Dragonmeet 2022
This weekend I tabled at Dragonmeet. This isn't the first con I've worked but it's the first one I've done alone which inflates the cost quite significantly. I haven't done the maths properly yet but I think I've made maybe £100 profit at most.
The more I do these things though the more I don't really care about the financial aspect. I don't want to lose money on them, but if I just break even that's fine. The value absolutely lies in getting to talk (and sell) to people who I wouldn't normally have access to because they're not eternally online, and in being reminded that the loudest voices on Twitter aren't representative of the hobby/industry at large and that most people really just want to sit and play games with their friends and have a good time doing it.
Highlights from the weekend:
- Multiple people who told me that Wretched & Alone got them writing and publishing games for the first time
- The person who liked A Dragon Game so much that he scrapped his 5e game and has been running it exclusively for the past year
- A long conversation with someone who had run The Vermilion Throne and loved it and wanted to tell me about it (this is the first play report I've heard of for that adventure)
- A woman who bought Under The Floorboards from me last year to play with her daughters as their first ever RPG, who sought me out this year to tell me how they'd loved it so much that they now play it every Saturday afternoon as a family
Endless recycled discourse and outrage online often makes me wonder why I chose to work in this industry. Days like yesterday remind me what the answer is.