DunDraCon 2024

My triumphant return to DunDraCon!

No pictures of the con as it didn’t occur to me to take pictures of any of my games besides the game I can’t share (see below).

I bought a badge.  Been ages since I bought a badge to local con, as I just run stuff.

And, that has been the problem.  Local cons have felt like chores.  I run stuff part of the time.  Help out other events part of the time.  Don’t sign up for events.  Don’t end up playing stuff.  Or, like play a pickup game I don’t care about that I could be doing outside of a con.

So, I made an effort to do stuff at the con.

And, I did.

I submitted my prereg choices like first or second day I could.  I don’t get into either of my Friday afternoon choices.  So, I crash a 2PM game.

Exalted

GM intended a 10 player game for 10 hours where we fight a god.  We have five players, so the adventure gets modified.  Which I think was a good thing in multiple ways, but it did have a problem.

We are Exalted heading to Cadun to find work.  Cadun is looking for superior adventurers to go steal Hephaestus’s hammer.  We talk about just going to find Hephaestus and act as liaisons between the city and him to achieve what city truly wants, which is to be an exporter of manufactured goods rather than raw materials.

We get joined by an all-knowing NPC.  We go through Hephaestus’s labyrinth (a very extensive dungeon).  Our challenges are all puzzles.  We meet up with Hephaestus, talk a bit, become his smith lieutenants piloting fantasy mechs.

So, what was good?  The ending was amusing.  Didn’t bother me that it got very wild.

Cons?  So, this is Exalted.  I’ve played very little Exalted, but Charms are kind of important to making you feel like a demigod.  None of our Charms mattered.  We never got into combat having a slew of combat abilities.  Expectations fail.  I would avoid all-knowing NPCs.  I’ve played very little Exalted, and I still don’t really know anything about the world.  It’s such an opaque setting to me.  And, I own the game!  I just don’t care enough to read more than what I’ve read in the past.  And, it’s a White Wolf resolution system, and those are bad.

Saturday morning, I got into my first choice.

Feng Shui

I have some misgivings about Feng Shui convention games.  Last one I did wasn’t fun.  Too many are just Big Trouble in Little China either as complete replays or essentially the same thing.

This was very good.  The adventure was based on years of a home campaign, so there was lots of content, content I didn’t already know, and it was coherently put together.  The GM knew the genre, so scenes went like they should.

We are all gang members (including the cops, who are functionally a gang in San Francisco).  We are at a sham wedding, where ninja attack.  The whole point of the wedding was to trap a sorcerer who was trying to sacrifice lovers for power.  We take that sorcerer down.  Our cop friend who set the trap dies mysteriously offscreen later, so we reunion to go hunt down the killer.  We uncover a conspiracy to do some magic stuff, with a giant snake shapeshifter being used as an assassin.  We take out a drug kingpin, the snake, and, finally, “The Necromancer”.  They may have been trying to bring back Gao Zhang, but this game wasn’t about the setting’s time war.  I played a sorcerer and got to lean into doing thematic wind magic stuff.  I’m in favor of my convention one-shot characters getting to do things that are interesting.

There was only really one con – Feng Shui system is bad.  I used to love it.  Oh, I thought some parts of 1e were ridiculous.  I thought 2e just made things worse by losing flavor from 1e and for really not being designed for anything besides one-shots.  But, having argued for years on how bad d20 is as a resolution system, how bad percentile is, how bad 3d6 is, up die/down die is just bad.  It’s just not fun.  It feels a system of failure in a genre when failure should be of the botch sort where things explode when you don’t succeed.  The initiative system sucks (and always has).  Attacks are boring.  It plays slow, which is the opposite of how FS should play.  2e schticks are boring.

There’s a reason I created Feng Shui Tu Huo, my homebrew Roll & Keep system to play a FS game.  What system would I use for FS play if not some homebrew?  I don’t know.  I think most systems are inferior.  One of my goals is to play more non-L5R … so that I can remember how much better R&K is than almost every other system.

1e’s schticks are so cool.  I get the IP.  I can tolerate the system when good GMs are doing stuff.  But, this sort of game shouldn’t be saddled with a system that is worse for action than various other systems I’ve played.  I can believe there’s a d20 system that is better for this genre.  It’s possible Mutants & Masterminds is better for this genre; maybe I’ll find out in coming months.

Saturday evening, I didn’t get into my prereg choices, so I went home.  Being old and decrepit, this worked well.

