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.

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?

Gen Con Postview

Logistics were fine, so moving on to gaming.

Thursday

So, start in on my six slots of Heroes of Rokugan – 3 premier mods, finale, open, and …?  Five year campaign coming to an end, I missed only about 10 of the nearly 75 mods.

I planned things out to some degree, using those business planner skills and all.  First up was March Unto Death.  While starting with a potentially dangerous mod might not seem like easing into HoR at the con, it was a low rank mod, so I was playing an alternative character.

Very dangerous.  But, before getting to that, the setup was that Akodo Gintaku, The Steel Lion, shows up with his Lion army that he had been using to destroy the Unicorn and Dragon in his attempt to claim the throne.  He says that he will put off claims on the throne until the Shadowlands army that overran Crab lands is dealt with, so with 2000 Tattooed Folks and others hanging in the village, we set off.  Along the way, everyone expects to die, so there’s lots of hooking up as well as various diversions.  Playing my Tattooed Actor, I perform the role of a famous empress in a noh play, making a bud of Hida Buso.  Usagi Hachi, noted Hare lecher, sitting next to me, beats Buso and the Hitomi daimyo in wrestling to also BFUD (best friends unto death) Buso.  Togatsu, ronin, snuggled with Hitomi Choju.  I went to find a go opponent in some gambling house and ended up tenting up with Matsu Michiko.  This stuff is actually important.

We get to the battle site.  We split up into the fighty types going into the reserves, while we wusses go into the rear.  Reserves fight some stuff, then cut scene.  Gintaku sacrifices his kid, pulls the Sun/Jade Dragon out of the sky, then kills it, getting its power.  Now, we run.

What follows is a series of skirmishes with ogres and goblins.  My actor may be a goofy concept full of sheer awesome humor, but I did take all combat related tattoos, so I Hurricane, effectively nerfing the enemy as long as I’m around.  By the way, Hurricane will come up prominently later.  The reserves had to take 3 rounds to catch up with us.  The other thing that keeps us doing okay is that all of those BFUDs that the mod has you make earlier show up now to nuke themselves on the enemy, a reasonably clever concept.  Most of us make the running roll to get away, but those that don’t are kinda screwed.  Bad resource management on the part of the Kitsune shugenja, who wasted way too many spells blasting ogres early on, as well as some non-use of Honor Rolls or whatever means that the Kitsune and the Kakita Jester(!!) are kind of screwed.  Another mechanic in the mod is that people can sacrifice themselves for some mechanical benefit to others, so the Jester holds off the Shadowlands forces while the rest of us get to the last boat.

My recollection may not be right, but I believe that in all of the HoR tables I’ve played at, using one of the most deadly *popular* systems, the only time any PC ever died was by self-sacrifice.  Grave of Heroes, aka Hero Gravy?  One dude stayed with the twins.  Essence of Toshigoku, aka Toshi-screw-you?  Boring, except for the discussion of what to do after I give my first alt as a hostage.  Battle Interactive (the first)?  Those Slayer Knives kind of hurt, but why didn’t I get to make a roll against the ninja poison when I have Jurojin’s Blessing?  Oh, because they are rank 5 (something my main never made it to).  Doom of the Crab?  I’ll try to knock down the Dark Moto that I can’t actually deal any damage to … oh well … hey, water tensai, why are you healing me?

Up next, is Hellas.  Greek mythology space opera.  I played a Zintar, tentacled head creature that uses artificial bodies (carapaces) to help do stuff out of water and whatever.  The Greek connection is that the carapace pictured is centauresque.  Our leader was a colony of insects, in Greek god/hero form, of course.  We are sent to negotiate back some loot that some prince has gotten from a planet.  We do stuff, find the location of the “kill everything organic on the planet” weapon/temple, self destruct it, end a space war/feud.  Simple resolution system.  Glory level determines what godly powers you have, so when I went over 60, I could start making helper machina (robots) – I was the engineer.  One detail that was cute was that I got illusioned by some magi as I was trying to hack the station’s cameras to show the betrayal of the mercs working for the prince, so I jury rig my carapace to give me electroshock, er, stim treatment to pierce the illusion.  The Glory mechanic is not quite the same as, say, Insight in L5R (or Glory for that matter), so it’s kind of interesting.  I like how one’s name enables the character to one time auto-succeed based on the character’s epithet.  I’m not as excited by descriptive RPGs – Dogs of the Vineyard, for example – as I once was as there’s no baseline to show how special your character is in comparison to, but a little bit of “I just do stuff because I surpass the rules” may be good.

