the lockdown in our own particular way in our own circumstances. It was good to spend some time gaming together and look forward to bringing more later in the year.
Stay Safe, Play Games, Have Fun.