Hot damn why did I not get around to attending gaming conventions until now? All the years of unexploited opportunities! It makes me weep.

I’m back from Gamex, and despite coming down with a little Con Crud the day after, and despite quite possibly the worst My Life with Master player ever, I am coming away from the weekend all smiles and exultation. Sadly, I have to wait until August to do it all over again. I am so saving my pennies for GenCon Indy next year — I’m sure it’s completely different, but that just makes it more intriguing.

Here’s what I played:

Dogs in the Vineyard — I ran with six players, none of whom had played before, and we managed to pull off a good game. Not a great game, but at least a good, solid game. Solid enough that three of the players asked where to get the game when it was done, and as far as success metrics go, that’s a pretty good one.

Prophecy — I didn’t wake up early enough for Paul’s first Nine Worlds game, so I ended up playing this board game, instead. It was pretty neat — sort of like Talisman, except designed well. “But have you played Runebound?” everyone keeps asking me, and no, and I’ll fix that soon, but Prophecy was pretty hot shit, too.

Shab al-Hiri Roach — It was me and Jesse and his wife Meghan and some total stranger Doug playing; I had not had the pleasure before. It was lots of fun. I grabbed the Roach early on, when I got the card that turned all of my dice to d12s, and stocked up a high stack of reputation. I ditched the Roach in the next event, and was sailing towards winning… only to pull the Roach in the last Event. Sadness. But Regina Sutton died, so I suppose not everything is lost.

Primetime Adventures — The Ward — Judson and his SO Stacey came down to Gamex and paid admission to play only one game, and it was this one. And I have no idea why they paid admission. But! This was awesome. I’ve never had the pleasure here, either, and that has been revealed to me to be a travesty of untapped opportunity, much akin to not having gone to gaming conventions. I admit, I was skeptical and somewhat put off by the “groupthink” that everyone always raves about in PTA — skeptical that it would happen and put off by the very suggestion that such a thing might be enjoyable — but wow when it happened it was awesome. We put together our series and played two episodes in five hours. The Ward is a serial set in a mental hospital where the patients’ hallucinatory world is shared for reasons unknown. There was all sorts of lingering doom and unspoken possibilities of what might be happening, but all we did in our two episodes was gleefully pile up the mysteries without a care in the world as to what everything might turn out to be in the end. I would love to play a long-term PTA game to see what it’s like to play an entire season.

Nine Worlds — Paul ran the same scenario/situation twice, and based that situation off of a previous game of Nine Worlds at ForgeCon (you all know that’s what the thing is called, so give up calling it “Forge Midwest Gathering”). Basic idea: six people with diverging agenda are on a ship heading from Point A to Point B. Apparently the first game the day before, which I did not wake up in time for, played out as a soap opera with the principals all flinging love and desperation and whatnot at each other, and ended with people settling down to raise children. Our game, by contrast, played like Paranoia, with everybody spying on everybody else, and follow-up conflicts that were all about finding out that they knew that we knew that he knew that they did something else. We ended with me jettisoning two of the other players out into space. Marvellous.

My Life with Master — I’m going to chalk this one up alongside Sorcerer in the category of “games that were interesting and developed a lot of things in the design-o-sphere but by the time I played them there wasn’t anything new for me there.” Also, the paucity of available options (Villiany or Violence and only character action) drove me up the wall. And it didn’t help that we had a player who had responded to the initial pitch of “you’re a minion of an evil mastermind” without understanding the implied addendum and it sucks. Said player and the friend he brought with him had lots of fun wreaking havoc with their character-pawns, but the fact that they were racking up a stat called Self-Loathing was apparently lost on them. All that said, it was still an entertaining game and I’m happy to add that notch to my belt — although I’m not sure I’d want to play the game again.

Then I was supposed to run Capes next, but I only had two folks sign up — the troublesome player and his friend from My Life with Master. Now, while I had been sitting in MLwM and wishing that I had something like Capes to moderate this guy’s, say, casual “accidental” violence to women, I had no wish to play Capes with just he and his friend. I wouldn’t have the player resources to fight them both off, just to begin with. And Capes with three kinda sucks. So I cancelled the game and went to play (wait for it)…

Vampire LARP — All throughout the con I was complaining that I didn’t get to play any mainstream games, since I wanted to play all the indie games that were on offer and that left me no time to “ground” myself in the default gaming experience that so many gamers assume to be the entire world of gaming. Also, I have never LARPed before. So with Capes shelved, I accepted an invitation to play in a Vampire LARP. Good fucking god. I spent, no joke, twenty minutes trying to get out of a room. While they were calling out initiative order for Round Three of the combat that somebody had conveniently placed right in front of the door, I thought to myself, “Why can’t they just deal everybody a couple cards and decide who wins right now? It worked in Nine Worlds this morning…” I am completely unfamiliar with the new Vampire, and have passing knowledge of the old Vampire, which gives me the level of knowledge of exactly dangerous, and easily confused by statements like “The Brujah are a bloodline of the Gangrel.” So it was very profoundly reiterated to me how much White Wolf games are all about mastery of setting minutiae: lots of stuff was happening, and there were boons and favors being exchanged, but to me all of it happened without any significance, so it was an oddly flat experience — like a four-year-old watching movies. Things explode, but who knows why.

All in all, a very successful, entertaining, and educational weekend. Anybody in southern california that aren’t going to Strategicon events are missing out — they’re not big high-production affairs, but they are a few hundred players gathering in one place and cool games being played. Hard to pass that sort of thing up!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 11:21 am and is filed under Gaming Culture, Other People's Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.