KublaCon 2012

Was going to post something about registering for Gen Con events on May 20th, but I’m losing interest in commenting upon that.  Meanwhile, KublaCon ended yesterday, so while things are relatively fresh in my mind.

Friday

I give Eric a lift and we get to the con a bit before 2PM.  Briefly talk to Brad, who had shown up Thursday and noted the large number of people for an unofficial day of gaming.  I totally don’t get why these cons keep moving things earlier.  It’s almost like there’s rampant unemployment to where people have plenty of time to game on weekdays.  Oh, right.

I don’t bother trying to get into a 2PM game, even though there are more RPG events I’m interested in at that slot then any other during the weekend.  Just not mentally “there”, yet.

I chat with people I know for a while, then get dinner at a Japanese place in Millbrae that I go to for potato croquette curry.  Now, some may wonder at this.  I have asked a number of people who have lived in Japan, and they know nothing about potato croquette being served there.  Yet, I have seen it at other Japanese places.  I could search online to see if it’s a dish found in a particular place due to trade/immigration with/from other nations, but it’s more amusing to be one of life’s mysteries.

I wander about a bit longer and then go home a bit after 7:30PM, when the commuter lanes are open.  Yes, I bleed the con dry of all its precious vitae!  Or, not.

Saturday

I figure there’s a good chance I’m in a 9AM game.  I pick up Andy, who had spent Friday working on his Flames of War army for Sunday’s tournament so hadn’t been to the con yet.

Even though I do plenty of L5R already, there weren’t that many things on the schedule that interested me that weren’t at 2PM Friday.  I’m in the L5R game, the only one on the schedule and my first choice over something I don’t recall.

It was not either of the two things I was mentally prepared for.  I was figuring either that the game would be very rooted in the world with a lot of social challenges or that it would get L5R junkies.  I know that sounds kind of similar.  In other words, either the GM(s) would be junkies or the players would be.  I kind of forgot that I’ve played a number of L5R convention games and that it’s common for there to be people who just aren’t that into the world, if they know anything about it at all.  My immersion in all things Rokugani is showing.

The game was a fairly straightforward fantasy RPG experience.  There was only the lightest touch of the society of L5R.  Honor was the main thing that was specific to the genre, and, you know, that’s actually a pretty good thing for a con game, maybe even a takeaway that can be applied to home play.  It’s so easy to get bogged down in all of the details of L5R’s history to where it detracts from simply playing a game.  One other player and I actually seemed to know L5R much better than the GM.  I played the only shugenja since most of the players were new to the system and/or world, and it was an effort to refrain from abusing the power.

Plotwise, one player was the second son of a Crane daimyo.  The rest of us were retinue or friends.  A village got burned down by mysterious attackers and we were off to investigate.  We stop at a village on the way, where the locals speak of strange lights at night.  We check out the nearby hills.  At one abandoned bandit camp, we find a mysterious brass coin.  At the other bandit camp, there be bandits.  We fight a bit, then we find out that they use maho to teleport away.  I Commune with a strange Air kami.  With some other info, we get the picture that the daimyo’s banished brother has learned gaijin magics and returned for vengeance.  We go to the burned village and find a giant sand/rock mound.  We get closer.  It explodes.  We wake up the next day in the bodies of bandit types.  We figure out the need to get back to the castle and restore our bodies.  We get back, sneak in, get some equipment, get attacked by illusionary wraiths that I Spock to irrelevance.  We are short on time, so we don’t fight out the fights against ourselves and the daimyo’s brother who switched bodies with the daimyo, we bust the mirror ball that enables the body switching.  The end.

The GM had frontloaded the combat, an interesting idea for a con game.  The one combat I wish we had fought was against a sand monster that had attacked the village.  The party duelist didn’t really do anything and had to leave early – other than people who hate a game and are trying to flee from it, I don’t understand why people don’t plan to stay until the end of a game.  Other people have trouble getting into stuff, so leaving the slot open for them makes more sense.

Also, the characters were crazy powerful.  Just another example of how higher rank characters are broken.  In 3e, somewhere in rank 2, the game breaks.  In 4e, I think it’s in rank 3.  I rolled a 60 on my first Divination roll.  I rolled a 63 on a Perception/Investigation roll and only tied the party magistrate.  My Commune with Air roll started at 10k5.  I healed 42 wounds with the only Path to Inner Peace I cast.  Someone commented about a “mere 32″ when rolling for something.  I think our magistrate hit 69 twice on Investigation rolls.  For context, a Target Number of 30 is extremely hard for a lot of rank 1 characters and about a challenging TN for many rank 3′s.  I had like 5 skills at rank 5, Spellcraft at rank 7, and several skills at rank 3.

I have plenty of time to kill before running V:TES at 8PM, so I wander around and talk to folks.  Andrew, Brad, and I go to my favorite Chinese restaurant (in the world).  We get our own stuff, so I get tan tan mian.  We get back.  I park in my parking space (the closest one to the hotel outside of their parking lot).

I set up for V:TES.  Tom and Kat, who show up every year to play in my V:TES event, even though they live in Reno, which is insane by the way, show up first.  Geoff, who I hadn’t seen in maybe 6 years, is the only one signed up on the sheet and I spy him.  Rich, who I played some with ages ago, and Brad fill out a five player table while I wonder whether others are going to show since there’s only at least seven other people I know at the con who have played the game a significant amount.  Jeff is around, in between RPG coordinator duties, and the two of us talk while the five play.

They play for 2 hours with no one being ousted.  Brad was playing Akunanse, Rich borrowed Tzimisce, Geoff some Sabbat Pre/Obf vote deck, Tom 419, Kat Lasombra.  To make things a bit more interesting and because Jeff offers, we set up two four-player games with Jeff playing in each.  I go first in my game playing my “collection” !Toreador deck, Kat plays her Lasombra deck, Geoff plays Jacko throws cars and launches RPGs and other flung crap, Jeff borrows my Blessed Resilience deck.  In the other game, Rich plays some Stanislava bleed deck, Jeff borrows my “dudes with agg hands and Potence” deck, Tom plays weenie something, and Brad his Akunanse deck.

In my game, I’m not terribly threatened, so Loonar comes out, learns Auspex and gets a Sawed Off Shotgun.  She also acquires a members only Leather Jacket.  Redbone comes out.  I Effectively Manage and get Malabranca, so I work on him; later, he goes pool stealing, including when my prey is at 3 pool!  Jeff keeps discarding the combo cards for the Force of Will bleeds that is all the deck does, including Forces of Will.  My prey is somewhat contained because I’m oh so spooky [wiggles fingers].  Jacko tries to beat up folks with varying ability – one of Jeff’s guys gets torped and Jeff diablerizes with his other vampire who gets burned by Kat’s votes!  Geoff’s KRCG gets used a lot and even leads to a block or two.  My hand goes from too much intercept to too little and back.  Kat tries to vote, I generate four intercept, she gets five stealth.  Jacko gets bounced to me and it’s on.  Jacko goes long and dodges I think.  He additional strikes Molotov Cocktail.  Loonar additionals Sawed Off Shotgun.  Jacko presses with Flash, I press with Read Intentions.  Jacko presses with Psyche!.  I press with Nimble Feet.  For the win!

I get Kat down to 1 pool after Pentexing her Antonio, leaving her with no blockers as she only has him and Ambrosio.  I fail to kill her and she ousts Geoff.  Jeff breaks the Pentex.  Kat Villein’s and Giant’s Bloods to go to lots of pool.  Jeff finally kills me with Force of Will.  Kat crushes Jeff in the endgame as he can’t block anything she does at stealth and she has vote lock and this little thing we like to call Dominate.

In the other game, Jeff plays most of it with just Thetmes, somehow outbloating Stanislava bleeding.  Jeff ousts the weenies and Brad and Rich gang up on Jeff, Brad gets 3 VPs.

Geoff shows Jeff and me the game he’s been working on for years, so we play a dungeon crawl themed card game.  It’s good.  Definitely polished like he said.  I don’t like that you can only win on your own turn, though, and we didn’t see the party forming mechanic used virtually at all since it was just a three-player game.  I was surprisingly out of it by this point, slept horribly Friday night even though I was in bed around 10PM.  Drive home.

Sunday

I get in before 9AM, wondering whether I got into a 10AM game.  There was talk of playing some pickup Babylon 5 CCG, so I hung around the area where one of the game’s designers, Edi, was running Diplomacy.  Amusingly, two of the game’s original five designers were present at the con, though I never ran into John (Hart).

For some crazy reason, 10AM (and 11AM) games were in a slot that had event registration close at 9:30AM.  I get into my game and we decide that I should play in it rather than try to get a game of B5 going, maybe after my game ends we can see who is around.  When I get to my room after seeing my name on the posting at 9:50AM, the room is full of people who don’t know whether they got in or not.  One person comes in with a written out list.  One person gives up his seat so that a crasher can play as some people are having good luck getting into games and some people aren’t.

The game is Unhallowed Metropolis.  Obscure game where the small print run of the first edition book and obscurity means that the first edition books are apparently quite valuable.  The genre is post apocalyptic zombie/undead Victorian England in the 22nd century.  I wanted to play the “mourner”, a profession that means guarding a dead body for three nights from bad stuff.  A combat profession.  In fact, all three of the characters I was interested in were combat characters as playing an aristocrat or a doctor would be too much the sort of thing I usually play, and I’m not interested in playing a criminal.  I end up with my second choice, “undertaker”, basically a professional bounty hunter of the undead.  Third choice would have been dhampir.

We are hired to acquire the grandson of a nobleman from an orphanage.  Our first challenge is that the area near the orphanage goes under quarantine where the military comes in and cleanses the area.  We are in London, by the way.  Supposedly, it’s worse in the wastelands, but it seemed rather sketchy in town.  We jump a dumpster and blow away some zombies with our aristocrat fleeing towards destruction.  He gets corralled and we enter a building that seems like the orphanage, which it turns out to be.  We go room by room clearing out zombies.  We find paperwork and other stuff that gives us clues as to what’s going on.  I check out an obvious escape by some of the people who were at the orphanage/asylum/genetics lab/etc. and nothing comes of checking out the sheet rope from the window to the roof of the nearby building.  We go to the basement and come across prometheans – form of Frankenstein monsters.

