Gamehole Con 2023

Logistics were more what I wanted them to be this year.  But, flying is getting harder on me, so I may need to rethink when I get into cons.  I’m thinking that I really need to just arrive the day before I normally do, flying out late morning or so and getting in late night to con location.  Then, just rest the next day.

I flew out 11:59PM Tuesday redeye to O’Hare.  Then, had to haul 100lbs of stuff forever to get to my terminal and wait around for my connection.  Everything worked as planned and I got into hotel room about 11AM.

When I was packing my checked bag, it was about 10lbs over having just two boxes of tokens.  So, I dropped one of the boxes; the other was my transmute box where I had everything bagged and slipped.  I couldn’t fit a laptop in my laptop bag.

I was meeting locals for some games and food, so I eventually lay down for a while after asking front desk some questions.  Fell asleep enough to miss when they arrived.  We went to Portillo’s, then came back and played Galaxy Trucker before a one round demo of Traveller CCG.

I’m fairly sure I’ve played Galaxy Trucker like once before, so this was a lot of relearning how things work.

They had to get going, leaving me a couple gifts.  Some of my roommates arrived while we were doing stuff, so we planned to go to dinner, then wait for Jim to arrive on his flight.

We went to a brewery, as half the group likes beer.  I got the pork belly burnt ends and two blackberry sodas and ate some fries.  Hardly perfect, this still ended up my favorite dinner, even if I really should have just gone to bed rather than staying up late.

Thursday

10AM – Scooby Doo (Savage Worlds)

We had four players, so Daphne didn’t get played at first.  I played Velma.  I didn’t realize that the Scooby Gang is supposed to be teenagers.  We stop at a truck stop in a blizzard and a whole lot of NPCs start doing things or just watching other things happen.  We hit a lot of the right notes, though maybe some were overdone as there was not a lot of plot progression.  Combat with monsters would break out.  Fred’s trap failed, of course.  We eventually just accept that we need to leave the MacGuffin with the aliens as they were slaughtering folks, and we couldn’t escape otherwise.

Why am I not giving more details?  I’m not sure if it feels like someone may play this game again or if it was because it felt kind of awkward and didn’t quite inspire me to point out the point when Velma lost her glasses or the like.  It could also be that my mind was so much more into True Dungeon stuff since that was why I was there.  RPGs were just to fill out my schedule.

Btw, one of the things I thought of blogging about was reviewing Scooby Doo movies or episodes I had seen recently after discovering there were a bunch of movies.  I don’t find the movies to be all that good as they do things episodes didn’t.  Then, one episode I watched was fairly terrible.  I watched Stage Fright, Mystery 101 episode of some series, Scooby-Doo! in Where’s My Mummy?, part of Scooby-Doo! and the Goblin King, and something with a different animation style.

So, I can suspend disbelief to account for the cosplay Shag and Scoob regularly do, the defying gravity, teleporting between rooms in spooky mansions, eating infinite amounts of food, or whatever.  I could not suspend disbelief with Where’s My Mummy?.  It’s just a too ridiculous setup, followed by not very interesting activity until get to ending that was predictable as I knew there was a twist ending.  I couldn’t even finish Goblin King, as there wasn’t any mystery and it had nothing to do with real estate developers trying to scam their relatives.

The game was okay.  I was in a hurry to go get my transmute box and get over to transmute room to drop like 25lbs of plastic disks with metal slug weight.

3:36PM – True Dungeon

Only one dungeon.  First of five runs of it.  Because The Nicks couldn’t make the con (last minute unfortunateness), I was the only person from the team on any runs until Saturday.

Nine of us.  More than half the group was running out of one player’s collection.  We lent out some TEs so that everyone could max treasure.  I asked if we wanted me to play bard, and nobody felt strongly about it, so I played wizard.

We were doing Hardcore.  So, I felt okay with a +22 spell damage build in my 15 token build.  Got guarded by paladin as I was a typical AC13.  52 hit points.  Saves 14/10/11.

This build was too strong for the run, but we were generally too strong for the run.  This is why I avoid PUGs (when I can).  We would have had an interesting challenge, I think, on Nightmare, where one player commented that we seemed overpowered halfway through dungeon.  Now, that had something to do with the dungeon.  The dungeon was way underpowered at various difficulty levels.