Sunday morning, I got into my first choice.

John Carter of Mars

Our Conan group tried playing Modiphius’s Conan.  We kind of hated it.  The oppressiveness of the metacurrencies was ridiculous.  We could just play d20 Conan, a d20 game I enjoyed despite it being d20 resolution, so why do we need to deal with Momentum, et al?

This was mechanically okay.  Maybe being a one shot and not being Conan, a game we played for 7+ years, helped.  Maybe having individual Momentum pools rather than a single Momentum pool helped.  Okay.  I still find all of these games that pull the player’s attention away from thinking as a PC and thinking like some GM/PC hybrid to be completely unnecessary.

Our group was really slow to do things.  However, the things we were doing were generally fun and mostly appropriate to the setting.  One thing this game brought out is that some of us really like the setting.  It’s really sad that some people only know JC from the movie, a movie I can barely remember which got his personality completely wrong and did some jarring things with the setting.

I was playing a bodyguard/duelist and got to do a lot of bodyguarding stuff for the daughter of our boss.  I didn’t realize for quite a while my character sheet said Firstborn, but I think I was essentially just playing the character as a red martian rather than a black martian.  First Born would make the character’s name make more sense as it didn’t follow red martian conventions.  I got to heavily damage enemies.  I got to avoid doing other things than fighting.  … ??  Yeah, see, I may not be normally into combat that much, and I may normally be into social interaction or knowledge crap or whatever, but I also appreciate being part of a party and knowing my role and embracing it.  In this setting, with this character, the only thing I should be doing is fighting.  If I was on my own, sure, sneak around, learn crap, talk to people.  But, I’m not.  And, I enjoyed fighting or choosing not to bother when the party was just shooting some poor animal to death.

Good game.  I might play more JCoM outside of con.

Playing this game, I missed our Traveller events.  They were very busy.  This just points out how much running stuff interferes with my playing what I want.

Playtest

I hung around in the boardgame room so that we could do a three-player playtest of the boardgame we are creating.  We have a long ways to go.  What’s interesting to me about creating games other than CCGs is that I may overestimate how open-ended CCGs are.  In both the CCGs Jeff and I worked on for extensive periods, I had a sense of play from very little playtesting.  With other games, I don’t get that same sense.  Though, that could just be that I’m a CCG expert in a way that I’m not an expert on other game types.  Or, maybe it’s that CCGs are inherently a much more similar experience to each other than I think.  Or, both.

Different boardgames really try to achieve different experiences.  Agricola is not Settlers.  Chariots Lords is not an 18xx train game.

So, I was reminded of yesteryear with DDC 2024.  I got some good stuff in.  I met more gamers even if it’s unclear how impactful that ends up being.  I saw people I gamed with in the past, including a VTES player that might play in the South Bay.

Am I motivated to run a RPG?  Not so much.  I did think about what running would be like while playing, including what running at a con would be like.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get enthused.  I imagine my running a RPG at a con would be too much like my running at cons in the past.  None of these three games have systems that get me excited by the mechanics of a particular RPG.

I’m planning on running Traveller CCG at KublaCon.  But, if Kubla ends up feeling like a chore, maybe I’ll attend as a civilian more often in the future.

The Best of … 2020

So, I didn’t so much miss a deadline as much as I just forgot about my annual tradition.

One of my brothers had a wedding Saturday, so the last week plus has been kind of busy.

I actually had a plan for posting before my best of post something, but it has been hard to be concerned about normal things.

Anyway, 2020 was not a good year in various ways.  As I just start looking back at what I wrote as I write these posts, let’s see what I want to call out.

January

Fascinating.

Eleven Decks, Eleven Notes – Part 1

Somehow, this entire series … started in 2020 … ended before we stopped playing.

This is precisely the sort of thing I should do more of – build decks, talk about how the decks perform in actual games.  Of course, it’s kind of hard to play decks when there’s no one to play with.

Other parts are probably noteworthy, too.  After all, they aren’t short play reports, even if I included TV reviews or whatever in some of them.  Can get an idea how bonkers Shadowfist is by trying to describe games in partial detail, though it’s not like I haven’t done SF session reports before.

Advanced Play – L5R & Gloomhaven

I was trying in 2020 to get back to doing more analysis and less navel gazing.  Well, not that anyone needed to hear my Gloomhaven analysis so long after the game came out, but I write about things I do.  Advancing Tatakisu might have been interesting for how I both try to know how to min/max, then do something weird.