Back to HoR.  I debated playing my main in Fate of the Assassin as I didn’t care so much about XP as Honor and I heard that Honor wasn’t in the printed out .pdf.  I played my main, anyway, to ease into the morning’s Celestial Journey, the high rank mod I had to play to be able to play my main in the finale.  People couldn’t shut up about Celestial, so I was getting way too many spoilers.  Anyway, Fate was kind of blah.  A lot of man vs. nature, which I’ve gotten tired of after playing Shadowlands mods recently.  Then, the ending made little sense.  Yeah, the true Lion Clan Champion is alive, but why is Kagekaze, the assassin badass, here?  We convince him his life is meaningless and he whacks himself, which is the more likely outcome, apparently, but the mod is pretty uninteresting.  Even though I’m helping my Champion and my greatest Honor loss ever for was not helping my Clan, somehow, there’s no way to get Honor in the mod (for someone with my rank of Honor).

Friday

Celestial Journey.  Go find the Obsidian Dragon who has gone nuts from the Sun dying in March.  Go to heaven to convince the Celestial Dragon that humanity can get the new Jade Dragon’s egg to hatch.  Along the way, find all of the PCs lost in other spiritual realms in prior mods.  So, my first alt is back.  I think I’m the only person in the campaign who had three “get into the finale” cards, one for Zetsu from March, one for Ryota from Celestial, one for Jun from playing Celestial.  The main thing about Celestial was that it was meant to rebalance the campaign for the finale.  All of the cheesy, broken stuff that characters could acquire (excluding very special stuff that people could acquire) was written into the mod to get excised.  So, you sacrifice part of yourself to the egg, and the GM lists like 40 things that you remove from your character sheet.  If you have none of them, in other words, if you aren’t a power gamer, you permanently lose the ability to spend one of your Void Points.  Then, you choose body or spirit.  Depending upon which you choose, you lose stuff off another list of 30 or so things (each) or a Void Point (but can’t lose two).  I could have lost stuff on the spirit side, more so if I had more of my certs signed – I only had two of six.  I only ended up down a VP.  Hoshi would have probably been slammed, but then, he would have never been in this high rank mod.

The main things that were nailed were things like tattoos, Hurricane at the top of the list, strong combat ones second and third.  Crane, which *just* enables you to not die once per session, wasn’t considered problematic enough.  Great Destiny, Great Potential, blah, blah, blah.  Dark Fates could be lost, too, like in Jun’s buddy Seppun (nee Soshi) Soko’s case, where he almost turned on the party, but he was too weak of a villain to be a party killing villain.

The one mod I cared about getting in before the end was Loyalty, the finale to the Code of Bushido series, where I hoped to get the better Nishari cert … and hoped to get my Honor back to 5.  Celestial left it at 4.9.  Jun had so many things trigger off of Honor, that just being at 4 was sad.  Not that he or anyone deserved to be at 5, but since other players easily got to 5, it annoyed me not to be.  We mostly broke Loyalty because certain spells in the game are horribly broken.  I got my pip of Honor to get to 5, I got my cert.  I wasn’t going to screw things up and play Jun again before the finale, so I started thinking about playing in the political event Saturday morning.

Unwind time.  I played Fortune’s Fool, a Renaissance, Tarot resolution, fantasy RPG with stuff I’ve grown to hate – elves, dwarves, goblins, etc.  In this case, however, I was cool with it.  I played Grillo, a goblin muslim nobleman from the Ottoman Empire who was Gepetto’s bud and Pinocchio’s tutor.  We were awfully violent chasing after Pinocchio having gone bad because the dibbuk animating him had woken up on his 7th birthday.  I eventually killed the annoying halfling thug that we kept running into.  Did I mention that I was a skilled fencer?  The game had a lot of numbers on the sheet, similar to how The Zero Movement, another Tarot resolution game, was way too mathematical, but here, the game wasn’t trying for great symbology.  The mechanics were actually rather CCGesque.  The deck manipulation abilities characters get are insane.  My best was being able to look at the top three cards of the deck and discarding one.  Another guy could shuffle back in all cards with a value equal to or less than what he named.  Another could summon The Fool, which was important for nuking The Tower, the screwjob card for the players, though The Fool did other stuff.  The GM isn’t supposed to ever draw, so the GM can go search for cards and stuff while not changing the order of the deck.  Players draw both for their actions and for the NPC actions against them.  Anyway, playing Grillo was amusing.  The picture of him was too sweet not to come up with some sort of ridiculous accent.

