How We Schedule Games
We schedule most of the games as they come in. In years past, we waited until November 1st to schedule; this meant handling some submissions several times, which drastically increased work load. This was acceptable in the past, since we had space limitations for RPGs and LARPs. We now have many more RPG spaces in breakout rooms than past conventions had, so early scheduling has little impact on space availability at any point before mid-November, or even December.Now, the optimum handling sequence is: once we look at the game, decide it’s acceptable or not, schedule it, and notify the GM that they are scheduled for a particular time, but not the location (though there are typical venues for each type of game, so you probably know what you’re getting unless you ask for something unusual). The scheduling process may cause games to move around from location to location pre-con, so it’s useless information to say the given game is in room X, when it might be Y, Z, or Θ by the time the con starts.
There are a variety of considerations as to when to schedule games. First of all, the schedule has to meet the GM’s criteria for timing. If we can’t make that work, we won’t schedule the game until we contact you and try to work out an alternative. Usually, though, this is not a problem. Other issues are how long the game is (10- and 12-Hour RPGs are only scheduled on Friday, or starting no sooner than 2 PM Saturday/Sunday); when games with similar systems are scheduled (If we have three iterations of GURPs, we want them not to coincide); when a GM’s other games are going to run; how much set-up time there is (for RPGs, set-up is considered part of the play time—if you absolutely need an exception to that, we may have trouble scheduling the game, but we’ll try to make an accommodation); and unusual requirements, which usually means a larger room.
And why would we reject a game? We don’t schedule more than three games from any one GM. This is rooted in the prevalence of respiratory disease in the winter. GMs get sick and have to cancel at the last moment every year. We encourage cancellations for whatever real-world situation provokes them, and we do not hold that against the GMs in a future convention. But the more games a sick GM cancels, the more holes it pokes in the schedule.
We don’t schedule games that violate our safety protocols and/or the rules of the Marriott. Nor do we schedule games that ignore minimum requirements of qualifying for a complimentary membership. This includes all 2-player games, any RPG offered for less than 5 players, any RPG of less than 4 hours, any other game of less than 2 hours, and any aggregation of games other than RPGs that offers less than 4 hours of play for less than 6 people. If we do schedule a tournament, that tournament may not eliminate any player after any round. Round robin or Swiss-style tournaments are acceptable.
Very occasionally, we do not accept games due to content. See Prohibitions for all DunDraCon games to give you an idea what we don’t want to schedule. This does not include every game we consider to have content problems, but we reserve the right to refuse such a game.
As to whose games we’ll schedule, this answer is the simplest: yours.