We did combat.  We weren’t really challenged in combat until room 5 and only room 7 felt dangerous.  I cast spells.  It was okay.  But, again, this is not what I’m looking for out of TD.  I’m interested in being challenged.  I’m interested in my build mattering.  I’m interested in playing with people I know.

I dropped off my transmute and waited forever.  I thought they were going to text me, but they never did.  I helped someone with bagging transmutes for some of the time.  Finally, I went in to check, and my stuff was done.  Got everything I expected, then headed to hotel for dinner as roommates and others grilled sausages at the hotel and brought other stuff.

Very kind of them to prepare food for us.  I had to turn around and head out again.

8:30PM – True Grind

I got there a bit early, so I sat with Fred and Limitless a bit before our run, picked up couple of things from Fred.  I played wizard – Epic level build that even ran Ashenne’s.  Fred was covering three other people’s builds.  Smak was on the run, though I never got a close look at his War Maul.

We only did Nightmare, which was yet another case of PUGs going on easy mode.  It’s okay to be challenged.  It’s okay to fail, yes, even when only doing one run of something.  I barely exerted myself spellwise, mostly firing Darts for 59 damage.  My recollection is that I only Quickened one time the entire run.  I did Boost Smak at the end and could have easily Spell Storinged Lightning Storm to finish off the end monster, which wasn’t even necessary.

It’s not like cool stuff didn’t happen.  It was good.  It just wasn’t … epic.  My metagaming was all a waste.  Maybe if my being immune to Disintegration, Confusion, Maze, Blinding attacks, Petrification had actually mattered, I would have been more thrilled.  Was really cool adventure, run really well.  Because I was so unthreatened, I didn’t even remember to meta appropriately for second Grind run.

I got back to room before roomies.  Eventually went to sleep.

Friday

9AM – Symbaroum

Jim is a big fan of this RPG.  I’m not.  The adventure was fine, very sandboxy.  The world isn’t my thing if having to deal with an Inquisition is typical as I can’t stand groups like that and don’t enjoy them as villains as it’s all too real.  I really didn’t like how the system played.

D20 systems are inherently bad.  D20 systems without ability to manipulate results are even worse.  Sure, there is a mechanic of assisting in the game that was never explained to those of us who hadn’t played the game before.  Sure, you could permanently taint your character for something as trivial as one reroll.  I finally realized that Taint in L5R doesn’t really mean much as it’s hard to get up to a rank of Taint, yet still hate how Taint works.  This is just the same sort of thing for trivial benefits that you inflict upon yourself.

We failed rolls constantly.  I didn’t feel plot progression while we had a deadline to save those being witchtrialed.  The ending worked out okay as we finally started succeeding at rolls, rolls that mattered.  But, it was all so random.  I didn’t feel like I had any agency, as everything was dice dependent, which might have been the way the GM ran the game.

Dark fantasy may or may not be my thing.  Grim fantasy very likely isn’t.  Conan worked, worked rather well, but I was also playing with people I knew, so we could do some dark things and be on the same page about them.  Feeling like I’m playing Call of Cthulhu fantasy doesn’t get me enthused, especially not for campaign play.

I went back to room and found food left out overnight (which I avoided eating for breakfast to preserve) gone, figuring someone ate it.  I had the stuff to make Boaz’s, so gather up ridiculous amounts of tokens and head out.

3:24PM – True Dungeon

PUG again, with some players who had never played.  Nine of us.  Six were part of same group that was new or casual.  While waiting for this run, I made a Dwarven Defender build that amused me for a Hardcore run.  Since we played Normal, I decided to take Duelist card to add to my collection and to see if Twist the Blade ability of Duelist actually does anything.

Maybe it does if you are good at sliding.  I’m not.  I’m very … um … hit or miss …  I did use the ability in most combats, but it was just to retain normal [sic] damage and maybe give something for others to bounce off of.  We did puzzle, and I did not understand the first puzzle at all, as it was absurdly easy.

I don’t remember much from this run.  Did get room 4 puzzle, where first run ran out of time after learning what the puzzle was about (in a way that didn’t make me happy – it’s okay to fail, it’s okay to be challenged).