Saturday

I had sound reasoning for giving up on playing a mod I missed and playing the political event instead.  For one thing, I wasn’t going to play my main.  If I played Zetsu, then I play him anyway in the political event, because Tattooed Folks are natural politicos.  I didn’t think forming a table of a mod I needed was that likely so late in the campaign.  I was kind of bored because I went to the con by myself and only talked to people around my games, and the political event was likely to have more interesting mechanics.

I was just along for the ride, but my table was annoying.  One person was way too bitchy.  Others were way too unclever.  We succeeded at getting the Dragon on our side but failed to convince the Emerald Champion.  Another table took care of that.  One of our nobodies (tables were often balanced between mains and people just along for the ride), killed herself to try to get his attention, but she wasn’t important enough.  I’m sure two others could have used that trick, two others maybe could have.  The event finished with some LARP stuff that saw a few characters get cut down for speaking the wrong things.  Quite a bloody affair, as various tables had players off themselves to get their jobs done, too.

To The Last Breath.  Gintaku needs to die, so we throw our tiny army against his two big ones.  The wedge is designed to just get as many heroes to him to cut off the head.  Each table can send one character on.  If you die, you can bless someone else.  If the table dies, they can bless another table.  There were about 16 tables.  They were forming at least 8 per table, yet my table was 6.

There were various factors that made it hard to figure out whether our table should have been wiped.  The goal of the event was to kill 75%-90% of the PCs because that’s how samurai stories end.  My table was short, which I didn’t know whether was bad or whether the GM was adjusting for.  We had a really good character setup, unfortunately, we had a flawed player setup as I sat next to a basketcase.  I don’t mean gamer basketcase – weirdo, gun happy, etc.  I mean someone who kept crying.  I don’t think she’s functional without one of her friends, who happened to be at another table.  I don’t know if the GM adjusted for this.

One would think that he must have as we all survived.  See above for my good luck charm power on RPG tables.  Actually, when I started recounting my tales of Gen Con, one of my fellow V:TES players pointed out that it was just like playing V:TES with me – nobody dies (except maybe by sacrifice). 

I had little impact in the first battle against Akodo and Matsu bushi, who mainly went after the rank 6 Hida.  I killed a couple of samurai with my first attacks when I was calling raises for extra attacks, foreshadowing?  The second battle was against 4 oni.  I was crippled going in, btw.  Two ugulu, known for invulnerability.  A rhinocerous oni, which seemed scary.  A headless oni that actually had a specific name.  The Hida did some damage to the rhino.  Rolling 4k3, I did 63 damage to the rhino killing it.  I got healed up some.  The headless grappled the Hida, effectively eliminating him from combat.  Had to die.  I did 124 damage to it.  War fan 2, oni 0.  The two ugulu went full attack on me.  Our Scorpion Tsuruchi Magistrate wondered why, and the GM’s reply was, “Did you just see what he did?”  I stupidly didn’t spend a Void to increase my TN, so the first one outed me, which at least meant being alive.  With various environmental effects – arrows, exploding winged demons from nearby tables – I went down to 1 wound box.  I got healed enough that I killed one of the ugulu, another 95 damage.  Then, I was pretty much spent.  So, I did 282 damage in three attacks when 57 would kill my character – yeah, 3e L5R is a bit sick.  Let’s see what 4e is like.

Third battle is mostly fought by our water shugenja (rank 5), the Hida who has taken around 170 wounds and is spending Void to not die and keep fighting, and our earth shugenja.  Fortunately, the water shugenja casts a broken spell, Suitengu’s Embrace to drown four of the Lion samurai including their shugenja.  The GM makes a call that he has to concentrate to continuously drown his targets unlike how the spell reads where you basically permanently continuously refill the targets lungs with water as a fire and forget spell.  We are the last table to finish, but we win.  We send the water shugenja to the final table with a rolloff.

