#you take jenga blocks to build your own off-kilter jenga tower and if either of them collapse you freak out

[fantasyfantasygames]

Pure Dysfunction

Pure Dysfunction, stop bothering me about a name games, 2017

Written by a game designer who had been to one too many bad cons, Pure Dysfunction (PD) is a game about running a gaming, comics, or other fandom convention. You play the con chair, ops, other officers, and volunteers dealing with your total inability to plan ahead.

Having been involved in the running of a con myself, it usually does not go this way, and you should thank the many people who made the event happen for their role in not having everything fall apart. This game takes all the bad stuff that happens at a dozen cons and crams them all into three (in-game) hectic days.

Your character is rated on four stats, each of which have a different scale. You have a Typing Speed (in words per minute), Sprint (in meters per second), Customer Service (rated in number of cards), and a Frustration Tolerance (rated in blocks, with 1 being good and 4 being bad) You use different resolution mechanics for each, so you'll have a deck of cards, a pair of d10s, and a Jenga tower on the table. You also may or may not have Card Access to the various rooms where events are happening, and that might change as you're forced to shuffle events from room to room. You spend an initial split of Enthusiasm and Experience on your stats - they add up to 10, but of course each stat costs differently. Completely separate from all that, you have an Archetype that determines what stuff you have access to. You might be an Otaku with a massive collection of anime and video equipment, a Tinkerer with a bajillion tools, the Dice Hoarder, etc.

The game comes with a few sample floor maps and schedules, from Genericon-sized to Gencon-sized. It also has several d66 tables of what can go wrong. The tables often point you to other tables, so generating an "encounter" (yup, they use that word on purpose) can take a few rolls. The events are mostly realistic - or maybe they're all realistic and I just haven't run into the more outlandish events. The game could run GMless if you wanted to have someone who's not in the scene play out the NPC interactions.

PD's main drawback is that it's a bit short. Much like a play about putting on a play and a movie about making movies, a game about game/anime/scifi cons only really works for people who have some experience in the arena already, or when you can provide lots of context. PD tells you what's going to happen, but if you're not familiar with the experience it's not going to give you a detailed explanation of what's going on.

Pure Dysfunction is passed around in much the same way as The Eye of Argon - photocopies of photocopies, mostly person-to-person. A number of copies were lost in 2020/21 because of the 'rona, but odds are about 100% that your ops person has a copy. Just don't bother them during the con.