My build was overpowered, but it wasn’t particularly overpowered.  I didn’t realize the bard was being lent Widseth’s when I finalized my stats.  I would have likely taken off a couple points of to hit if I had known to try to get a reasonable faux-Normal build.  42 HP, 7/11/3 saves, +10 to hit melee and ranged, +7/+4 damage.

I do think we did a reasonable job of not overwhelming the new players.  It’s really hard to just let other players play since it’s a coop game.  Even if I can get my builds in line with the difficulty, the social dynamic on PUGs is just not remotely optimal.  Buy out runs.  I’m thinking if I go to GHC next year that I’m just going to buy out two runs and try to jump on empty or largely empty runs opportunistically, which was how last year worked.

5:36PM – True Dungeon

Solo run.  Behind me was another solo run.  Behind that was apparently a two-person newbie run.  Something about how this timeframe overlaps with Trent’s party may have a lot to do with it, though, something about the afternoon matters as there was a 48 minute bubble behind my first run.

So, I had done Hardcore when should have done Nightmare.  I had done Normal.  Now, that I got to choose, I thought about Epic for my solo run but settled on a nice comfortable Nightmare.  The first combat wrecked me, so I used three heal potions.  Turned out that the dungeon calibration was so off that that was overkill.  Room 2 monster could only hit me on 20s.  We talked about its stats, and I did not understand who came up with its to hit bonuses at all.  By Saturday, these middle rooms got beefed up a lot.  Room 3 monster could only hit me on 20s and hit me once.  Room 4 puzzle I knew.  Room 5 monster never hit me.  Room 6, I was expecting to take push damage rather than try the physical puzzle.  DM called in gremlins, and we did it in time.  Room 7 could only hit me on 20s and hit me once.  A second hit would have killed me, but that was only because I was forgetting that I had used Horn of the Valkyrie.  I actually could have just healed myself to guarantee victory, but it was more exciting to try to murder the demon’s soul when a successful attack would have done me in.

Yup, just standard solo Nightmare win.  Yawn.  Of course this was my favorite run as I felt like I was in some actual danger of failure.  Should have done Epic.  Maybe solo NM on Saturday would have been more impressive.

Trent’s Party

I had my like six slices of pizza and my level 10 Critical Hit soda.  Was actual soda.  They ran out of lemonade, so I went root beer, brown sugar cinnamon, grenadine, raspberry, and maybe something else.  I was supposed to demo Traveller to Mongo, but there wasn’t time.  Trent is very generous.  I didn’t win anything, but I didn’t need to to get a lot out of this event.  I did one of my few trades.

I went back to room and drank root beer, which was very comfortable to deal with all of the salt from the pizza.  Didn’t get heartburn, which pizza often gives me as I eat it too fast.  Was a good day.

Saturday

Had tons of time in the morning.  So, I only ever had breakfast at the hotel.  The trash breakfast of the hotel.  Well, in comparison to places that give you options of things like bacon or sausage.  We did go to a bakery.  Not a breakfast place with a bakery, just a bakery.  So, that was useless to me.  We twice went to a place last year I enjoyed that is only a 45 minute walk from the hotel.  But, I was too tired and unclear that we weren’t actually going to a place to eat to take that stroll or go to the place only 1.3 miles away which is a bakery with food.

The advantage of these awful breakfasts was that I consumed far less food to save room for dinner.

11AM – True Grind

It was basically the same experience as first Grind run.  I ran fighter.  I took all of 20 damage all run because we only did Nightmare.  This is going to sound like beating a dead goatman, but True stuff interests me when I do interesting things.  I’m very tolerant of mediocre gaming and can go into sightseeing mode rather easily, but great gaming involves doing great things.  Not just contributing some damage.

Yes, it was fun.  Yes, it was worth the cost.  I would do more Grind runs akin to this.

1:24PM – True Dungeon

The only planned run I did.  Epic … of course.  There’s only really Epic for my peers.  I played Templar.  That ended up being bad for our fighter, as she died, and I couldn’t just effortlessly raise her.  Someone had to use a rez potion.  Then, in room 7, cool stuff happened.  Not in my case, but in the team’s case.  One player has two daughters.  Other daughter was at college and normally plays paladin.  This daughter played paladin and got to one-shot boss, something her sister had never accomplished.