The final table is amusing where Gintaku has godlike powers where he just acts whenever, kills when he wants, and resists … well.  Some of the more notable players in the campaign – Eric Menge with Kuni Fumio, Hida Tango, Todd Stiles with his Akodo War College character, Ethan with his “if you kill me, you die [unless you are a god]” certed Crane, etc. – get off some good lines and amusing actions.  Todd’s “do it twice” lines were awesome – Akodo War College rank 5 gives other characters additional actions.  Fumio blew up the bloodsword Ambition but had his crystal eye explode from the magical feedback.  Hida Tango lived (of course).  The Kakita Artisan (really?!?) even chopped off Gintaku’s arms.

The last day, including those who played the event on Wednesday who GMed Saturday, failed to kill its quota.  I think only about 66%-75% of the PCs were killed.  Before the final table, they played solemn music and named every character killed.  It went on for a while …  I was happy to contribute with my sort of bard, former Emerald Magistrate (one of two in the campaign), apparently “one shot anything I can hurt” oni slayer.

I wasn’t a diehard for the campaign, but, really, it was awesome.  Five years of storylines, so many characters doing cool things.

My GM for my night game is in the hospital, so instead of Feng Shui, I play CSI style Hero.  Actually, the system was meaningless as I only ever made three rolls, two Perception, and one Intelligence of my own choice to decide what to do.  It ended up being CSI meets the X-Men.  It was okay, but anticlimactic.

Sunday

I had scheduled a noon game with my morning for rest and dealer’s room.  I do that and my noon game has no one show up, so I go back to the dealer’s room bored and find someone I stalk so that I have something to do until the con ends.  I finally give up and leave before 4PM to go back to my hotel and chill.

In the end, things worked really well gamingwise, even if I did lose out on Feng Shui and a Green Lantern game.  I don’t know if I want to do six slots of anything ever again, but every five years might be okay.  No V:TES.  I couldn’t even find White Wolf’s booth, I’m not sure they had one even though it was in the book.  I bought virtually nothing, mainly dice!!!  I’m normally disdainful of people who buy dice when they have enough already, but these were astrological dice, so I make exceptions.  I only bought a single RPG supplement for $5.  I demoed nothing (not counting RPGs I preregged for) except a Are You A Werewolf? type card game that I just thought was unnecessary.

Probably some other things I want to mention, but I have to run … gaming is a harsh mistress.

Gen Con 2009

From a gaming standpoint, Gen Con this year will likely blend into all of the other hazy memories I have of Gen Cons past.  From a nongaming standpoint, being ill throughout the convention was an unfortunate challenge.

Well, this is a blog about gaming, especially about analyzing gaming, so let’s get into zee gaming.

Thursday

Bam!  First slot, right into Heroes of Rokugan.  Unable to get a pickup game in Wednesday night, I needed this slot and the Friday afternoon slot to get my 8 XP to rank up my backup character for the special event, Doom of the Crab.  Running through my printout of an Excel mod tracker (like lots of experienced HoRers have), we settled on Harsh Lessons.  I met one of the players I play a lot of online mods with and another player I’ve played once or so with who also GMed for us.  Another player was someone who actually remembered Ryota’s notable falling off a mountain episode.  Harsh Lessons was exceptional.  I wish more mods were like it rather than the tragedy or intrigue that suffuses the campaign.  It also gave my backup character a new goal, which I thought wasn’t likely to matter since I figured he’d die in Doom.  At one point, it wasn’t clear whether we were supposed to cross some water only later to find out that there was no way and that the place on the other side was the world’s version of Hell.  Since my Phoenix trained at a Dragon bushi school is as good at sailing as anything else, I now totally see retiring to become a Charon like character who facilitates travel of PCs between spirit realms.  There was also a Dragon (shugenja) character in the mod who is meant to provoke a duel with a Phoenix PC.  Besides notable for being my first duel whenever the obligation to duel to the death gets resolved, it was terribly ironic given that my Phoenix isn’t a shugenja, the expectation, and is Dragon trained and ended up becoming a guest instructor at a Dragon dojo.

Next up was Oz: Dark and Terrible.  Game is still being worked on, but they already have t-shirts.  I have the lion and the scarecrow ones.  I plan on talking to the designer as there are some things I think they need to work a lot more on.  One problem is the marketing plan.  What we played – woman having her head popped off, scarecrow snapping the neck of a PC – is not going to fly with the family market.  That may or may not be solvable.  The mature art, though, I can’t see being used with any sort of family version of the game.  There were also way too many wargamey mechanics.  I did enjoy it and I hope it turns out well as it’s one sort of genre I can get into.