Should comment upon combat in this game.  It’s crazy deadly.  It’s hard to say that 4e L5R is truly a deadly system like the L5R GM and others say, but the GM for this game was certainly right about it being crazy lethal.  I was in six combats.  I shot six times.  Twice, both times with my shotgun, I missed.  The other four times I blew the heads off my targets.  The dhampir got four attacks a round with his swords and the mourner got four attacks a round with her knives.  With essentially one exception, they killed everything they fought in one round.

The aristocrat nukes the first promethean with a pistol.  The mourner slices up the other two.  We find a tunnel but choose to ignore it as we have a location already.  So, we cross town.  Undead follow us out of sight.  We get to a warehouse.  In the warehouse are a bunch of zombie test subjects that we ignore.  We come across a vampire feasting on some corpses and the criminal and aristocrat flee while the dhampir takes him out in a round of combat.  We open another door and come across the kid as a boy cyborg with a big cyborg companion.  This is where I miss with my shotgun.  The doctor throws an acid grenade and somebody dispatches the cyborg’s head, probably the mourner, as the dhampir takes a wound that was one off killing him.

We leave, even though the doctor wants to use the lab in the warehouse as we are fairly sure the cyborg is going to explode.  We walk right into a bunch of zombies.  What’s funny is that they give us our toughest fight in that they swarm the mourner and give her all sorts of wounds.  I do waste my major ammo – I had switched clips in my pistol for the cyborg – blowing the heads off of zombie children.  We limp to a safehouse.  The aristocrat speaks to our employer about the state of the kid, the employer doesn’t want him, so the aristocrat plans to off the kid, which the doctor objects to.  While they argue, the military shows up and blows the head off the kid and arrests the doctor.  We get paid.

Grab food with Jeff at my favorite Chinese place, more tan tan mian and some xiaolongbao – place is known for dumplings and those two dishes are the standard ones I get there.

I don’t get into my evening game, so I wander, running across Rich, Ray, Tom, and Kat.  We play a game of Smallworld with the Underground mechanics.  I play horribly, not having enough experience, and the game quickly becomes a two-player race, though Ray makes a good showing at the end.  There is pounding on Rich, but unfortunately, no pounding on Kat.  She wins by a lower margin than I thought she would.  We play a pickup game of V:TES.

I lend out my 3-cap Lilith’s Blessing Thaumaturgy bruise deck to Rich and my “collection” !Tremere deck to Ray, so I decide to play one of my non-collection decks and play my Archon/Anathema/random weapons/Potence deck.  Tom, my prey, brings out Beast.  Rich brings out Masika St. John.  Kat is playing a goofy Lasombra deck, not her deck.  Ray brings out Malgorzata.  Tom threatens to rush my Nikolas Vermeulen if I don’t say I won’t bleed him (for one?).  He eventually decides to rush forwards and I retain my hand of multiple Torn Signposts and Undead Strength.  Turns out Tom has a fair amount of ranged strikes to go with Carrion Crows.

Ray quickly has five votes, having brought out Polly Kay.  That makes my game awkward as I need votes from Kat’s Aurora Van Brande who became the Archbishop of Philadelphia to pass votes.  My first Archon fails.  I do bring out some Progeny.  She helps me get an Archon on Selma.  I Bloodhunt Malgorzata, torp her, and Selma eats her.  Meanwhile, Tom keeps torping Masika, but Masika keeps coming back with more stuff – Mr. Winthrop, Zip Gun, Weighted Walking Stick, Blood Doll, Camera Phone.  He had put out Lilith’s Blessing early, so he just kept refilling the dorks who were rescuing Masika.  Rich finally is able to Flames of the Netherworld Beast and eat him.  Kat’s Ignacio gets torped and never comes back out, so she’s ineffectual.  Ray does not kill me with Dominate.

Tom goes to 2 pool for another Beast.  He goes to 1 pool to DI something.  I oust him.  Rich ousts Kat and Ray.  The endgame is completely in question for round after round after hour.  After 3+ hours, with my having 3 cards in hand and five vampires in torpor and Rich having all four of his vampires in torpor, I win.  At one point, Nikolaus had four Grenades and a Deer Rifle, only one of the Grenades being thrown for a simultorp.  Murat had Disguised an Ivory Bow to torp Masika.  Two of Rich’s vampires had been Anathemaed to oblivion.

An interesting game for the first hour or so, but it degenerated and, then, became kind of endless as we were so limited in what we could do to each other in the endgame.

I ran across Andy, Eric, and Jeff playing Die Hanse on my way to the car, figured out when I had to be at the con on Monday, and drove home.

Monday

The question was whether Andy and I were playing in Eric’s game.  Another question was whether Eric was running his game.  Two of the three people signed up had crossed their names out.  The third never showed.  However, a crasher showed, so Andy and I filled out the party and we played Eric’s Hunter: The Reckoning, using Savage Worlds rules, game.

I was born to be a wayward nun, so I played the wayward nun.  Andy played a retired park ranger.  Jay played a burglar.  We had to find a fellow Hunter who had gone into the upper Klamath River area, looking for something.  Hiking.

We talk to a park ranger, who doesn’t help.  We hike a couple of days upriver.  We find some tracks and the river is oddly polluted.  We decide to go for a thinner forested area to get a better view.  We spot a cabin.  In the cabin, the burglar finds a claymore mine.  We find lots of weird stick bundles strewn about.  We go upriver and find uranium barrels corroding in the river.  We find more.  We camp away from them and get attacked by werewolves in the night.  Our ranger does heinous amounts of damage to the brain of one of them without felling the creature.  I fail my fear roll and roll badly on the table, getting a major phobia of wolves, rather inconvenient since everything we fight ends up being werewolves.  True Faith protects me as the other two shoot the enemy.

We head Eastward, going further up into the hills, and find more barrels and more stick bundles.  We find a cave which the burglar’s second sight had said was a likely place for who we were looking for.  By the way, I was Judith, the ranger Jim, the burglar Jennie, and our fellow Hunter John.  We find John and I Rejuvenate away one of his wounds and do the healing thing I do.  A rift starts opening up in the cave while the mine we took blows up a werewolf.  Two more werewolves attack us and I do my usual thing of True Faithing while I tend to Jim.  John and I leave and the others finish off the werewolves and join us.  A great sound can be heard behind us.  I’m the only one not afflicted with radiation poisoning.  We get back to the ranger station, find out that he’s a naughty dude, and we report our findings on Hunter.net so that a larger force can come in and deal with the werewolf nest and extradimensional monster thing, while someone needs to clean up the random radioactive waste.

I thought using Savage Worlds (with mechanics Eric came up with) for Hunter worked well.  I’m much more okay with World of Darkness mechanics when playing a human than when playing a monster as the high variance and tedious failures seem more reasonable to me, but other than playing around with how Powers work, like one of mine was fairly useless though True Faith made up for it, things seemed smooth and appropriate.

All three of the RPGs I did were similar in that they were all solid con games.  By con game, I mean that they were reasonably straightforward, kind of fighty, things moved logically forward.  I’ve told some people recently that I actually find the average con game session better than the average home game session, and they seem shocked.  While I’ve had a full spectrum of con games, from the most painful and disturbing examinations of my fellow humans to awesome games, usually my con games are much brisker and more productive than my average home game sessions.  That’s kind of funny when you think about how strangers tend to work better together than people who know each other, though I think the fact that con games are known to be one-shots and tend to be more linear and/or focused has a lot to do with that.  It’s not just more combat, which is an inherently cooperative activity, either.  In con games where I talk with PCs and NPCs a bunch and fight little or not at all, things go much smoother.  Investigations are much smoother.

*shrug*

Eric needed to get home to run a game online, so I drove him and Andy home fairly soon after Eric’s game ended.  I did finally run into Eric P. right before leaving, so I saw most of the people I usually see at the cons.

Summary:  No B5, no Type P Magic, only two games of V:TES though one was outside of my event which was nice, boardgame and cardgame, three RPGs, all of which were good, food I wanted to eat, conversations with people I pretty much only see at cons, and my parking place was always prepared for me.  I feel like I’m missing something that I did.  Oh well.

DunDraCon 2012

While driving back from DDC, I said to my carmate, Joel, that I’d give the con a B.  I’m inclined more to a B- now.  In case anyone was looking for V:TES stuff, there’s very little.

Friday, I had to get to the con before noon to run my noon game.  Ridiculous that there were any noon games as it wasn’t that long ago that local conventions started at 7PM or so on Fridays.  There were 16 tabletop RPGs at noon.  I picked up Joel a bit before 9AM and we got there 1.5 hours before my targeted time.  It was actually quite pleasant.  I got checked into the hotel immediately.  I had time for a leisurely breakfast.

I went to my game an hour early and somebody came by looking to crash soon after I arrived.  I never saw him again.  Either he got into another game or he remembered me and wanted nothing to do with my running another game for him.  In the end, I had one no show and one crasher, so it worked, and it appeared that noon on a Friday was a reasonable time to schedule 16 tabletop RPGs.  I was running an adventure I hope to eventually get published.

It went better than expectations, yet there’s a good reason I’m not a fan of GMing.  The whole rest of the con I kept thinking about how things could have gone better.  The main thing I would have preferred is fighting out a final fight, but my time management is questionable and we had to leave the room at 6PM, so there wasn’t time.  I definitely need to work on making character goals less vague, combats more common, and combats happen earlier in one-shots.

I probably should have tried to play something Friday evening – it would have taken my mind off of my game.  Instead, we walked 20 minutes to a local shopping center as we are all quite bored with the nearby offerings at this con.  We waited 30-45 minutes for a table, which didn’t bother me a whole lot since I had nothing to do, but it would be something of a theme to the con.

I also got bad heartburn and slept very little, defeating my being done for the day early.  In the morning, I checked to see if I got in my 10AM game or the 8AM backup game, tried to sleep a bit more when it was the 10AM but largely failed, and went to my 10AM.

Knotty’s Party

I got there very early, so I talked to the GM for a bit.  The system was his homebrew based on a few things he liked.  It’s downloadable, as is at least the main game he based it on.  The plot was what was highly amusing.

A puppetmaster has a teenage, animated puppet that has gone missing right before his birthday.  If he doesn’t make it to his birthday party in time, he loses what life he has.  If he does make it, he turns into a real boy.