So, I wanted the Templar card, but Templar kind of blows in in person play when playing with other people trying to crit and when you don’t slide well.  I suppose if I got better at sliding I could more often get on 18+.  I did cast some spells with my +38 spell damage bonus and used Turn Undead.

This was my second best run for reasons that will take a couple thousand words to explain.

5:48PM – True Dungeon

Normal again.  Maybe it was fun for everyone.  I feel like I was too “veterany” on this run even though my Sorcerer build was much weaker than my Duelist build.  At this point, I was just exhausted by PUG runs and should have tried harder to just embrace sightseeing mode.

That’s the thing – it’s vastly more stressful for me to play easy mode with randos.  I’m constantly worrying about either being mechanically patronizing or socially patronizing to players with inferior collections.  Last year, when three of us ran with two newbs, that run was great.  Coach jumped up their stats so much they were higher than my neutered build, and they didn’t know enough to realize how different it is to be limited by one’s collection.

Every time I do PUG runs, I come to the same conclusion – people’s builds should all be similar power levels, very similar power levels.  Now, others may not care.  But, I do.  There are reasons players should be more similar in things like experience level if playing with randos, which is why I’d much rather just not play PUGs even if the people are people I might like.  Now, sealed run/dungeon, sure, I’m fine with playing with randos – removes all of the 50lb baggage that comes with players at different levels of the token pyramid playing together.

We went to dinner at Feast, a dumpling place.  It was a mess.  Now, the food I ate, which I didn’t order, was good, and the price of the food I ordered but didn’t eat was extremely low, and the company was good, but the experience was needlessly stressful.  I go out to eat to relax.  As much as I talk about food, especially in my decrepit old age, I don’t really care about food much at all.  I care about meals.  Because they are social events.  I want to sit in a comfy booth and get what I order and hang out.  This is why the Wednesday night dinner was the best meal – we were hanging out in a reasonably comfortable setting.

I want to try this place … for lunch, when they don’t run out of pork and beef except for the pork and beef they have that they said they didn’t.  I am quite leery of the idea of eating dinner at a place that so easily runs out of their main dishes.

Sunday flying back was really annoying even though nothing really went wrong, not even our double landing at SFO (considering what else occurred recently, this was trivial).  I did manage to be 5 minutes from my favorite Chinese place in the Bay Area twice and not be able to go there either time as they aren’t open on Tuesdays and close at 7:30PM.  I went there yesterday as I was part of the way there – just too far to ever bother going there just to go there, and it was enjoyable, though the volume of food wrecked me later.

I did read some of the stories in Tales from Earthsea on the way back.  Note that I’ve never read any other Earthsea stuff, even though I own at least the first book of the series.

Overall, things were very good.  The Nicks were missed.  But, I got to hang out with folks.  Gaming was good, wasn’t like anything was actually bad.  Flying is getting hard on me with all of these full flights; it really makes a huge difference when you have space on planes.  The real weak point was meals.  The smoothies in the convention center weren’t nearly as good as last year, underblended.  The smoothie from the food truck wasn’t remotely sweet enough.  My chicken divan crepe at the Denver Airport from Magic Pan wasn’t remotely like the chicken divan crepes I ate while growing up going to Magic Pan when they were an actual restaurant chain.  May wonder why I dwell on food so much – because it’s so easy to plan ahead of time with meals.  Not only do I want to have relaxing meals, but I want to try places when I travel.  I only go to Madison once a year, and it’s always possible I’ll stop going.

My luggage was like 25lbs lighter coming back.  I didn’t get rid of much outside of transmutes, and I didn’t sell hardly anything, but that weight decrease was significant.  It’s just such a pain to sell/trade that I think I’m losing interest in trying to make deals happen.  Maybe next con I’ll bring even less stuff that is of no use to me.

Mice Schemes

So, I actually have a backlog of possible topics for posts.  And, I got ideas (since forgotten to varying degrees) from certain things.

For instance, I watched last two episodes of season one Andor and first four of Ahsoka recently and can muse on … well, not much.  I can write about the “Questing for the 4th XP” series of mysteries my mother got at least two books from.