Off Court

Why do courtiers exist in a fantasy world where Hell is just to the Southwest?

I’m still playing Akarui.  Team Akarui just won an actual Winter Court event.  Obvious thing for a team of Imperial Herald, Tortoise, and Yasuki to win – shrine building.  Yup, build that shrine better than all of the other teams, which I think all had shugenja on them.

And, that’s why courtiers exist – to have multiple ranks in Engineering, to have Lore: Shrines, to have partners with a bunch of ranks in Lore: Rokugan, to have Ebisu’s Blessing and to have lots of koku koku bills to throw at spiritual projects.

February

Unstable

I almost skipped over this, but this was the most interesting thing in February.  It’s long, so it must be good.

I was just talking to one of my GMs yesterday about how contested rolls in R&K are bad because the system has too much variance.  This article is a lot about how variance creates problems with combat.  Now, maybe it’s just because L5R has lethality.  Maybe a system that wasn’t bad to begin with (most are, bad that is) with low lethality or enough metacurrency to not die can embrace variance.

March

Roll & Defeat

Speaking of the problems with contested rolls and variance …

April

Rather Not Walk

Choo choo.

ARe Wards

More direct about what players like me want and what isn’t as important.

Fiction Destruction

So, how good is my writing?  Much like my cooking, I’d say highly variable.  I don’t care much about getting better at these sorts of things as much as I just like being wrapped up in the narrative (that includes the narrative of cooking).

This is really, really long, but that just means it’s got to be better.

May

Building L5R Characters – Emerald Empire

*shrug*  If people want L5R content, I might as well write about L5R stuff.  How do I know people want L5R content?  I check what articles are getting views at times and it’s mostly old L5R articles.

Friendliness Rating

I try at times to create things for people to use.  Whether I ever use this idea I have no idea.

Gen Con – Early Years

Some Gen Cons are very similar to others.  And, yet, lot of stuff going on every year relative to other cons.

[Classic ] Gen Con SoCal 2004 [12/8/2004]

Why call out this classic post?  Charmed, I’m sure.

[Classic] Gen Con 2004 [8/26/2004]

I had seven posts in May, so it wasn’t like I chose every one.  First time playing Heroes of Rokugan!

June

Fight, Right?

Yet another take on what makes combat better or worse.

August

Gen Con 2020 – Oh, The Horror!

For posterity, the virtual Gen Con.

[Classic] True Dungeon V1 Feedback [2020-8-3]

Well, as much as 2021 was my favorite year for VTD, most recent VTD was vastly better than VTD1.

September

Card Qualit-ies

I am a CCG designer/developer.  Like a real one.  I’ve created other games, but those weren’t actually sold to people for actual money.

October

Brain Squishy

Who doesn’t want to know more about what sort of gamer type I am?

November

Midwest Gamefest 2020

As possibly the only Midwest Gamefest I’ll ever participate in, figure why not.  Besides, had Battle Interactive.

December

Camping Tools

Sure, other people have their lists.  Here’s mine.

So, 2020 was 2020.  I’m trying to get this wrapped up as family is having New Year’s dim sum lunch.  While there’s probably more to say about the year, I guess I’ll just let it go.

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.

Gen Con 2023

Tuesday

We fly out in the evening.  Why?  Well, our original flight out got canceled.  Timewise, the itinerary we got as a replacement was okay with me, but there were two problems with it.  First, Dave had a True Dungeon volunteer meeting to go to and would have missed it.  Second, I wanted to be in the TD meet up area on Wednesday to conduct transactions.

Since we are going out on last flight of the night that isn’t actually that late, we are scheduled to arrive at 1:50AM Wednesday morning.  Our first flight is delayed.  Fortunately, our second flight is delayed as much.

Wednesday

We get in to Indy closer to 3AM.  We sit in the TV/business room of the hotel until 7AM.  I do a little work but don’t want to rely on my phone as hotspot.

We go to First Watch for breakfast because it’s not far, and I’ve been to one in Virginia so I had an idea what to expect.  The food (or the hot chocolate or both) were hard on us.  We sit back at hotel until like 9:45AM, where we get to get into room.  On 16th floor.

I take a weekly work meeting.  I try to finish up something for work, but I’m being defeated, so I pack up tokens and head to ICC, where I set up on laptop and discover the reason job keeps erroring out is because … of something I changed (trying to fix something else).  I eventually figure out how to get the SSIS package to run and talk to my manager about making adjustments, where I end up making them through the power of multiplication rather than reprocessing the entire job.