This was exactly the scenario that I had played in an adventure at Gen Con.  Of course, knowing virtually nothing about the real story of Pinocchio until I just looked it up online, I didn’t catch that they were both riffing on the actual story.

Even more coincidental was that both adventures were set in fantasy worlds where the common Tolkien races could be found.  Since we created characters for this session, I recreated to the best of my ability the character I played at Gen Con – Grillo the Muslim Turk Goblin.  After the session, I asked the GM whether he ever went to Gen Con, but he said he never had.

So, an elf high wire entertainer, a dobbin (hobbit) thief, a human noble, a human musketeer, a dobbin musketeer, and Grillo went looking for Knotty.  Knotty proved very popular with the local brothel.  His two abductors were bribed and we went to find Darius, The King of Magic.  We scoped him out and he didn’t have Knotty, either.  We found Xerxes and a back entrance to Lord Montaigne’s residence, where the lord explained that he bought Knotty and sent him with his (infatuated) daughter to be presented to the Sultan of Turkey.  We take the lord’s flying carpet, get to the hotel they are at, continue to explain the need to get Knotty back in time or he will be lifeless (and, apparently, sexless), take out a few guards and start flying back.  The carpet becomes damaged, so we get stuck.  I and another fall 700′ feet into the ocean as we try to get to a fishing boat.  The Sultan captures us and lets us go.

It was perfectly fine.  One of the players was new to RPGs, but unlike a lot of new players, she was very active and outgoing.  The group was humorous.  The adventure could have been less linear and harder – a lot of NPCs simply gave us info and helped us.  Time had something to do with that, but it seemed like nobody really cared about preventing us from doing what he wanted once we told them what would happen if he didn’t get back.

I had no real interest in Saturday evening games, so I hung out with nothing to do and went for dinner.  Sandra found a Chinese restaurant online that was near but questionably walkable, so I encouraged going there but nobody wanted to give up a parking space.  Eventually, Misha was willing to drive but wanted to go to Zachary’s for Chicago style pizza.  Okay, whatever.  As it happened, this Zachary’s was table deficient and we waited an hour.  It didn’t bother me much.  One problem was that Eric got a thin crust pizza and it was overcooked, not that they seemed to do thin crust all that well to begin with.  The pizza I shared was decent and the small was the right amount of food for the two of us.

We got back, I ended up playing some pickup Alien Frontiers.  What was funny about this game, which had a lot in common with Alea Iacta Est as a Yahtzee style dice-rolling game where you placed dice, was that I liked it a lot more in the beginning and a lot less at the end.  It was obvious where everyone stood at all times and variances in points were small enough that the endgame was a bore of trying to manage two-on-ones (we had three players).  The endgame needs some serious work, but the rest seemed okay

Then, Brad, Jeff, and I played V:TES with a guy and his daughter.  He had just opened up a bunch of cards and had some decks, hadn’t played the game in a while.  Jeff is all thrilled to play Madness of the Bard out of a borrowed deck; the 12 yr.-old gets a couple of VPs.  In the second game, I realize my For/Vic anarch deck has no way to oust people.

Sunday, the only game I was trying to get into was at 2PM, so I tried sleeping in.

Eric was willing to give up his parking space, so we hunted for the Chinese place.  We hunted a lot.  Again, in no particular hurry, I didn’t really care about driving around shopping centers looking for the place.  I did have to finally call my mother to do an online search as neither of us had smartphones, and we finally found it.  It was closed.  We went across the street to another Chinese place.  It was bizarre.  It was dark.  There was lots of seating in multiple rooms.  I wondered going in whether it was a fancy place with ridiculous prices.  My thought wasn’t weakened when we got a simple foldup menu like fancy places do and opening the menu gave the same sort of limited choice style that fancy restaurants more often do.  But, the prices were reasonable.  Not good but reasonable.  The food was decent, though the portion sizes were modest.  Each category had about six choices, so there were enough options to find interesting things.  The ambience was just so weird, though.  The other group left and we were the only ones there.  Halfway in, they turned on one of the lights, making it less dark but still nightclubby.  The people were nice, probably because they were new and had no business.  We were asked to order some food to go by Jeff still back at the con, the cost of which was excessive for what it was.

Torchwood

Back to gaming, though apparently food was more interesting than gaming at this con.  I get into my 2PM game, Torchwood using the Dr. Who system (the new one) with slight modifications to make it deadlier to PCs.  We spent the first hour just learning about our characters.  We spent the next two hours going through a door.

The opening was that there is a real bar, The Edison, in Los Angeles across from the LAPD Station.  Torchwood’s LA facility was underneath The Edison.  The LA staff disappeared a few days earlier, the branch going offline.  I, Jasper Daly, was pulled out of retirement.  Two Torchwood staff, Carter and Helen, came over from Cardiff.  Our team lead, Mustafa, came from San Francisco.  Our LAPD liaison was Axel.  The Edison’s bartender Liz knew a lot about Torchwood, including one of the agents.  There was another player …

We spent a ridiculous amount of time futzing around in The Edison, arguing about who would go through the secret door to the facility, who would stay outside, etc.  Liz was too eager to go in for Carter’s interests, and this caused a huge problem.  The player of Carter was someone who believed that dice cannot change your mind, that dice are only used to resolve actions.  The group just wanted to explore the facility after we finally opened it up, but he didn’t want Liz going down, even though the team lead was cool with it.

I had a feeling even beforehand that things would be kind of rough with the personalities at the table.  Liz’s player just wanted him to roll dice, making a valid argument that suspicion was already built into a die roll, but saying it in such a way that would only antagonize the guy.  Another player tried to argue that this was like a TV show where illogical things happen to move the plot, which was a terrible argument for this sort of player.  Another player was of the mindset that, if you don’t want to roll dice, play a LARP, which is also valid but not helpful, though he also argued that in character the team lead had said it was fine, which was a more helpful argument.  Assuming anyone actually listened.  So many people were talking constantly that only the GM was likely to get anywhere.  The GM said that social conflict was part of this game system, so dice-rolling was appropriate.  The player bowed out of the game.  His wife was also playing.  She was new to role-playing.  She also left.

Me?  I gave up on trying to get a word in.  Too many people arguing, and I felt like nothing would convince the guy, anyway.  My argument would have been that suspicion that Liz was the enemy was appropriate – my character would be suspicious, too.  But, the player was being disingenuous in his arguments.  He had made up his mind that she was the enemy, not just had suspicions of it.  There was no basis to believe that.  Now, I’m fine with dice influencing thinking, but even if I weren’t, his thinking was unrealistic, for all his claims that he was being a true role-player and being in character.

3.5 hours into the game, and the seventh player hadn’t even been introduced.  She took over Helen and the group e-hunted the con for another player to get us back to six.

Once the new group got together, we finally did stuff.  Investigation.  Bomb going off killing our leader …  So, it may have been a conceit of the GM’s to show how deadly the game could be, but damage in Dr. Who is incredibly lethal, often one-shot lethal, and the GM took away the Story Point mechanic of reducing damage, which is how Dr. Who characters survive alien weapons.  Mustafa came back, well, in a new body, so the party remained functionally intact.  We fought a Cyber-Dalek before getting coordinates to the base of the tri-brid human, Dalek, Cyberman forces.

I think I’ll cut short on descriptions of the action to remain “brief”.  Jasper survived, transmatting by himself out of the crumbling base, and returned to his retirement without another word to the team.  Liz and Axel didn’t.  Mustafa got a new body.

We finished 2.5 hours late.  Scheduled for 8 hours, finished after 10.5 hours.  It didn’t bother me to run long as the last 5 hours was a decent game without player conflict, but everyone was a bit perturbed by the scene and/or the delays.

Dark Continent

Monday morning was not ideal as I just wanted to sleep but, my alarm at 6:30AM went off, waking me.  We had to get going for Brad’s 8AM Dark Continent game.  When I got down there, two people had backed out due to tiredness and Eric, who should have crashed with someone at the con, decided his lack of hotel room for Sunday night meant leaving the con.

So, we only had three players and only one who wasn’t part of the gang.  We skipped the outfitting part of the expedition, using the same outfitting we had done in our home run of the adventure.  We quickly made it from Adulis to Gondar where our patron wanted us to rescue her boyfriend from Emperor Theodore.  The home game only got to Gondar.  This group strode into the citadel compound and ran across the Vulture Cult advisor to the crazy emperor.  One member was started in on being corrupted by the cult.  The other two of us got poisoned.  Kevin’s character died.

Easy death seemed oddly common for the con.

I critted my medical check, shot some cocaine into his heart and revived him.  His fit after being revived was passed off as epilepsy.  We bought some guard disguises and did the “we’ve brought a new prisoner” bit, which led to fighting guards in the night.  We broke out a Euro from the dungeon, but it wasn’t our man, though he did tell us where the others had been taken.  Jeff showed up to play the new character.  I shot him with Coke to get moving and Morphine to take the edge off.

Guards made a move on our caravan, but the influenced PC showed them the nifty statue he got from Vulture dude and we got out of Gondar.  On the way to Wenchi (not the one in Ghana, have no idea where this is on a modern map), we are followed by a vulture.  We shoot at it, someone besides our group shoots it in the heart – the heart being our preferred location for mayhem.  Our guide to Gondar reveals himself as someone who knows about the vulture cult.  We recover the body, which turns out to be a cultist with a letter saying to kill all of the prisoners.

Using copious amounts of walnut oil to disguise ourselves as Ethiopians, again, we go to the mountain top fortress of the cult where they are preparing festivities – torturing and eating people.  After locating the prisoners, Horace Pocock (not to be confused with the famed Pococks) has had enough of this villainy and directs our Askari escort to open fire on the celebrants.  We retreat into the church while Alexander, the American engineer, works with a priest to lower prisoners down the mountain with a winch, Samuels, who we liberated at Gondar goes after the leader who got shot in the groin and can’t get up, and James, the Scot explorer, starts crawling that way too.

After much shooting, including Alexander taking out flying cultists, and jumping down the rope with the priest, leaving our patron’s boyfriend behind, Samuels offs the leader, and we stagger back down the mountain while the horde tries to make sense of what we did.

Failure.  Though, we did save three prisoners, so we got a good amount of Renown for the mission.  I only hope, when I pass my journals to the children of the priest’s daughter, that future generations will know that Horace Pocock did what he could in the Almighty’s name to smite the abominations.