But, nope.  Maybe I’ll get to those later.

So, I was talking to someone about stuff happening in a campaign when threw out brainstorming idea of having NPCs have a plan that they want the PCs’ help with.

Off the top of my head, I cannot think of a situation like this.  Well, not in the way I’m envisioning this scene.  Sure, most jobs PCs do are “I want this done, make it so.”

But, when is it “We have this problem.  We came up with a heist, er, scheme to solve our problem, but what we really need is a 4th level gravedigger, two multiclassed shop assistant/cooks, and a 3rd level theatrical composer to execute Operation Geniusnesses to fell the Unstoppable Demon King.”?

Never that structured.

Is this a deep topic?  I don’t know.  But, it’s a topic.

So, what’s the value in doing this versus some other plot hook?

Obviously, it shows that the NPCs, well, these NPCs, aren’t idiots.  That’s kind of rare when you stop to think about what NPCs don’t do for themselves in worlds.  Not just not idiots but that they have some life beyond the PCs (by inference).

It gives more structure to what PCs will be doing.  Either PCs blow off their plan, in which case PCs will have come up with their own plan (one hopes).  Or, they will know the plan that maybe they modified or maybe just went with.  The rails are there, and the PCs can go off them as much or as little as they want.  Lot of RPers don’t want to come up with plans, they can just use someone else’s.  If it fails, can turn around and blame the NPCs.

It enables having an info dump that’s more natural than “Hello strange adventurers who may be evil beyond evil, please allow me to give you all sorts of details to satisfy your quest that may destroy the world and rip the hearts from my kin.” or “I have just given you your mission in vague terms, please now do the requisite asking of me the questions whose answers may be critically important to what I just tasked you with or may be utterly useless.”

It can define NPCs distinctly.  So, the leader is the … leader, while the leader can call out “Redicus Shirticus here is supposed to do the scouting for our plan.  Healerus Muchicus was going to tend the wounded.  Tankius Maximus was going to frontline in case someone tried to murder our souls in our quest to buy brownie cookies.  Smarticus Aloticus was going to make sure we understood every thing we ran across that required being able to read a book.”  Boom, not just amorphous NPCs with maybe weird looks or annoying habits.

It is different.  So many players become jaded and RPG play gets made into parody rather than being a moving experience that causes us in our senior years to regale grandchildren (someone’s grandchildren, anyway) with stories of playing make believe with other nerds.  Break the chains of tropeloops.

Can also get players to talk about their characters in a more natural way.  “Look, weird strangers with way too many weapons and too much armor, we are going to go sneak into Instakill Castle using the supersecret tunnels that must have been forgotten since they were last used a fortnight ago.  Do you have any possible way to help us get inside and take out the Ultralich and its army of infinite CR27 undead?  Like, have you ever fought anything tougher than a one hit die skeleton?  Which of your 15 magic weapons, fighter, did you use in your great plundering of The Dungeon of Well Defended Diamonds?”

Maybe that won’t happen.  Maybe don’t want your players to spend next 40 minutes looking through their character sheets to remember who their characters are.

Well, running out of things to say about this that come to mind as I type each paragraph.  If I think of something else … I’ll probably never follow up this post unless, of course, I use this plot hook myself and it works either well or horrendously.

VTD 17

Why didn’t I write this a long time ago?

Combination of some travel, then getting sick.

Friday wasn’t VTD 17, was patron run.  Second patron run of the year.  I didn’t do first.

Played with people I’m used to playing with, with like one exception, though one of the players was someone I played with almost entirely when he was DMing.

Epic.

There were two puzzles.  We failed them both.

We also failed a combat because we didn’t figure out the trick in time.

The visuals were really good.  The plot was dimension hopping, and the backgrounds and transitions were beautiful.

We did 919 damage in one round, with three crits.  I didn’t put much effort into tallying damage since it was a one-off adventure.  First combat lasted two rounds.  Barbarian missed twice … and party did 600 and 575 damage.  Of course, we also had the wrong dungeon code, so the “slides” may have been off.

It was good.  The last combat was funny.  One thing it did was remind me how we don’t get in VTD what we used to get.  Room 6 had similarities to room 2 of VTD 6, with funny dialogue.