Thursday night was one of those “good story” games.  It should come as no surprise that many of my best role-playing game stories come from the most horrendously awful games.  The system was meaningless, the GM forgot character sheets and so just ended up winging the mechanics.  It was essentially League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vs. movie monsters.  Our party consisted of Sherlock Holmes, Alan Quartermain, Nayland Smith (me, who is Nayland Smith? Fu Manchu’s nemesis), Harry Houdini (yes, out of his time period), Annie Oakley, and Mulder and Scully’s ancestors only switched around to where Mulder was a German scientist and Scully a druidess.

It was just painful.  The Mulder player was bored out of his mind and did next to nothing in the 5 hours (of the 4 hour game slot).  The Scully character was hugely useful to doing anything but her schtick of rubbing her acorns was the source of numerous juvenile jokes.  Houdini’s player made no effort to play a character and was far too loud, too craven, and too disruptive.  Quartermain’s “big gun” was the source of more infantile jokes than the acorns.  Characters like Sherlock Holmes, only the most famous detective in the history of the human race and one of the most famous characters of any sort, should not be played by people who don’t actually know anything about the character.  Things like the fact that he actually investigates mysteries.  The plot was tissue thin to where I knew exactly what was going on 10 minutes in.  The only obstacle was getting to where the monsters were, which we never actually accomplished.  The closest was finding Dracula’s lair and eliminating some of his brides and trying to genocide his rat army.  We never did run across him, the Wolfman, The Mummy, or the zombies (because why be so predictable as to have graverobbers be working for Frankenstein).  We did find the cultists!?!

With a better group of players, I might have fleshed out my character more.  I was thinking James Bond or, even more so, James West as inspirations.  But, it wasn’t until the climactic cultist battle that we really did anything that mattered.  Well, some of the party did get information from Fu Manchu so that we knew where the hell we were supposed to go, but I question the “mattering” of that.  With players into gunfun, I played up my spy’s tricksomeness instead and tried one incredibly cool thing.

I described my turn as:  I release the smoke grenade from my boot, I open the secret passage I know is right “there” (I established its existence at that moment), I grapple with a cultist and steal his clothes without going through the secret passage, so that the other cultists would chase “me” to wherever “I” was naturally supposed to go while I chased them to find out where I was supposed to go.

The GM didn’t let me pretend to be a cultist pretty much making the whole thing meaningless as we could have just taken the stairs down to the basement area where we knew where the artifact was somewhere.

Strong concept.  Needed reasonable players and a decent GM.

Friday

Native American, mythological style role-playing with a Dogs in the Vineyard like resolution mechanic.  Add in decent players and decent GMs and this is what I live for.  It wasn’t fantastic, but it was quite solid.  The interesting mechanical twists on Dogs are that there are multiple GMs to manage conflicts better and that the conflicts are more constrained than Dogs so you don’t run into the Dogs problem of spending two hours rolling all of your dice in a conflict.

The plot was that a water serpent came around every once in a while to steal a child from the village.  The relationships were:  I saw the hunter who failed to deal with the water serpent as a role model; my sister (PC) hated him for raping our mother; the ugly girl of the village was friendly with the other PC while contrary with me; the wandering shaman/necromancer was involved somehow; the other PC (our cousin) hated our dad because he killed his father; but sis got along well with dad (until she stole his bow to give to Failure).