Isn’t this a gaming blog?  [Whatever.]

I conduct transactions.  I am pleased at how transactional my transactions are.  I talk some with other token tycoons as well as some aspiring tycoons.  I buy the one token I arranged to buy, not one of grandeur but just an esoteric token for esoteric metagaming.  [See, gaming.]

I finally get out of ICC when pretty much everyone else was already gone or in the process of leaving.  Still have to finish up work at hotel.

But, I get to trying to sleep at 9PM, so it’s better than many years.

Thursday

No True Dungeon run today, so I don’t have to carry any tokens at all.  Consider the difference between like 5 pounds of gaming bag and 35 pounds (I’m getting better about what I take to GC so that it isn’t like 50 pounds of tokens).

Breakfast at hotel (it’s why we stay there).  Then, Subway for drinks, lunch/dinner.

9AM – Fate of the Norns, Celtic

I’ve played Fate of the Norns a few times, though not enough times to remember that you choose one of three roles with your character at the start of play.  I’m playing Leigh, a devotee of Morrigan.  I choose the charioteer role, though the beginning of the session is very much about ramping on mechanics, so we are in a fight against a neighboring village’s toughs.  The plot is that our chieftain died, and we care who the next chieftain of our village is.  Funeral games will affect that, as there are three NPC judges, plus one of the PCs inserts himself into judging.

The king in Dublin is a viking, and one of the judges is his henchman.  Most of us align to Celtic gods, though we do have a Christian monk in our group.  This matters as he waylays another Christian.  One of our group is a noble, and we eventually conspire to help him become next chieftain.  There is talk of other games, such as hurling, but …

While the noble talks to the spirit of the dead chieftain (I think it was him), I work on building my chariot.  Others help with the chariot or help with “diverting” our opposition.  What we have time for is the chariot race.  I have the ability Blazing War Chariot of Queen Medb, so I infuse our chariot with divine energy and we blow away the competition.

I guess I got some of the setting.  The mechanics are still sufficiently different from other games that I never fully grok them.  I have some interest in the Celtic book, but not enough at the moment.

As only a three hour game (*sigh*), I have plenty of time to eat half of my footlong.

2PM – Fight to Survive

Diceless, gritty, multigenerational martial arts.  That’s only kind of different.  But, I rate this as one of the most different RPGs I’ve ever played because there’s a bit more to the structure of the game that was surprising.  As a warning, we played like the intro adventure in the back of the book.  Nothing weird about the setting …

1985

I’m playing Sally Ting Pei, teenage university student with businessman father.  It’s the end of Summer, and we are in Beattown (Beat Town?), a district of the city.  Ellen Aim and The Attackers are going to perform at the arcade.  Yes, that Ellen Aim, that The Attackers.  I had forgotten her band was named that, but the GM and I had an opportunity to converse on songs from Streets of Fire.

Brick goes through the window before the band arrives, and Hardcore Harriett says the concert ain’t happening.  Leo, PC, who is one of the arcade owners goes and investigates HH, ending up winning a bar fight with a grappler dude.  I use Flash attribute to clean up the arcade.  Melody, PC, also does some clean up and runs across HH sledgehammering (well, of course!!) cars in the parking lot.  Melody fights HH for a round while I watch.

Why am I watching a PC fight the enemy?

Besides how each session is like three years in our characters’ lives and PCs eventually get so beaten down physically and/or mentally to take on a student and retire and besides that combat is a matter of choosing three maneuvers from block, footwork, grapple, kick, and punch where you follow up your opponent’s maneuver with one of the three you choose until you determine who fails to counter two out of three rounds of sort of a back and forth and sort of a snake, PCs don’t get better at martial arts from fighting!  They get training points from watching other PCs fight!!

As Melody is getting hurt bad from HH’s sledgehammer (who woulda thunk?), I take over the combat in the second round.  I choose kick, punch, punch as my three maneuvers even though only my kick and footwork skill levels are any good.  I manage to defeat HH as Leo shows up.  As Sally is in love with pop music, I’m all into comparing earrings with Ellen Aim as the concert goes off.

End of 1985, I train my Kick stat (combat stats also double, triple?, as other stats in the game, so this also my Flash stat) and increase my love of pop music by one.  No, I’m not going to coherently explain how comforts, hardships, and whatever work.

