Why are some events fun to play in, while others aren't? First, it's worth noting that gamers vary widely in tastes. Some people love intensive role-playing with little or no combat, while others get restless if they haven't killed anything for more than fifteen minutes. Neither type of gamer is better, and before you can say "Wow, that event sucked!" you need to take into consideration who the intended audience was. In general, though, there are some features that good events will have. (Since we run mostly AD&D events this may be a bit specific to fantasy role playing, but many of the points hold true in any system). As an example of how a KORG adventure gets written is here in this case study.

• Interesting characters: The characters the players have to choose from should be fun. If the event is going to emphasize role playing there should be plenty of hooks. If it's hack and slash, give each character different kinds of weapons with which to do their hacking. Instead of handing out three generic fighters, a generic thief, a generic mage, and a generic priest you should spice things up a bit. You can do this a variety of ways. Sometimes it is as simple as names. In one event we gave the characters oriental sounding names, in another they've all got French ones. This has no bearing on game play, but it adds flavor to the setting. We made all the characters cave men for one adventure, which meant all their equipment had to be made from non-metal items, and no one could read or write. All of our events feature female characters (several KORG members are women, and they hate playing in events where no female characters are available). Sometimes we make the females the big tough fighters, which can be a change of pace for some gamers. The basic idea is that a character should have a few things that make them memorable, even if it's minor stuff like a cool name, an unusual weapon, or a weird curse.

  In events you run at a convention like Gen Con you don't have long to establish mood and setting. Players don't have time to read ten pages on the history of the world they're in, and even if they did they couldn't possibly retain it all in such a limited time. You're better off giving them a few small things they can build on as the adventure progresses.

• Balanced characters: One thing we've always hated is when some characters in an event are clearly the stars, at the expense of other characters. I've played in events where one character got to battle the major villain, solve the mysterious riddle (he was the only one with clues as part of his character background), and wield the incredibly powerful magic item (because he was the Chosen One). Meanwhile the rest of us were more or less along for the ride, with nothing we could accomplish that wouldn't be immediately outshone by the champion. Not much fun, really, except for Mr. Big.

  One way to balance the characters is to make them roughly equal in combat power. This is hard to do - it seems like there's always the inevitable weak sister of the group. This can be offset by giving characters specialized abilities that will be useful in certain situations. For example, maybe one character uses a mace while everyone else has swords, so when the clay golum shows up she's the only one who can hurt it. It also helps to spread out the big moments. If one character gets to challenge the anti-paladin to single combat, another character's big scene might have them as the only one who can pick the lock to get them out of a jail cell, or cast a particular spell to protect them from a dragon's fiery breath.

• Letting the players guide the action: As much as possible the players should control their own destiny. Give them choices whenever you can - if an adventure is basically a linear series of encounters there's not much choice involved. This can be hard, if not impossible, to do in a tournament setting. Often the illusion of choice is enough - we've been known to present three separate pathways, each of which looks different, but which lead to the same set of encounters (possibly with slight changes to touch things up).

  It's also important to let the players come up with solutions you hadn't considered. Just because you didn't think of solving a problem that way doesn't mean it won't work. Unless it's going to make the adventure completely worthless (like when one of our players thought about using Shape Change to turn into a dragon and fly over all our encounters - thank goodness he dropped the idea after a minute!) you should give the players plenty of latitude to be creative.

• Solid Design Work: To have a good event you must be quite diligent during every phase of work. That means taking time to go over the event looking for errors, omissions, and potential areas where players will get confused about what it is they're doing. Furthermore, this means play testing. Play testing is one of the most important things you can do - every KORG play testing we've ever done had has shown us multiple places the event needed tweaking. In some cases the problems were large enough that the adventure would have been significantly less fun at Gen Con had we not caught them ahead of time. When play testing it's better to use people that don't know you too well (strangers are best). Sometimes when you game with folks all the time you are able to predict how they'll do things. It's more useful to play test in an environment as close to that of a convention as possible - a bunch of strangers with their own play styles and gaming histories. It's also important for the play testers to be honest - if they hated the adventure you can change it before embarrassing yourself in front of lots of conventioners who are paying money to play in your event. We generally have little trouble finding people willing to tell us that our event sucks.

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