So, the chieftess of the village is ill and declares that whoever deals with the water serpent will be the next chief.  Failure and I run across the shaman outside of the village and I cut a deal with him.  My spin on why Failure couldn’t take out the water serpent and why he raped my mom was that he was totally into hooking up with said serpent and frustrated.  So, I suggest to the shaman that he make the interspecies couple more compatible and he takes the easy way out and does his mojo to transform Failure into a water serpent (either way was fine with me).  I have to keep his secret that he’s hanging around to heal the chieftess.  Meanwhile, sis is annoying dad by taking his bow to give to Failure to encourage the wuss to go after the serpent, while cuz is fiddling with some clay pot device to fight the serpent with and humiliates our dad.  Sis comes across the transforming Failure and kills him, thus screwing up two-thirds of my character ambitions – helping Failure and hooking him and the serpent up.  Alls I gots left for ambitions is dealing with the serpent.  So, I gather together sis and cuz to go fight the serpent.  The fight is a struggle to get to go according to plan, but I do finally manage to get the serpent killed using cuz’s clay pot trap so that I can pass along all of the cred to cuz.  Doing that is important because it satisfies his glory ambition while it also satisfies sis’s ambition of being the next chief assuming sis and cuz hook up (criminal incest in this game is closer than first cousin) with cuz being the village champion and sis being the leader.  As a reward (of my choosing) for the serpent conflict, I start a new society of serpentmasters.  A reward for … the serpent? GM? punishment for me? … is that I leave the serpent’s egg alone.  Well, of course I do – you can’t have useful serpentmasters without serpents to master.  ;)

We get back and things are going okay with cuz explaining his marriage to sis and sis being the next leader when ugly girl pipes up out of jealousy and claims our chieftess is evil and in cahoots with the necromancer.  Which proves to be true.  Fighting stuff happens for a while until ugly girl turns into a serpent and flees with cuz chasing after his true love and my society having apparently a lot bigger serpent problem for us to deal with over the generations.  Sis takes over and everyone lives happily ever after … oh wait, that’s the name of a later game I played.

Back to HoR.  I just need 4 XP out of this mod to rank up for the evening’s Doom.  We play A Day’s Sail, which is the one “shipping lanes” mod I missed.  Nothing terribly special happens.  I try to help the other PCs get the Thrane badass Daniel Hatcherman as an ally (I already have him as a true friend from the other mods), but we rush the ending and don’t meet the requirements for them to get him as an ally.

Doom.  It was a lot like the battle interactive from Gen Con 2008.  Tables simultaneously going through scenes.  We ended up with a table of six rank 2′s.  We had an awesome complement of character types, having three damage sponges, an archer, a fire tensai (infinite fireballs), and a water tensai (infinite healing).  We only had two Crabs; we had a Lion and three!!! Phoenix in this event that was limited to Crab Clan and their allies. 

The beginning is way more social than expected and it is shown that our biggest failing is lack of etiquette as we fail to get some guards out of our way and lose .3 Glory while trying to evacuate the Crab Champion’s sister.  First combat scene, the fire tensai basically solos as he master casts Heart of the Inferno to blow up groups of archers.  Second combat scene we face a Dark Moto and his oni horse.  Round one, he reduces the water tensai to down and does 53 damage to me with his second attack.  I Void for damage but the horse hits me for 17, reducing me to out (76 wounds kills me).  Second round, he downs or outs the fire tensai with one attack and does around 50 damage to the Akodo with the other.  The water tensai heals himself enough to make the utterly insane tactical decision of healing me so that I can futilely try knockdown attempts on the Dark Moto (jiujutsu or disarms would have been even harder).  See, he was invulnerable to normal weapons, which was all we had.  He had enough magic resistance that every spell against him failed.  Yet, the fire tensai was the only who could hope to do any damage.  The cavalry showed up – it wasn’t necessary to kill him, just survive long enough – and he took off.  I heard one table killed him and two other tables *almost* got him.  As a bunch of rank 2′s in an event designed for rank 4′s and with no weird items/magic items, we had pretty much zero chance.  But, we did win by all surviving.  Fight three was just a bore fighting some goblin berserkers led by someone with invulnerability who got smoked by lamely crushing a finger of jade on one of the Crabs’ tetsubo.

The Crab allies are removed and the Crab players are consolidated down to Crab only tables to go fight the tough part of the event.  Total rewards for my playing in Doom of the Crab, a mid/high rank special event intended to be deadly dangerous and being Crabcentric?  3 XP, lose .3 Glory for first scene, get .3 Glory at the end.  I successfully brag for one of the few times ever (3k2 for a TN of 20 is sketchy) to get another .1 Glory, so I net 3 XP and .1 Glory.  Favor Crab Clan?  Nope.  Ally Hiruma Tsuken (guy ordering us around)?  Nope.  Anything remotely to do with the Crab who I just helped evacuate thousands of people for in the face of a Shadowlands invasion of pretty much all of Crab Lands?  Nope.  I realize almost everyone, maybe everyone, who played in the event is knowledgeable enough about the campaign to write fiction to get these things, but I’ve now played in two special events that were Crabcentric and have nothing that relates to Crabbiness for this character, not even crabs from … never mind.