1986

We are at Howard (something) University.  Dad is giving a talk on expansion into the Battery.  Nice, proper gentrification.  I translate for him – actually my job with his company.  I have to spin some.  Some hippie shows up to cause a ruckus.  Melody, employed as dad’s bodyguard, confronts him, and it’s fight time.  She wins as we watch – more training points!  Crowd turns angry.  I Flash on how the economic improvements are for the greater good.

The hippie returns and pulls a knife on Leo’s sister (another student at the U).  Leo beats him up hard and Hawkwind dies at the hospital.  University protests make university function impossible as people don’t go to classes.  Leo’s sister is even a protester.  I do a lot of damage control with fake review committee, promises of charitable efforts, trying to discredit Hawkwind, and other corporate sleaze tactics, eventually get dad to have university admin give some BS speech to get kids back in class.  It works, though supposedly relying too much on our high stats (Flash for me) to solve problems will give us grief later.

Grief is supposedly the point of Fighting to Survive.

End of the year, I lean into Meditation to clear mental damage, leaving me with no opportunity to train to improve one of my three crap stats – wanted to do Punch/Heart as I have been using Heart at times to address problems.

1987

Summer in the city.  Youth center is robbed and kids are getting (deeper) into drugs.  We set up another Ellen Aim and The Attackers concert at the arcade to distract kids from pro-drug ennui.  Also hoping to hook the kids on videogames.  Youth gang with black headbands shows up at the arcade.  The Apple Pie Gang.  Leader has some ’50s theme to his attire.  Leo beats him up, where we find out his boss is Mr. Big Time.  Melody and I get pulled into fighting the gang members.  I rely on footwork to just avoid the gang’s grapple attempts or their footwork attempts.  We get to see the team fighting mechanics in use – choose four maneuvers and decide which PC gets which maneuver.  We defeat the gang through the power of evasion.  Other PCs go after Mr. Big Time while I hang with the band.

They find out that a certain Mr. Small Time stole drugs from the Ten Hand Society Tong.  We go to a bar for info (I try not to draw attention as a teen at a biker bar but have to interact with some bikers).  We head to Chinatown to find the tong leader.  That ends up happening, I could describe the florist, catnip, birds at tea shop, guy with rings on his arms, 18-yr old.  At Bobby’s house (he stole the money from the youth center), his mom with a black eye fends off PC while Bobby is getting beaten up by his father.  We have a pizza party where we keep a bunch of youths from escaping while the tong slaughters Mr. Big Time and whichever gang members were with him.

End of year, I clear mental damage some more, leaving me completely clear on physical and mental tracks at end of session.  But, also, not very capable as a martial artist.

7PM – CHEW

So …

So, while Fight to Survive struck me as highly unusual due to being structured very differently from what I’m used to, even though I’ve played Pendragon and Ars Magica, which are multigenerational, not that I ever played campaigns long enough for that to occur, CHEW is the bonkers setting type of RPG I will occasionally find myself in.

As I understand it, bird flu killed 100 million people, 20 million in the US, so the FDA became the highest authority in the country.  We also have food based superpowers for some reason.  Chicken is banned, no eggs, no other poultry, etc.  This is all based on a comics series done by Image, so maybe you know all about it, and I’m getting things wrong.

Speaking of food based powers, I was interested in the checked Quirk here:

But, instead, ended up playing The Mascot.

Note such amazing Quirks as Doomsayer.  “Chicken is DOOM!”

I choose to be the sidekick of The Expert (character who could make machinery out of sweets).

Our gingerbread director, Director Breadman, calls us in because Chef Chow Chu wants his recipe book back.  Chow Chu has a bodyguard, Diego Derryboo, who is constantly chewing gum.  Chow Chu claims that Chef Barnabas Cremini has stolen his recipe book to win a pastry competition being run by mobsters.  Apparently, Guy Fiery, Barnabas, and Chow were involved in a fistfight in the past.  Chow can’t compete in this year’s competition because he got banned for alleged use of chicken powder in the prior year competition.

The director wants us to do what Chow wants but also check out the mobsters and maybe learn something about Chef Anton Cobbler, a newcomer who is suspected of (oc)cult activity.  The mobster in charge of the pastry competition is Don Bucatini.  Another newcomer competing is Mindy von Oolong.  The PC whose ability is to swap what is in someone else’s hand with a banana he points at that person makes an enemy of Derryboo by swapping the gum Derryboo was going to stick in his hair.