Saturday 11:24AM

Only team run.  Epic, of course.  I played … fighter!  Since we have new addition to group who plays monk, I need something else to run and wanted to go higher damage with decent defense due to how many struggles we’ve had on only team runs.

I went with a faux barbarian build.  We had a pretty easy time.  That’s what happens when only first puzzle was challenging as a puzzle and final room was a puzzle room.  I think the group liked this a lot more than other dungeons this year including VTD 16 because it wasn’t that hard.  If you are only going to do a dungeon once, I understand not wanting things as hard, but that’s why we should be doing the dungeon at least twice.  We should have an appropriately challenging difficulty level.  In person play?  I don’t mind just checking out the scenery.  VTD is to make our builds matter.  The first puzzle was figured out before my next run.

Saturday 3PM

PUG (pick up group).  This worked well given that it was a PUG.  So many tickets sold, I didn’t have much in the way of options for a third run.  We did Nightmare as had people who should be playing Hardcore and people who should be playing Epic.  I ran No Hurt Me bard.  Where VTD 16 had a downer ending for me because my build didn’t matter at all, this time got amusement out of my exotic build.  First puzzle was predictably given away as people can’t stand letting players have their chance to figure out stuff on their own.  Ah, the advantages of solo play.

I took a total of 3 damage on this run.  I dealt very modest damage.  That combination is fair.  It’s when I can walk through a dungeon and know every room is an autowin that it’s dumb to be playing on easy mode.

Sunday 10:36AM

Anti-Cabal.  Nightmare.  I was thinking Epic would be interesting and NM would be a cakewalk.  I was wrong.  I started with 83 hit points and ended room six with 11.  I did another faux barbarian build, only slightly modified from team run, just as dwarf.  We actually failed room 7 puzzle as two people hadn’t seen it.  Cool – I got to see failure video.  I don’t understand at all what was challenging about this puzzle.  I was twice bewildered by why people thought guy in robes was a druid instead of wizard, which wasted a lot of time, too much in this case.  You get the classes … easily, then get the success indicator, so you now can knock out the other two assignments knowing when you are right.  Without getting anything right, don’t know that it’s just an easy process of elimination.  But, then, the whole thing is process of elimination, just like the middle puzzle.

Part of my enjoying this dungeon as much as I did, which was around 8/10, was that I did all of the work on the first puzzle myself both on our first run and after the run.  That puzzle was cool.  It had great visuals.  It involved knowing stuff.  You got partial success indicators, which makes a massive difference with puzzles.

I also got to trigger Figurine of Power Saluki on final run.  Little metagame triumphs are still triumphs.

Damage Tracking:
First run – Epic
Number of rounds: 2, 3, 2+qs, 4
Barb, 103
Bard, 50
Cleri, 10
Druid, 36
Dwar, 60
Fight, 61
Monk, 75
Rang, 93

What a difference a month makes. No DR that I’m aware of. Much lower ACs. We only did 11 rounds of real combat. Can see with bard how much doubling sonic damage matters.

Barbarian missed zero times, bard cast spells for 10 rounds, cleric missed 8 out of 11 rounds, druid cast spells until rm6 then missed 3 out of 4 rounds, dwarf hit 10 out of 10 rounds, fighter hit 9 out of 9 rounds, monk missed 9 out of 24 attacks (62.5% hit rate), ranger missed 5 of 20 attacks (75% hit rate).

Anti-Cabal – Nightmare
Number of rounds of combat: 3, 4+qs, 4, 5.
Avg damage:
Barb, 69
Dwa, 63
Figh, 44
Mon, 59
Rog, 40

Rogue damage is suppressed due to some last minute building. Barbarian missed 2 out of 16 times, dwarf hit all 15 times, fighter hit all 16 times, monk missed 15 of 34 attacks (56% hit rate), rogue missed 2 out of 15 attacks. Monk hit rate in rm6 was only 30%!

I have the numbers, of course, from PUG Nightmare run, but it just demonstrates how people have wildly different collections, either that or shows how paladin is way overpowered as can deal more damage than barbarian and monk combined. Also, where these two runs didn’t have anyone doing something esoteric. In my PUG run, the bard had the highest AC in party – paladin was AC 44, bard was AC 50.