One last thing about the Dark Continent session:  it had a lot of combat.  We had more combat than we usually do playing Conan.  I find that notable, even if con games might be inclined more towards combat because of more aggressive players.

Did a reasonable amount of stuff, actually got into every game I signed up for, though I think preregging had something to do with that as I’m inclined to believe they favored people who registered for games before the con.  Games were good.  Food waits didn’t really bother me.  By the way, did go to the Chinese place after the con, cheap, good ingredients, not exciting food, no place to sit so ate it at home after dropping off Joel.  Why not a higher grade?  Guess it’s more a lack of anything really special.  I didn’t buy anything.  My world wasn’t rocked by a new game, though I did like the Dr. Who mechanics, they have a very strong Buffy/Angel feel, just replacing a d10 with 2d6.  I didn’t sleep well at any point.  Solid but unspectacular.

The Quiet Year

End of the year.  Thought I’d look at what I predicted for 2011 and wrap up anything else for 2011.

Were there any major changes?  I don’t think so.  The Conan campaigns had already lost traction, so that we haven’t done much this year is hardly surprising.  We don’t play Mondays at conventions anymore, which was our one consistent time.  Running HoR2 weekly continued throughout the year, possibly a surprise, the group has even grown.

I did start playing Friday nights with a new RPG group.  That’s a change but not major in the grand scheme of things.  Nor is going to a different convention than ConQuest rise to the level of a major change.

V:TES

I was wrong about storyline play being the big deal this year.  In fact, the big story this year was attendance at standard, constructed tournaments.  We’ve had more 20+ player tournaments this year than every other year combined.  That’s just weird.  It’s so hard for me to understand what interests people when it comes to CCGs.  For me, once I’m invested, I’m invested.  If I’m not, I’m not.  Matt Morgan winning the NAC was notable if not a great shock, had been one of the top players in the game for quite some time.

I may have enjoyed play more but certainly enjoyed tournaments less.  Not playing in finals means less stories to tell, which makes the various tournaments less notable.  I’ve also been less invested in what I’ve played in events.

L5R

Yes, 4e now has at least one broken school – Asako Henshin.  I have really liked the quality of the books that have come out, more so in terms of aesthetics.  I’m much less of a fan of the official forums, where rules questions are rarely answered and are buried in an awful single thread.  As I frequently mention, I’d rather be playing 3e (well, 3r).

Other

I can’t really speak to other predictions.  I just don’t know enough about what is going on in the industry.  Even from a personal perception standpoint, I’m hesitant to believe some of the things I’ve mentioned have either come to pass or haven’t.

Concerns

HoR3 has done well.  It feels slow to me, but that is possibly due to being involved from the beginning.  I’m not clear why there’s so little discussion on the Yahoogroup about the new campaign, but there were a lot of players at Gen Con, so something is going right.

Gen Con was ridiculously expensive again, though just taking the time off as an hourly employee ends up being a huge part of the cost.  I didn’t make it out to Origins.  I realized that I’m not really interested in traveling for cons (except Gen Con) by myself.  A lot of the fun of the cons is in talking about gaming on the way, at the event, and on the way back.

Hopes

DunDraCon was enjoyable for the first time in years this year.  I ran the intro mod for HoR3 and, while stressful, it was also beneficial.  I haven’t generated an interest in running it again or other HoR3 mods at local cons because it’s hard for me to anticipate that things will work out as intended, with players who want to play a living campaign getting to play and those who don’t avoiding the events.  Also, the mods are oriented toward 4 hour slots, and local cons are more about 6 or 8 hour games.  And, I’m not that into most of the mods.  Even the best of the new mods is not a great RPG experience.

V:TES has gone pretty much the way I hoped.  In particular, we finally got rid of the newsgroup as the primary location of discussion.  With 2012, we even will have a major fix to the game by “unbanning” Minion Tap.

I haven’t gotten inspired by a new product.  Though, likely getting into something new means finding a different group of gamers, which isn’t something I’m inclined to try to achieve as I game reasonably often.

Execution

I haven’t come up with a mechanism for creating new decks.  I’m constantly reminded that the best way to come up with deck ideas is to play and to talk with other players.  There are so many cards I’ve been meaning to do something with that I just never get around to.  Of course, actually playing more decks that I design rather than writing out something and never bothering to build it remains an issue.

The best I’ve figured out with Solomon Kane is that I’m not that motivated to run it.  Running a weekly game is far more GMing than I’m really interested in.  My RPG schedule is kind of low on play, but full enough to keep me not only busy but from going to a Thursday class that I’ve been going to for nearly two decades.

I haven’t done hardly any fictions, possibly none at all for HoR3 or Conan.  In both cases, the rarity of play is a significant cause.  In the first case, that I don’t really want anything anymore for my characters has an impact as well.

Haven’t been organized with this blog.  Card of the Weak is actually a good idea for a series but one I don’t spend enough time thinking about to commit to additional card choices.

I did throw a lot of cards into boxes as I needed to clean up the computer room for work to be done.  But, I’m thinking I should really do a massive organization as I’m kind of tired of having some sets never organized.

What else?

I’d say 2011 has been a quiet year gamingwise.  The most surprising thing has probably been the increase in V:TES tournament attendance.  Otherwise, usual evolution of what in particular I’m involved in.  I suppose I could have hoped for more, but there is an element of getting out of something the amount of effort put in.

Interlude: Miskolc

At least, I think it’s Miskolc.

So, I would have been happy to finish my “series” on skill lists.  Actually, it occurred to me that taking a look at Solomon Kane wouldn’t be horrible since that’s a system I do actually make house rules for.  But, today was straightening up the computer room so that people can get around to fix some damage.

While not so late I couldn’t do something more involved, in cleaning up, I came across a page of notes from a Gen Con of yesteryear.  The notes for the RPG sessions are atrocious, though it appears I played some sort of Doctor Who game that year, quite the challenge to get into those, though it sounds like we were just part of UNIT.

Anyway, the important part of this discovery is that it has my notes about Miskolc (I have it written down as Mishkos, after some online research, I’m pretty sure they are one and the same).  That would be Miskolc, Hungary.  Why do I have notes about it?  It wasn’t because of a RPG session.  It was from something far funnier.

That year, I went with a friend who lives in the area.  We did mostly different things at the con.  When the con was over, we were exhausted.  So, we rested in the hotel room, turning the TV on after we talked about our various gaming experiences.  Somehow, we ended up on a travel channel or foreign channel or something that had a travel episode on Miskolc.

We were dying laughing.  From my notes:

Imaginary Tailor – I remember distinctly when the narrator started in on the town being known for its imaginary tailor.  Was that misheard?  Maybe.  But, the existence of the Little Tailor of Prague (close enough!) meant I couldn’t not connect the two.

200,000 … several times – Miskolc (according to the narrator, Wiki entry suggests otherwise) got to a population of 200,000 … several times.  We started thinking about scenarios for this.

Castle Ditch – There was something about how bread or food was served in the castle ditch.  I can still picture them panning a camera across what looked like the castle’s (empty) moat; I think there was a table with a woman and others dressed in archaic dress serving food, but this may just be the influence on my imagination from the Tailor.

Department Store – I don’t remember this at all.  Maybe, it was something about how the city had a department store.

Stone Theater – If you read the Wiki entry I did, Miskolc is credited with the first stone theater.  My notes, besides saying “stone theater”, also say “first” and “destroyed/rebuilt”.

Bank – Why is having a bank funny?  This sounded like a modern travel guide with comments about the city’s history.  My notes are “over 7 years” – I distinctly recall the narrator mentioning that the city had a bank for over seven years.  (That’s one more than six!)

Did you have to be there (and kind of high from exhaustion)?  Probably.  That I still remember lying on a bed, laughing hysterically while the narrator droned on about the amazing features of this singular city, from a gaming convention in 2006(?), suggests being there was a good place to be.

Con-vex

So, we had two game conventions on Labor Day Weekend.  That’s not actually unheard of, though it hasn’t been an issue for me in around 20 years.  I decided to try the one I hadn’t been to as the bar was set so low from the one within walking distance of my house that I’m getting to the point of rather just not going to these things at all.

Was it better?  I guess.  It was maybe similar to two years ago for the con I usually go to.  I didn’t do a whole lot, but that wasn’t entirely the con’s fault … well, no, actually it is.  I get grief for not being more into the local conventions, but really, if they had more interesting sounding events, I’d be more into them.  If people actually showed up and played CCGs I wanted to play, ran RPG systems/genres that didn’t leave me uninspired, and so forth, maybe I wouldn’t take days off or game outside of the cons.

Friday, I tried to get into a game run by a GM I know, someone I played with years, many years at this point, ago.  Twelve people signed up and I wasn’t one of them.  With my usual Friday night GM running a game at the same time, I played in his game.  So, it was a lot like any old Friday for me, except we started earlier and the players were far more cooperative.  We played until 1AMish.

Since I knew that the only game I signed up for on Saturday was cancelled, I went back to bed Saturday morning to recover.  I had arranged to play V:TES Saturday night at someone’s house, so I built a couple 4cl decks and headed for the con around 3PM.  I demoed Battleground – miniatures combat with cards instead of minis.  It was fine.  I hardly ever play wargames or miniatures, but it’s not because I have anything in particular against them; it’s just I’d rather play other stuff.  Well, I do have something against games that last forever with a winner clearly decided early on or by chance, but that’s not a lot of games.  Battleground could have been simpler, not the demo which was simplified, but even the rules posted at the booth.  I wasn’t sufficiently motivated to buy what they had at the booth, unfortunate that they had neither Conquistadors vs. Aztecs, which would have been funny for my Solomon Kane game, or stuff from Your Move Games that wasn’t Battleground.

Played two long games of V:TES.  One was funny for my Lucretia, Cess Queen being too “powerful”, effortlessly employing and equipping past +1 intercept and surviving every combat with the powers of Celerity and Fortitude.  Kostantin showed up to threaten to steal my prey’s Ivory Bow, so I discarded my own.  My prey bringing out Miguel Cordovera made the game goofy, with my prey Bowing his own Miguel.  I’m pretty sure he never used Miguel to bleed his prey, while I ousted him by rescuing Miguel from torpor and bleeding him out with him.  The second game was less silly, but I won the metagame by playing a deck with Guardian Angels and Flak Jackets and Merrill Molitor against two decks that did aggpoke, including one where Basilia got the Ivory Bow.  It was a long grind, but early into Sunday, my final opponent played Frontal Assault when I had four minions and he had four pool.