Structurally, CHEW is an investigation game, where you try to figure out suspect, method, and motive.  Put sticky notes on a board, conspiracy style.  At some point, you come up with a theory, and the GM rates the quality of your theory and has you roll to see how well you do at solving the mystery.

Speaking of mysteries, as I’ll likely forget this if I don’t address it now.  I read one of my mother’s mysteries on the flights over to Indy and read for a couple hours on the way back, then finished after we got home.  The first mystery was Why Aren’t They Screaming?, a Loretta Lawson mystery.  Dr. Loretta Lawson is an academic.  First half of the book was fine.  There is an actual whodunit, where I find it weird when I read these mysteries that don’t actually have a whodunit.  The second half is ludicrous.  While other reviewers complained about the lack of resolution, in no way is the final ending my problem with what happens.

I am completely bewildered by multiple things with these mysteries I’m reading.  One is that the protagonists don’t solve the mysteries.  Second is that the reader is just told by some character who committed the crimes instead of, you know, being given clues so that you can figure out for yourself what happened.

What makes the second half of this book appalling is that Dr. Lawson not only does completely absurd things after being reasonably adult written earlier on, like explore a graveyard at night by herself when too scared to go outside of her cottage at night earlier, but makes things vastly worse while making unfounded assumptions as to people’s motives and activities.  Then, her relationship with her ex-husband is excruciating pretty much every time he shows up and takes you out of suspension of disbelief.

A Very Particular Murder wasn’t nearly as bad.  It was … okay.  The protagonist didn’t do anything (investigative) to solve the crime.  But, he doesn’t do insane things in the back half of the book even though his trip to Jerusalem is utterly pointless to the narrative of the investigation, and his religious epiphanies are unnecessary character development.  I guess he does do one insane thing by not talking to his lover who is working in Jerusalem.  Keep in mind the entire rest of the book is around Cambridge and nearby towns.  The ending is completely gratuitous.  The mystery is entirely solved by a long confession letter, which is cheap.  The soap opera is kind of interesting, but it also becomes kind of absurd.

Anyway, CHEW.

The pastry competition has some solid gold trophy, so a bunch of lowlifes are competing, and the whole thing is kind of a mobster convention.  Our direction is to not let Cremini win and check out Bucatini.

We go to R&D through the choked chicken being punched in the face door.  DQ gives some of us disguises to infiltrate the pastry competition.  As famed Chef Cordon Brandy has a restraining order against me, as I’m obsessed with cooking competitions and their tough-love stars, I naturally choose to disguise myself as Cordon Brandy.  If the actual Cordon Brandy shows up *and* my cover is blown, I’ll just pretend to be his bodyguard clone to protect him from assassination attempts … but I disguise myself as someone else later …

We go to the cocktail party before the competition.  I barge in late, complaining about firing my driver in my poor imitation of Gordon Ramsay.  I roll badly, so Bucatini blows me off, taking a shining to the PC who won the competition the previous year, and my mainkick, Candy Applegate, who is going to compete as a chef ingenue.  Bucatini has an extra set of hands hidden in his white dress coat.  Our fourth PC is a short woman, Susan Shi, pretending to be a not-short food critic Fu Dee, with an elaborate moustache.

TK, hotshot chef PC who won pastry competition previous year, is talking with Cremini and trying to give him something of a truth serum pill in his drink, so I start talking to Anton Cobbler, who is wearing an elaborate antlered headdress with meat on the antlers that keeps falling off, to create a distraction by pulling him close to TK, Cremini, and Steven Spielberg.  Anton is very … negative.  I do entertain him some by noting that I sometimes have to tell an incompetent on one of my shows that I’ll “cut out your liver and attempt to confit it”.  TK manages to drug Cremini, then later joins him in a piss on the topiary of Chef Chow Chu Don Bucatini has at his place.  There are also topiaries of other famed chefs, like Guy Fiery and The Great Fatanyeros.  Candy Applegate charms Bucatini by convincing him she isn’t actually a criminal disguised as a chef.

Fu Dee manages to share body parts with Mindy von Oolong and they read each other’s minds.  She makes all of us.  He finds out that she’s really Chow Chu’s sister Saffron, who is there to steal the trophy.  Since we are indirectly working for her brother, she is pro us.