The only special rewards were for getting killed as a Crab in the Crab only portion of the event.  Speaking of getting killed, the Sacrifices of the Crab table (the rank 1′s who were all grouped together to avoid having them screw up things for the rest of us) were quickly slaughtered, two other Lions apparently got slaughtered, one who had the Crow Tattoo (all Shadowlands notice you and try to kill you, always good when being run down by thousands of Shadowlands creatures).  Four? Crab died in the Crab only portion.

Saturday

Houses of the Bloodied is a game about a sorcerer-king servant race that the GM envisions a lot like Melniboneans plotting against each other.  The mechanics are competitive storytelling ones:  you establish a fact about the world, whoever opposed you establishes an “and, but, except” type condition on that fact and you keep going until you run out of “wagers”.  Sometimes, you are the only one with wagers and just start rattling off stuff.  It could be played without a GM, which is what one player really wanted to do stylewise.  The problem with games that require intelligent players is that you don’t always get intelligent players.  For instance, the diplomat was negotiating with a village chief and, when the chief said “you owe us tribute for passing through our lands”, her response was “okay”.  When another character established that it was snowing, she decided to make snow angels.  Now, the world was poorly defined (out of necessity for only a 4 hour time slot) and not everyone knows what Melniboneans are like, but distinguishing silly fantasy from other fantasy isn’t that hard.

I had some fun playing a cunning bastard.  And, I am okay enough at making up plot twists on the fly that I fixed our plot problems by having the sorcerer-queen eat her daughter, the naughty Suaven (don’t worry about it), which freed other Ven (our people) from the mirror so that they could testify against our liege lord, all as part of some deal to close the well that was going to swallow all of our souls.

There might be something cool with this game.  And, I respect competitive storytelling and those who do it well.  But, it’s not my thing.  I don’t like competing with players, I want to cooperate with them.  Dogs and How We Came To This Land (above) don’t have quite the same competitive feel, though they could easily be played that way.  More Native American mythology and more Christian enforcers in the New World and less “… but the smoke is toxic …” style creating your own screwjobs is a good thing.

I had an open slot in the afternoon that was intended for exhibit hall stuff and whatever.  One goal was to network as much as possible with industry insiders.  I was too sick to do anything but nap.  I could have done the HoR political interactive, but everything I hear makes them sound irritating.  As I’ve been explaining to people, I think HoR already has too much politics and intrigue and not enough heroic fantasy as it is, why play events that are nothing but that?  Give me unwinnable wars.

Saturday night was my last HoR slot and I finally got to play my main character.  I got to play with one of my roommates, finally.  The party’s efforts were weak.  Everyone figured out what was going on within 10 minutes, but it took forever for “Scorpion Time” to kick in and the dishonorable scum in the party to solve the mod.  We bruteforced our way through some of it and I kept expecting to get hammered with honor losses, infamy, penalties for being a Lion in Lion Lands who couldn’t deal with things elegantly, and whatnot.  But, it was a low rank mod, and those sorts of punishments tend to be reserved for higher rank stuff where players aren’t likely to be newbs.  So, I got my XP and even a pip of honor and said fairwells to the HoR crowd I met.

Sunday

I tried to sleep in a lot since I didn’t have a game until noon.  But, I had to hit the exhibit hall and I never leave enough time for that.  I did the minimum amount of stuff in the hall, bought way more weight of stuff than I expected, and went to my last GC game.

QAGS stands for quick ass gaming system.  The genre was fairy tale noir.  You start with a film noir archetype.  We had a detective, muscle, gun moll, magician, magician’s assistant, and I was the agency researcher/marketer/archivist.  Then, you choose a fairy tale character.  The detective was Sleeping Beauty, muscle Big, Bad Wolf, gun moll Goldilocks, magician Kate Crackernuts (no frickin’ clue), assistant Sister Rabbit (Brer Rabbit as a chick), and I was Rumpelstiltskin.  Then, you choose an actor who would play you in the movie.  This I didn’t pay as much attention to with the PCs, but I was played by Danny DeVito (of course).