Went to bed at 2AM, set my alarm for 6AM.  Rolled out of bed at 5:45AM.  Even though I knew I was in an 8AM game (my second choice on my priority slip), I gave up and slept for a while.  I built a couple of Ultimate Combat! Decks in case my sealed UC! event at Celesticon turned into casual play and headed to the con.  Allergies, from lack of sleep and probably the dust on my UC! boxes, annoyed me.

I ran into P-ers immediately, who had come over from the other con, and after playing a game of UC! and Magic while my friend built a Traveller character, I played a match of P.  Then, with only the two of us for UC!, I played a couple of constructed games of UC!.  We cracked starters and drafted a couple of boosters from the expansion – first UC! draft for me, ever.  He got power-hosed in game one and got me just before decking in game two with his vastly superior card pool.

What makes UC! such an oddity is just how close so many games are.  It’s why I believe it’s the best balanced and most fun CCG ever made.  My game early in the day saw my opponent on one hit point when he knocked me out.  The final limited game saw us both at two cards left when I took exactly enough damage for the KO.  I do believe that you have to have fast power generation in the first couple of turns, assuming your opponent does.  Monday I started contemplating mulligan rules since you can’t use Magic style mulligan rules very well.  I think allowing a mulligan for either 3 hit points of damage or 4 hit points of damage per mulligan might be worth trying out.  The other possibility is, of course, to just discard your opening hand since decking is such a huge threat in the game, though I wonder if Instant Replay or Favorite Technique decks can abuse that too easily.

The game also involves precise thinking, but analyzing UC! in greater depth is probably better as another post.

Suffering from allergies, tired, and with my UC! opponent off to do other things, I went home and had no intention of going to either con on Monday since my planned Solomon Kane game didn’t have enough players to make it important enough to run.  (Hope Tom recovers from his surgery.)

So, Monday was a lot about thinking about the need to do something for my HoR2 campaign and a lot about sitting on my sofa watching TV or lying on my sofa sleeping.

It should be interesting what happens next year.  A lot of folks want there to be only one con, either because they want to see people they see at cons or because it will make for better gaming.

Gen Con 2011

Usual smooth logistics.  Potential roommate backed out a few days before trip, but it wasn’t a new experience to be on my own like last year, so I was in a much better mental state.

Thursday

9AM – Emperor’s Favor, Part I

Start the con off with some Heroes of Rokugan.  First two-part mod in the campaign and I had scheduled to do it back to back.  Unsurprisingly, not everyone else had.  Cory, the campaign admin, made an announcement that it would be a very good idea to play this before the political interactive, much more important than the other new mods.

From my left, it was Mirumoto Katsubishi, Hida Kaminari, Shosuro Sakura, Hiruma Genji, Mirumoto Ito, Doku (ronin), and I was playing Moshi Shigeo (my main).  Ben Fredericksen was the GM; I am now trying to note GM names so that I better recognize people both in person and through their online handles.  I took a lot of notes, more than I expected.  Because others hadn’t planned to play the 2PM slot and we wanted to keep our table intact, we pushed through to get done by 4PM.

The most amusing thing about this table was that the two highest Honors were the Mantis and the … ronin.  It felt strange to not play online.  I think it was a combination of factors:  seven players; playing with people and characters I wasn’t familiar with; GM style; importance of moving quickly.  Mods just seem to be much more direct in person.  Maybe, it’s because it’s easier to determine leadership and come to an agreement on what people are doing and GMs don’t get terribly distracted with things not all that important to the plot.

2PM – Emperor’s Favor, Part II

Not really 2PM, we probably started 1PMish.  Similar level of notes.  I want to witness people’s reactions to what happens.

I go by the exhibit hall to check on Great Clans, as the most value to getting it at the con is to get it early and see if it affects my existing characters or what characters I might want to make if my I lose one.  Sold out.

7PM – Mouth of Milu

I had signed up for this because it was set in Hawai’i.  I’m surprised more things aren’t.  As we finished Emperor’s Favor early, I got to the game almost two hours early.  The GM had a large number of decorations, a tiki hut of sorts, leis for everyone, etc.  I ended up taking home a number of the decorations for work to put up.

This was FUDGE set in the modern day.  I played Dr. Lenk Martell, radical scientist working on NEOP Near Earth Object Probe(s).  These probes could be used to deflect asteroids and whatnot by self-destructing.  The PCs had various relationships, though not with everyone else.  After a recent meteor shower (caused by one of my probes), Kilauea erupts and the Big Island is being evacuated.  Blue geodes and strange cave formations appear around the island, with the blue crystal seeming to move.  We barely get off of it with our helicopters and start flying to some dink town because the stoner husband to one of our pilots has family there.  While arguing what to do, we let some people on the roof of a church get immolated.  Flying elsewhere, we rescue some Japanese who talk about monsters.  Eventually, we figure out that all of our theories – scientific, spiritual – point to going up to Mauna Kea where I hope to blow my probe.  The less intelligent PCs instead decide to throw some magic rocks into a frozen lake to get spirits to reactivate the volcano.  The GM is surprised that I survive and ours is the only group to never blow the probe.

Apparently, the meteor shower brought alien life that was trying to conquer the volcano goddesses.  The goddesses fought back by having the lava chase the crystal.  Reactivating Mauna Kea was enough firepower to keep the alien stuff at bay.

The lack of agreement on what to do was fine.  The lack of caring of what others did was a bit odd.  Some characters had way more to do than others.  A lot of time was spent with the husband and wife and ineffectually hanging around locals.  For me, it was fine as I got to do my thing.

Friday

10AM – Dragon Dice Quests

Yes, Dragon Dice.  I couldn’t get into a slot of a RPG at this time, so this ended up being the very last event I signed up for, figuring it was different and I could talk to someone about stuff Andrew and I worked on over a decade ago for Campaign Dragon Dice.

This was not at all what I expected.  This was Dragon Dice the RPG.  By using dice to reflect character skills, your character was a collection of dice that had normal RPG adventures.  A terrain die reflected range to enemies.  Number of health determined character level.  As a demo/playtest, it was mostly a combat scene, a combat that dragged on forever with no way we were going to lose.

It’s a really interesting idea, one I wouldn’t have considered.  On the one hand, I like how it enables using a bunch of dice to do something besides play Dragon Dice, to use dice one might normally use, and I think it can actually work.  On the other, I’m skeptical about selling the idea of using Dragon Dice to people for a home RPG.  While I like Dragon Dice on some aesthetic level, others I run into don’t.  I can see the relatively gaudy colors making things seem too cartoony for serious fantasy role-playing.

Being right next to the exhibit hall, I look for Great Clans.  Sold out.

2PM – Grand Theft Chariot

Greek heroes.  I choose the Cunning Hero and name him Kyrevaius.  His epithet, a game mechanic (one I’m used to with other Greek mythology games), is “The Resourceful”.

We begin in Patara, where the land goes dark.  The priests of Apollo wish to make additional sacrifices and the crowd gets unruly.  Being cunning, I douse torches to blind the crowd.  Others do their things.  Oh, the others being:  agile hero, strong hero, wise hero, charming hero, and fast hero.  The next day, we are called in by the queen to be sent to find the Oracle to Apollo on an isolated island.  I am the only person the GM recalls who actually asks what we know about the island.  Seems odd, when two of us are heavy on the Knowing skill.

Mechanics.  Roll a number of d6′s equal to your skill.  Fives and sixes are successes.  You have a Competency ability that is a pool of additional dice that can be added to a bunch of appropriate skills.  Competency dice explode on sixes.  So, my Knowing, for instance, is 3d6 from Competency and 4d6 from normal.

On the way to the island, we realize the entire world is in darkness.  The Storm strikes us, but we don’t lose the ship.  Korus “The Beguiling” loses a follower, as I recall.  The player gives his followers the most awesome names:  Red Shirticus; Expendicles; Meat Shieldian.  We begin to scale the 100′ cliffs, when harpies attack.  Pythus “The Knowing” cyclones some.  We dispatch the rest.  The filthy, sarcastic oracle tells us that Apollo has been taken to the Underworld, tells us about Charon, Cerberus.  I make some honeycakes for Cerberus and two sleeping potions, one a fake.

We music Charon as Orpheus did.  Cerberus we toss some poisoned honeycakes to and seems asleep as we sneak past but wakes up and attacks Cassius “The Colossus”.  I try to remove Cerberus’s acidic spittle from Cassius’s armor and get attacked by Cerberus’s serpent tail.  I survive the venom, so I milk some into another container … for I am cunning.  Meat Shieldian bleeds some for the ghosts so that they will give us information.  Expendicles helps dig a pit for the blood.  To Tartarus.

We find a centaur guarding a tree where the head of Orpheus sings, making this area of Tartarus pleasant.  Orpheus will tell us where Apollo is if we get him out of the Underworld.  Centaur doesn’t like that.  We cut off the centaur’s leg to free him from his chains and take the two with us.  Orpheus had been kept in a box by Hades and Persephone liked to take him out.  She dropped him, which is how he ended up in Tartarus.  Orpheus saw Hecate dragging a chained Apollo, so we look for her cave.

We find Apollo chained up.  Before we figure out what to do, Hecate appears.  Cassius breaks the chains and we briefly fight, with Cassius being turned into a tortoise.  Hades appears and gets everyone’s stories.  Xanthos, King of Patara, was pissed that Apollo was banging his wife, so he worked with Hecate to capture him, with Hecate becoming the new patron of Patara for her help.  Apollo and the rest of us are free to go.  Apollo asks us to kill Xanthos and reconsecrate his temple with the king’s blood.  I prepare a fake wound.  In Patara, we explain to the priests.  At the palace, the king punches his wife and attacks us for interfering with his vengeance.  I avoid guard attacks, moving closer to the king, while exclaiming about my “wound”.  I quaff my fake potion to “heal my wound” and accidentally drop my other “healing potion”.  I go to help the fallen queen, who is a slut.  Everyone else does their fighty thing, and the king finally tries my venom of Cerberus.

