object lessons

Two things learned at Lunacon:

If doing something well requires so much staff that there is no one left to appreciate it, it is better to do it poorly.

This is actually something I knew already from putting on TSD rallies, but had not applied to convention running. It is probably especially true of the Masquerade, because the pool you are drawing down is entrants rather than audience members, and there are a lot fewer of those. Lunacon got this one right, though they might not have seen it that way.

Changing hotels doesn't make the convention fresh.

Going to a hotel that you haven't been to before makes a convention fresh. Returning to a previously used hotel after a long absence is worse than staying put; you tend towards the patterns that worked then, losing improvements and adaptations you have made along the way. Lunacon got this one right, too, by dint of the unfinished construction taking away the familiar aspect of the hotel. Though the price paid for it was rather steep.