Someone was sabotaging the new act, the Queen of Hearts (Celine Dion), according to Alice (of Alice’s Restaur- … I mean Alice’s Talent Agency, played by Rhea Perlman).  Suspects included Rapunzel (Mae West, previous headliner, now the hostest with the mostest), Knave of Hearts (see below), Papa Bear (John Goodman), Mama Bear (Goldie Hawn), Prince Charming (Kurt Russell), and others.

I should mention that the Big, Bad Wolf was also an Elvis impersonator.  The player did awesome drawings, including a wolf in Elvis outfit (giant flared collars, open down the chest).  He also did a good Elvis impersonation.  Yet, he was quite modest.  I so wish there were more gamers like that in the world.

The police were the Three Little Pigs.  Yeah, that was awesome.  When someone asked who was playing the Knave of Hearts, the writer/producer for the Queen, I had to restrain myself from offering Jim Steinman.  GM’s choice?  Jim “greatest writer/producer of melodramatic piano rock with 50′s biker fantasy themes ever” Steinman.  Because that’s the way this world rolls.

In the end, we confront Alice, the police burst in, take a look at the grenade Alice is holding and start firing at the Wolf whose giant belt buckle deflects the bullets to Alice who falls through the window as the grenade goes off.

I suppose I should mention my giant (for me) old school typewriter that I would lug around the office.  When leaving the office?  Pull out the iPhone and bring up the typewriter app.

The final scenes that interested me included the Wolf singing Jailhouse Rock on a stage that pans out to be in a jail and my typing away in bed while smoking a cig while a woman under the covers with a huge head of hair sleeps.  I got to have Danny DeVito off Rhea Perlman in the movie for +2 fun.

After the convention, it was V:TES time.  The locals drove me over to Ankur’s new house for a 12 person tournament that included Jay Kristoff.  It wasn’t terribly interesting except for some wild antics by someone I played both rounds and a pickup with.  Jay schooled the rest of us with a sketchy deck, getting game wins in every round.  I failed to manage a single VP.

Monday

Came home.

Gen Con Event Registration

Gen Con Indy’s http://gencon.com/2009/indy/default.aspx event registration began today.  Having gone to many a Gen Con and had my share of problems getting what I wanted with hotels, events, or whatever, I make a lot of effort to do things ASAP.

I probably didn’t need to.  While some of the events I got tickets for were down to 1 ticket left after I purchased mine, the events I try to get into usually are not that popular or can handle a lot of players.

My current philosophy is to strike a balance between Heroes of Rokugan and doing new and different RPGs.  In total, I signed up for nine RPG sessions, didn’t sign up for the HoR LARP but left the slot open to decide what I want to do then later, and didn’t sign up for True Dungeon.

True Dungeon, for me, has been a middling experience.  It’s different, but it’s just not as engaging as it should be for the high cost, effort to get a slot, and time.

Last year’s Gen Con went perfectly well playwise even though I did a lot of HoR events.  I recall four normal sessions and the battle interactive.  As there are plenty of weird events or systems I haven’t played that I want to try, I don’t like overcommitting to one gaming channel. 

I really like my schedule this year in terms of finding new things that sound good.  Hopefully, nothing goes wrong.  I do need to figure out what to do during that Saturday 2PM slot, though.  The typically odd stuff I’ve signed up for includes Weapons of the Gods (have the book, can’t imagine getting any of my groups to play it), How We Came To Live Here (Native American gaming), Houses of the Blooded, fairy tale noir using QAGS, Oz: Dark and Terrible using Balance RPG system.  There’s plenty of things I don’t have time for that sound interesting enough.  And, I’ve skipped old favorites like Feng Shui and Four Colors al Fresco to allot enough time for new and HoR.

I think I’m drawn to fairy tale games having played a really cool Alice in Wonderland session at a local convention.  I went through a superhero phase in recent years and probably overdid that.  HoR has become my anchor of normalcy in a world of experimentation.  The one story I tell about last year’s Gen Con is the weirdest game I’ve ever played where the premise was that we played dreams in the real world.  One player had to drop before we started because it was too abstract.

I did actually look at non-RPG events since I wanted to look up the HoR LARP.  I just can’t justify signing up for CCGs, miniatures, parlor LARPs, or whatever when there are so many RPGs to try.

The online registration wasn’t particularly painful this year.  Nor did I have to spend a lot of time putting the puzzle pieces together to make a functional schedule.  It is sad, though, how many systems don’t get used.  RPGs never become obsolete.