Temple sanctified, queen servicing all the heroes who want her rewards.  My legacy is Kyrevaius “The Resourceful” “Who milked Cerberus”

7PM – Ancestral Dictate

Back to HoR.  I find out that AEG got in new Great Clan books around 4PM.  *sigh*

Ancestral Dictate cannot be played by the same character as Prison of Earth, which is perfect since I have two characters.  Most didn’t.  So, I play with four characters that have never played before.  Four combat focused characters … in a mod with no combat tag.

Charles Penn GM, Moto Shizu, Ikoma Osamu, Hiruma Sentou, Bayushi Junichi, and my character, Hoshi Takumi.

I do a lot of courtiering with my tattooed monk.  I spend all 11 of my koku with my Wealthy tattooed monk.  I have a lot of notes, again.  I think I take more notes in face-to-face games these days because I know so much more about the world and the campaign.  More XP means I can buy up my social skills before the political interactive, this ends up mattering a lot.

Saturday

9AM – Prison of Earth

An all HoR day.  I play with someone I know for the first time.  He plays his tattooed monk, I play my Mantis, so we have three Moshi at the same table.  We fight well.  The arc of the mod is a bit odd to me, but I guess that’s cool as it’s different.  One may notice the lack of details in my descriptions of HoR sessions, well, Andy and possibly others haven’t played them yet.

Ben, again, GM.  Utaku Zaina, Moshi Akio, Moshi Kokoro, Isawa Koukainashi, Togashi Juichi.

Swing by AEG booth, sold out.

2PM – Summer Storms

Ah, battle interactives, I love them so.  We have 12 Mantis, four rank 2′s, three shugenja.  I’m at the table with the rank 2 shugenja I played in the morning with and four rank 1 bushi.  I am rank 2.  Yes, I who can take 20 mods to rank up am a high ranking member of my contingent.

Moshi Kokoro, Tsuruchi Kendai, Yoritomo Sen (unit commander), Yoritomo Wakou, Yoritomo Kikai.

The nature of the battle event is that there are five locations for each battle.  Crab fight Crane, Dragon Phoenix, Lion Unicorn, the noble and virtuous Mantis vs. the Scorpion.  There are three rounds, where you get a random location.  If opposing tables are at the same location in a round, you can have player vs. player, which the Crab and Crane had.  There were three tiers of difficulty.  If you rolled well enough, you could choose a higher tier, roll really well, a low tier with better tier rewards, if you fail, a mid tier encounter with low tier rewards.  Mantis lacked generals.  We found out later we got slaughtered, not because our PCs did but because our victory points were way lower because our tiers were lower.

In the first round, we defended Gateway Village, the gateway to the Tsuruchi Valley.  We actually played this fairly smart but we took a lot of damage.  Didn’t matter as wounds healed between rounds.  We didn’t make our roll high enough to do anything but a low tier encounter.

In the second round, we tried a mid tier encounter.  Not good.  In the second round of combat, their bushi did 41 damage to one rank 1, 41 damage to another rank 1, 20-30 damage to a third rank 1.  We should have lost after round two.  After round three, we should have been wiped.  They were rank 2 bushi with 9k4 attack rolls.  While we finally took some guys down, mostly with grapple plus gang up tactics, we lost two bushi, one having to use a mod reward to reduce damage not to die.  Our shugenja, me, and our one archer (only one Tsuruchi archer at each table!) had to carry the load.  To give an idea how bad this was, we didn’t realize the bushi we were fighting were Earth 2 until two of our bushi were out of the fight.  We persisted.  We ran over time.  We finally won as the enemy shugenja was surprisingly useless.  We didn’t have time for a third encounter but got the rewards for a low tier encounter for the third round, anyway.  We did gain Honor for fighting a battle we should have lost.

I found out later some of the other encounters people had.  The high tier stuff was just insane, with seven rank 3′s where virtually nobody in the campaign is up to rank 3 yet.

8PM – Spoils of War

Political interactive, how I never have done a normal one in person before.  Prior to the event, everyone got special name cards that had stickers to advertise certain things to NPCs.  I got two stickers that very few had, so it was kind of worriesome.  I played my Dragon, the Dragon contingent was large and disorganized.  It didn’t stop us from doing well early, but we got screwed by the Scorpion towards the end.  The Lion got hosed.  Phoenix did well.  Tortoise!!! and Brotherhood of Osano-Wo!!! did well.

I found out that one of my stickers was for artistic ability, so I got pulled aside by the Kakita family daimyo to join his new artists organization.  The other sticker had to do with storytelling, which didn’t help me.  I probably should have had another NPC’s interest since I gained him as an ally in a mod, but it wasn’t reflected in my card since it happened at the con.  Because we were at an imperial court, Etiquette and other social skills were huge.  Another tattooed monk lost a rank of glory and some Honor for not having his social skills high enough, and as I said at the con “all tattooed monks are courtier builds”.  With my final XP expenditures, I skated, having the 3 Etiquette and 3 of either Courtier or Sincerity to not get hammered.  Woe to anyone with no ranks in Etiquette.

Sunday

Morning – exhibit hall

Sold out.

I did some exhibit hall stuff.  Normally, I do a complete walk of the exhibit hall in my off slot, but I had walked a decent amount earlier in the con when with someone else.  So, I focused on some stuff.  So many things I want, so little interest in paying for them, at least at full price or even 25% off.  I did pick up some stuff, about half my cash I brought went on Sunday.

Had to rush to my final game.

12PM – Wu Xing – The Ninja Crusade

I didn’t need to rush.  We started late.  We did very little.  It was lame.  At the end, the GM thanked people for the “demo”.  Okay, I can accept that there are RPG demos, but advertise things as such.  We had a full table with one fight scene and some other stuff most didn’t care about.  I did relatively a lot of stuff I cared about because I can be forceful when others aren’t, but it was still amazingly hollow.

I’m unimpressed with the mechanics of the game.  First, d20 resolution sucks – too wide variance.  Second, the initiative system was incredibly complex.

The one benefit was that we finished with enough time for me to go back to the exhibit hall, which I think was when I spent most of my money … wait.

Having the last game be lame and so much worse than anything else seemed like it would put a damper on things, but my mind was so much more in the HoR world and the buying of stuff afterwards meant I didn’t think a whole lot about it.  There was nothing great, nothing that stood out to compete with the many HoR adventures.  Grand Theft Chariot was nearly great, just the sort of thing I hope to play, but the con was dominated by HoR for me.  Good or bad?  Good that HoR is doing well, 100+ average number of people for every slot; good that I enjoyed the HoR at the con as much as I did.  Bad that I need some balance.

Okay, why don’t more of my friends go to Gen Con, again?

Off Kilter

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration – so sayeth someone who stole a bunch of inventions.

I could, of course, do my first June post by stealing some idea.  The inspiration hasn’t been great enough to justify the, admittedly modest, perspiration.  Why?  KublaCon came and went.  Normally, write about my con experiences.  Then, other things came and went that kept my mind unfocused.

I didn’t get inspired by KublaCon because it was mediocre.  It wasn’t terrible in any way and some of the annoyances didn’t have to do with gaming, like having my favorite Chinese restaurant have stupid hours on the weekend.  There was nothing particularly excellent.  Sure, there were a lot more V:TES players around than usual, but that also contributed to a lot of messy organization because people can’t be forced to be ready to play on time.  I must remember to never pretend that a convention tournament is ever going to be a tournament and just have whoever is there start a game and keep having games generate as players become available.

It would have been amusing to have my main character in HoR3 get killed on my birthday.  I did like Fire and Water.  The main gimmick is interesting but also not one I’d like to see employed much.  The reward gimmick based off of it is less bothersome and kind of cool, if, typically, unfair.

Rank the Mods (1-10 FQ, fun quotient):

SoB00 New Beginnings – (7)  Cute spin.

SoB01  Undefended Border – (4)  Stuff going on that went over my head, too early.

SoB02  Bonds of Fate – (3)  Not much going on, IME.

SoB03  Standing Against the Waves – (3)  What’s the story?

SoB04  Personal Sacrifice – (7)  Could use more development, PC defining.

SoB05  Poisoned Gift – (1)  Cool ideas, terrible plot, ridiculous rewards.

SoB06  Walk Through the Mountains – (8)  I was much more into this than SoB03.

SoB07  Delicate Negotiations – (9)  Biased cuz my PC was perfect for it?  Felt shafted on rewards.

SoB08  WC: Kyuden Hida – (6)  Would have done more with my other PC.

SoB09  Fire and Water – (7)  Could have done Fire and felt screwed in the end.

Okay, so that’s from a FQ perspective and that’s only factoring in the actual play, not the aftermath that is rewards.  Factoring in a more objective measure of quality of mod, trying to take personal experiences out of it, the rankings of the mods in my mind are more like:

1.  SoB07 – Lots to do, aka depth, personal achievements matter and don’t screw over others.
2.  SoB06 – Things to do before plot, resolution interesting.
3.  SoB08 – Decent number of things going on without being bogged down.
4.  SoB00 – Better intro than Topaz Championship (fewer die rolls), decent narrative.
5.  SoB09 – Linear, which a number of mods have a problem with, but flavorful.
6.  SoB04 – Heavy on the exposition, light on things to do.
7.  SoB01 – Too much wandering about without a sense of what to do.
8.  SoB03 – Maybe there’s more to the story, felt like excuses for combat.
9.  SoB02 – Missing a scene or better connectivity between scenes.
10. SoB05 – Waste of some interesting mechanics.  Is there more than one way to proceed?

In general, the earlier mods suffer from lack of depth either in story or in choices.  Later mods feel fuller, more coherent.  Undefended Border would probably be given more credit if it came later, when it made more sense to introduce “new” things.  Alternatively, if there was follow up to it, to where what happens mattered more.  I really want the sequel(s) to Personal Sacrifice since its reward/punishment mechanic clearly needs a follow up.

It’s good to see some different faces for our Sunday V:TES sessions.  My new Pander deck is the sort of hilarious, “here’s a bunch of cards in five disciplines” deck that is so much more interesting to play than focused decks.  I so need more of these.  Maybe I build a counterpoint deck that is the other five common disciplines.  What I just said might not make any sense.  The Pander deck is an Aus/Obf/Pot/Pre/Tha deck.  Not intentionally, just because it’s what the crypt encouraged.  If I build a deck specifically of Ani/Cel/Dom/For/Pro, I have a challenge and a wacky deck … um, except Stanislava is the only vampire that natively has all of those disciplines, with Forestal in support.  That doesn’t sound wacky or hugely challenging.  Maybe I just don’t run either one.  I could take out the “crutch”, but that leads to boring Gangrel/! crypts.  Taking out Protean is funny for Cardano and Kostantin.  Taking out Animalism has some interesting choices.

As for Off Kilter, only thing I got that would be different is vote, in particular Patsy deck to try to wreck annoying titled decks, except those are the decks that can stop your votes.

Bonus boardgaming section:

I’ve gone to some boardgame days recently.  I played a couple of games of Phoenicia (and watched one before playing which helped immensely).  I liked it.  Not great but something I’d do again for a few more times.  Quick, light, auctions weren’t painful.  It was a day of nothing but auction games for me, though, with a six-player of Scepter of Zavandor.  First six-player game I can recall, though I think I’ve played five once or twice.  Fortunately, only one new player, so things weren’t crazy long.  My strategy of focusing on production with sapphires and buying up production artifacts worked well … for someone else.  I came in third or fourth in what was a reasonably close game.  With players who know how to value artifacts better, the game is much harder to dominate.  Anyway, a reasonable day.

Yesterday, played Alea Iacta Est for the second? time.  We totally didn’t remember how it was supposed to work so we played a practice round first.  I finally remembered what it was like and went through the same feelings as the first time – it seems like sets end too quickly but it makes sense when you play the game out.  Frustrating in some ways because I find the dice mechanic neat and the game is much more tactical than strategic in how you use dice.  Me being a strategist and not so much a tactician.  Another game I’d want to play again, though I’m more interested in how to use the dice mechanic for something cooler.

Then, played Glen More for the first time.  I’m not a big fan of Carcassonne.  It’s okay if uninspiring out of the base game and I’m not too familiar with the expansions.  I hate Caylus.  Didn’t used to.  But, it’s mechanics are not ones to endear me to repeated play.  Glen More has elements of both.  Yet, I’d easily play it again, maybe a few more times.  I like the flavor, for one thing.  That I haven’t figured out the winning strategy is another plus.  I had the most whiskey, the most chieftains, the castle that rewards for villages to counteract my massive territory, and came squarely in last.  I knew a big territory was bad, but I didn’t realize that what VPs I got from my advantages wouldn’t pay off at all.  My theory is that brown tiles are where it’s at and the game is about cashing them as much as possible.  I only had one in my 17 tile empire and I didn’t even max it out.  I find the “bigger territory = less VPs” mechanic highly amusing and innovative.  Do I think it will hold up after about 5 or so plays?  Probably not.  Even with the randomness of tile sequences, the game seems simple enough to solve in terms of optimal strategies.  I’m not a huge fan of games that require spatial planning, since I overthink things, but this has few enough tiles that I don’t see a big paralysis by analysis problem.  Kind of a lighter way to go then Caylus, with more style.

DunDraCon 2011

Surprisingly easy to get to the con given all of the rain Friday.

Friday

Get in early enough to do something by 7PM, consider trying to do the L5R LARP that was happening at 8PM, but the organization left something to be desired and I lost interest while waiting.  Saw someone I didn’t expect to see (moved) and talked for a while and we settled into some three/four-player Dominion.

Ah, Dominion.  I was reminded, as I am pretty much every time I play, why I’m not fond of the game.  That we used random card draw with at least the base set and Prosperity seemed odd to me given how often cards just don’t work together to provide interesting or effective strategies, theoretically exacerbating the problem of there only being limited strategies to a game.  But, upon further thought, I’m not sure that’s quite the case.  I just think the game is fundamentally flawed by having a narrow, i.e. 1 or 2, optimal strategies within any given game.  While this may appeal to people with an interest in efficiency, my interest in efficiency isn’t in the doing but in the knowing.  In fact, the doing of clear effectiveness bores the hell out of me.  Maybe somebody would like to argue that the value in the game is that it’s quickly over and you can move on to the next one.  Hmm, that would be the argument people use for why Magic is better than other (more fun) CCGs.  Still doesn’t work – there’s no point in playing a game that’s usually unfun when there are plenty of others that are.

We, then, played seven-player 7 Wonders.  It was okay.  I think it has, at least with so many players, a problematic mechanic with regards to player interaction.  It’s not quite that there’s none across table, just that you have to really know what’s what to impact the game over yonder.  We so didn’t have that what’s what knowledge.  Being cognizant of how to draft games in a general sense and picking up games quickly (while often losing interest quickly), I can now lord over lesser beings with my undefeated 7 Wonders record.  I didn’t have too much trouble completing the Great Pyramids and got a last epoch boost in military to crush my neighbors for an eleven point boost, giving me the only 50+ point score.  Would I play it again?  I’d only say probably not just to keep my silly record intact, it’s actually … okay … inoffensive.  I just can’t say I’d care one way or the other.

Find out I didn’t get into a Saturday morning game, begin to think this DDC will be as awful as the last two were.

Saturday

Ah, not just a gamer anymore, an old gamer.  While gaming has decreased (at local cons), sleeping has increased.  No morning game = little morning left after getting out of bed.  Leisurely lunch over at the shopping center, continue creating characters for my Sunday night game, unable to get a V:TES game together, finally my 4PM game arrives.

Marvel Universe using BASH system.  Have about 50 Marvel supers to choose from (no cosmic powered or villains).  I can’t think of anything specific at first.  Yes, I have favorites expressed in my former buying habits, but I was trying to think of something different.  Not particularly wanting to go the mutant route and thinking more in the Avengers vein, I finally thought of Vision … One of the themes of the con for me was being chill.  When the GM read off names, I was almost tempted by Moon Knight, though I found out later that it was the crazy MK, so I was fine with not having to think that hard.

So, Vision, The Hulk, Captain America, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Shadow Cat & Lockheed, and Spiderman team up to defend part of New York from a giant Hydra robot.  As expected, Vision and Lockheed team up for the kill and The Hulk throws it out of harm’s way.  Other stuff happens, but really, does any of the minor characters’ exploits really matter?  Uatu shows up to speak aloud in our presence of the danger of Kang going 70 million years into the past to find a cosmic cube and to randomly create a portal to Doctor Doom’s castle where a timeship may or may not be.  Once there, The Hulk starts drawing fire, Shadowcat goes to find the defense system controls, Vision also runs some “shoot me ineffectually” forward positioning, Doombots show up, and eventually the timeship is secured.  With Spiderman at the controls, dinosaur time.  Wolverine squares off with t-rex, stampede comes through, Hulk smashes stampede, stampede smashes injured t-rex, we resume mission.  Hulk leaps on Kang’s ship, Nightcrawler bamfs us in, Shadowcat, Lockheed, Vision phase.  As expected, Lockheed and Vision bombard Kang’s forcefield with hotness, which eventually drops to the three-bladed Nightcrawler.  Shadowcat claims the cosmic cube.

To the future … with Kang!?!  We try to find his honey and he stops messing with our centuries.  Uatu gives him coordinates, he leaves, and the world changes.  We not so smart.  Uatu is not himself, nor Thanos, nor a bunch of other supervillains that may come to mind, but Apocalypse.  Nightcrawler bamfs a speeding semi into Apocalypse, mutants unconsciousify Apocalypse momentarily, but he recovers to full strength, so The Hulk jumps him and gets casually flung aside, leaving Captain America to go all steroid freak on Apocalypse and make him not so living.  Dr. Strange is found to restore our reality.

On the one hand, having a bunch of superhero nerds note nerdy things is interesting, on the other, it gets distracting.  The game was basically a series of combats.  In and of itself, that’s reasonable for a superhero game, but things dragged.  The Doom castle stuff was especially slow as none of the weapons had any effect on The Hulk or me.

Oh well, it was the first scheduled RPG I got into at DDC in three years.

Sunday

Old people sleep.  Nice leisurely lunch at the shopping center, followed by reading the adventure I was running, followed by, wait for it, a pick-up game of V:TES!  Once upon a time, you could play all con, all night.  One DDC, we had a 17-player game, while the finals were going on.  These days, it takes incredible effort just to get people who don’t play anymore to fill out a four-player table for a single game over a four-day convention.  No one got ousted.

My game was full but in a weird place.  It turned out to be a pretty good room for us.  I had two extra players (8 total), so the extra space was nice.  What was I running?  The intro mod to HoR3, New Beginnings.  I had two players deeply into it playing twin Bayushi brothers.  They did an amazing job acting out the scene of Akodo meeting Ikoma.  Things went longer than I wanted and I was losing coherency six hours in, but I didn’t feel as badly as I usually do after running a RPG afterwards.

Monday

I slept through my alarm.  That happens, on average, about once a year.  I woke up a bit after 7AM (going to bed around 2AM, not falling asleep much in between – bah, only old people need sleep).  Got ready to go down to confirm that I was in an 8AM game.  Checked the sheets.  Didn’t see my name.  Checked the program, had an interesting realization.  Checked the sheets again.  Found my name, for my 10AM game.  I had a crummy parking spot anyway and Monday was not going to see a full parking lot and I don’t really like any of the food around the hotel, so I drove over to another shopping center and got a sandwich at Nob Hill.  Drove back, packed, took my stuff to the car, waited in the game room until other people arrived. Yup, the usual things you do before your game begins on the last day of a four-day con.

L5R – but not HoR.  This con was ridiculous for L5R when you consider how D&D and Call of Cthulhu prevalent it typically is.  The LARP, a L5R related game at the same time as the LARP, my game, this game.  Though, this game was billed as having Call of Cthulhu elements, so there you go.

I decided to play the Miya character.  I think we were all rank 2.  We had a Shiba bushi, Isawa Earth shugenja, Soshi shugenja, and Kakita bushi.  We were on our way to a matchmaking event.  In my case, I was the official herald for the event with a personal interest in improving the prospects of my three daughters.  I got the assistance of one of the matchmakers as things were progressing adequately until the Shiba started in about “terrible slaughter”.  An agent of the Lying Darkness was shapeshifting and we confronted it, had a nice dinner, then confronted it and its fellow Lord Moon Lobby in a cave.  Did we survive?  Don’t know.  In the end, four of us were trying to scramble away from a shadow beast coming through a gate while the Soshi shugenja cast a spell to send a message for help.  So, whether Hiromi, Kasumi, and Miwa gained husbands or lost a father is a page left unwritten.

… 2011

So, following up from the look back at 2010, might as well throw out some thoughts on 2011.

Predictions

I don’t foresee major changes.  Boring?  Sure.  I’m sure something inconvenient will happen, like computer issues or a shake up in what sort of gaming I end up doing or having convention plans not work out quite right for Gen Con or, if I’m feeling frisky, Origins.

I don’t foresee picking up any major new game.  … boring.

Need to predict something.

V:TES will see a continued emphasis on storyline play, meaning something this year.  No new set in 2011.  A continued problem with coherent conversation on the game.  The lack of material compensation should see fewer out of country participants in the NAC, so it’s likely a NorAmer will win.  Columbus group should do well, even ignoring that it’s in their backyard, but we might see another Canadian coup.

L5R 4e will put out broken schools/paths.  One CCG that isn’t Magic, Pokemon, or Yu-Gi-Oh! will hold people’s attention briefly.  Self published RPGs will continue to take marketshare from established companies and the e-ification of RPGs will grow to the levels that they should have already.  Boardgames (and non-collectible card games) will continue to be where the hobby gaming money is.  The expandability concept built into many recent games will continue towards becoming the standard, just as Hollywood loves its franchises.  On average, EuroGame complexity will rise (falling when the boardgame bubble bursts next year).  Online gaming, of course, has an impact on tabletop, but I think most of the damage has already been done.

Concerns

I am concerned with the smooth sailing of HoR.  Even if I don’t have any troubles getting mods in and the campaign doesn’t have a major problem in 2011, I imagine that an increase in players will put stress on how things are currently done.  Also in the realm of HoR, my plan to run mods at local cons may not work to get more players or even work so well as one-shots.

While my planning for major cons is superb, I can’t control everything in ways that are rather important, so there’s always the concern of keeping the cost of Gen Con under control.

I don’t know that Origins or Gen Con will fare all that well, which might not be a big deal this year but may be a problem for next.  Both appear to be struggling mightily, possibly due to online gaming’s hold on the mainstream.  I expect ConQuest will have its last year near my house, possibly its last year.

Hopes

I hope that the local cons are better experiences than in recent years.  But, I might as well keep expectations low so that I’ll be pleasantly surprised rather than disappointed.

I hope that V:TES’s management doesn’t try too hard and end up making some decision that reduces the fun of playing the game.  I hope that some site replaces the newsgroup and much of the fragmented discussion on various forums as a central place for discussion of the game.  I hope that players stick with the game and don’t try to come up with house rules.

I hope to find some new product that is inspiring.  Unfortunately, I think the ship has sailed on a two-player CCG being that product.

I hope to find the magic mix of time and money to make it to more interesting events.  And, for those that I do attend, I hope that they work out a bit better than the last couple of years.

Hope to correct any of my mistaken theories on how games, the industry, or whatever works.

Plans

My intention is to continue to try to find a mechanism for generating decks that amuse me to play and to eschew reactionary concepts.  I might have to break down and play some of my tournament concepts in casual play, though, if I manage to get to Origins, that won’t be necessary.

My intention is to tighten up my RPG schedule, as I hope to be busy enough with other things that I need to manage things more wisely.  Hopefully, Conan will be more consistent.  Hopefully, I’ll figure out what to do, if anything, with Solomon Kane.

My intention is to get some of my fictions done that I’ve intended for ages.  I can hope to get some non-gaming writing done, but that’s asking a lot.

Look to finish off one of my blog series and expand on the Card of the Weak series.

Look to put away all of these loose piles of cards, even if it only lasts briefly.  Will need to switch to bigger boxes, though, as I can’t even fit Serpentis in its box.

Try to be even more chill on public forums and avoid using this podium to unfairly criticize.

Is 2011 the year to consolidate lessons of the past and move forward more wisely?  Or, will it be surprising?  Or, will it be much the same?

2010 …

It actually didn’t occur to me until a few hours ago to take a look back at the year.  It’s still a few hours until 2011 here, so here I go with my look back on my 2010 gamingwise.  No top 10 lists, no deep thoughts on theory or strategy or astrology, no particular cleverness at all – just some things to ramble about.

Biggest Story

I watch a lot of ESPN/ESPN News, and they had a poll of the top story for 2010.  LeBron’s decision led.  I understand that; it was the story that had the most that could be talked about and was really intended to be a media frenzy thing.  It wasn’t the most important story, but it was the biggest.

Heroes of Rokugan.  I got invested in 2009, but I was involved in 2010.  I did most of my fictions, played in the final events, scrambled to try to get all the mods in, planned things out, and completed my (main two) characters’ stories.  HoR3 hasn’t been that big of a thing, yet, I still don’t know what I want to do with characters, but I’m still looking back at HoR2 both for the stories and because of my running it for others.

Most Notable Event

V:TES going out of production.  While I actually don’t care a lot that there’s no cards expected any time soon, which is a complete reversal of my views on CCGs I played in yesteryears, it’s akin to Tiger Woods (the most important sports story of 2010) in that what it precisely means is unknown, yet is disturbing in its implications.

It’s not just about V:TES, which, really, has already had a period in which it looked like production was over.  It’s also a general sign of the decline of CCGs.  Where have all of the niche CCGs gone?  Oh, not being plugged into the CCG market like I once was, I’m sure there are ones doing okay out there.  Just had a conversation with a store owner where L5R seems to be hanging on.  The market isn’t likely to die as enough CCGs have gone mainstream and (even more ludicrous) Yu-Gi-Oh! episodes keep getting shown in the US.  But, I don’t see any effort to publish new ones.

As for the major release of 2010 – Heirs to the Blood – I have such mixed feelings.  On the one hand, the starter thing was painful.  On the other, the set overall was quite pleasing.

I must rant about Visionquest, however.  There are plenty of horrible cards in V:TES, astronomical numbers in all of CCGdom, so why single out this, rather harmless, card?  I get offended by certain cards because they are such a mindboggling failure of design and/or development.  There’s no rational reason for how bad Visionquest is.  Sanguine Instruction isn’t technically, strictly better, it’s just “strictly” better, which is absurd when you consider how bad a card Sanguine Instruction is.  When SI was first published or maybe when we were playtesting the set, I don’t recall, I couldn’t understand why it was only a 1 stealth action.  That Visionquest does far less *and* has a drawback suggests to me a few possibilities.  One is, of course, that maybe nobody read the card, something I highly doubt if it was provided to playtesters since even niche playtesting sees a high enough level of scrutiny that how bad it is would have been caught.  My preferred theory, at the moment, is to think that the card was stronger in playtesting and got nerfed after the playtesters were done, something that happens quite often in my experience.  I don’t prefer this because I think it’s the most likely scenario, I prefer it because playtesters often get blamed for things that aren’t their fault.  There’s always the niche CCG playtesting problem of not having enough time to worry about underpowered cards, but that would still mean that people found it acceptable as it is currently written, which would be discouraging.

Conventions

Gen Con was a major mixed bag for me.  The lack of comrades on the trip had a huge impact both monetarily and in terms of enjoying my downtime.  DunDraCon was awful, as it has been for years.  KublaCon was okay.  ConQuest was virtually nonexistent.  I had more fun going to the Vegas Qualifier and the LA Storyline events, events where I didn’t game a whole lot, than I did most of the local cons.  Hell, I tend to get more enjoyment out of a casual gaming day than most of the local cons.

The question is whether this is the cons’ faults, my fault, or both.  I certainly don’t make much of an effort, anymore, at local cons.  The first ConQuest near my house I rather enjoyed as I played a few scheduled events, and that was only a couple of years ago.  On the other hand, a reason I don’t make much of an effort is that the cons don’t really offer much that enthralls me.  I’d rather play HoR online than virtually any of the RPG offerings at local cons.  A lot of that is due to a “been there, done that” view of things.  CCGs are all but dead at cons.  Boardgames …

Here’s the thing about local cons – they no longer provide something I can’t get elsewhere.  I can play boardgames probably like 5 times a week if I wanted.  Right this second, I’m not playing as many RPGs as I’d like, but I could be playing more, and I’m GMing my limit.  And, with CCGs being a nonfactor at cons, RPGs are the only things left.  Where are the special events?  Where’s the diversity?  Oh, right, have to go to Gen Con to find those.

Order or Chaos

I actually have very little consistency in my gaming schedule.  The only consistent thing these days is my running HoR2.  In general, though, the average amount of gaming seems fairly normal.  Maybe V:TES playdays pick up and Pleasanton slows down or South Bay RPGing picks up when HoR slows down or whatever.  No doubt, the amount of time spent gets fairly consistent due to filling up my free time with the sort of things I enjoy doing.  If I were busier, I don’t think I could continue running HoR2, for instance.  Should be interesting to see what happens in January.

Grade

What’s the grade for 2010?

I see discouraging things in the RPG industry and I’ve mentioned many times my views on the decline of CCGs.  I find a lot of boardgames popular with others rather tedious; those I don’t, I tire of reasonably quickly since boardgames are so inferior to CCGs in variety.  Campaigns have been inconsistent.  We have far too few V:TES tournaments.  I haven’t gotten terribly inspired by something new.

On the other hand, gaming leads to meeting new people and doing some different things (hadn’t driven to SoCal in ages) and gives me far more things to think about than I ever write about in this blog.

C?  C-?

2010, still

I should have time tomorrow to write about 2011 – what I predict, what I hope for, or whatever comes to mind.  Still thinking about 2010, is there anything I really would have changed?  I would have, of course, preordered HttB starters like I did for every set prior that WW published, but that’s not really what I mean by the question.  Should I have made more effort, whether it was with cons or getting people to play things I wanted or whatever?  Should I have tried more new things (or just more things in general)?

I give this year a mediocre to poor grade for gaming, but one thing that has struck me quite a bit in recent years is the idea that gaming should just be fun.  At the point where it is more of a chore or a downer or whatever, it’s kind of failing.  Now, gaming to me is more than just actually playing games, so I enjoy things that others can’t comprehend, like horrible RPG sessions and terribly designed boardgames that nevertheless have strategic options that are up for analysis.  I don’t have the mentality that some do that every session/experience should be enjoyable, but I see 2010 as being more of a year of just letting things happen rather than being as driven.

And, somehow, I taught people Ultimate Combat!