A big deal is made of some appetizer, where The Great Fatanyeros reveals himself as disguised as a topiary of himself, while we have emotional moments from his power to inject emotional stuff into his food.

As things wrap up, Candy hangs around in the kitchens working on something.  TK player puts together a reasonable theory as to what happened with the recipe book, where Derrydoo, who was at the cocktail party, stole it and was trying to get it to Cremini.  Fu Dee follows Derrydoo and runs into him and Anton Cobbler talking about Anton buying the book from Derrydoo.  They discover Fu Dee, who bananas the book away from them, and the Pastry-Satanist Anton Cobbler forms a donut devil from his mouth as they pursue Fu Dee.

Meanwhile, I used some salad to disguise myself as a topiary of famed Tin Chef Sabby Slay.  So when Anton’s donut devil is on Fu Dee, I use my topiary chef’s knife to rend the donut devil, then bite into it to release its jelly ichor, which causes me to become Ruthless and Cocky (game mechanics, repercussions of not rolling better).  Candy makes a tripwire out of sugar to slow down the pursuit of Fu Dee, and I engage Anton, rolling well enough to get him in the liver, but his second donut devil gets me, so I don’t have an opportunity to confit the Pastry-Satanist’s liver when I wake up at FDA HQ.  With Anton slain, we do impair the West Coast branch of the Pastry-Satanists.

One day of gaming in and winning.

Go to bed late as I need to figure out Dave’s borrowing of tokens as he has a run without the rest of us.

Friday

Get breakfast, already getting kind of bored with sausage, bacon, and syrup with peach drink.  Finish up dealing with Dave’s token situation.  Get another footlong.

8AM – L5R, FFG version

My first ever time playing the FFG/Edge version of L5R.  Not thrilled with 8AM start.  We are residents of a Crane shiro that wants to be a kyuden.  One PC is a guest sumai instructor Matsu, two PCs are Daidoji including leader of the garrison, I’m Doji Masateru, hatamoto to the castle’s daimyo.  As a courtier and vastly more familiar with the setting than the other three players, I do lots of talking to get our mission to bring a famed Kakita blacksmith to our Winter Court.

We are located near Scorpion Lands.  We set out during Winter and have some samurai v nature to deal with and find out Scorpion are in the hood causing trouble for our vastly more honorable clan.  We get to the village where the Kakita is supposed to be and it’s empty.  We find the villagers hiding from any samurai.  Find out that Scorpions have been extorting our peasants.  The others go explore while I help get the village operational again even as they are starving from having food taken from them.  They find some stuff, the Matsu returns to the village first, and we uncover Scorpion operatives disguised as Crane peasants.  We confront one of them, and he flees from us.

Session ends with “what now mechwarrior?”, where I would have preferred to have more combat as my main interest was in learning the system, as opposed to caring much about the world.  The other players, new to L5R, all seemed into the setting.  I talked to the GM about Heroes of Rokugan 5 going on using this system.

With noon end time, I had plenty of time to eat half my sandwich and be fading while I waited for …

2PM – Everyday Heroes

The system wasn’t the important part, though it was my first Everyday Heroes session.  What made this important was that it was the Scoobynatural event (one of them).  I meant to see the episode but forgot.  I’ve only watched a little Supernatural and am not a big fan of Sam and Dean (or Castiel).  I obviously chose to play Shaggy when only four of the eight players showed up.  Someone played Scoob.  Someone Dean.  Someone Velma and Castiel.

Scoob player was so good.  Voice, diction, actions.  Velma/Castiel player also really understood those two characters.  Dean player was good, too.  The plot may not have been all that, but this was probably my most fun play experience.

So, we pick up at the end of the Scoobynatural episode with the spirit going to release the boys, but it can’t as the Scooby Gang is also cursed.  We drive up to a house where any other direction gets us nowhere.  We start exploring empty house and find creepy warding symbols, plus there are weapons all over the place, like pistol in the nursery.  By explore, I mean the others, Scoob and I mostly focus on trying to find usable food in the kitchen.

I accidentally open a secret door to an underground level while following Dean and Velma into the basement.

Scoob finds the kitchen, so we make some sardine mac & cheese with peanut butter to get us through the next hour or so.  Others recognize this place.  There are five bedrooms, a library with an interdimensional telescope, an infirmary where Scoob and I find morphine, a greenhouse where Scoob and I find … um … herbs.

The players and/or PCs decide this is the Avengers base where the room with a heavily reinforced bed is for The Hulk.  We find a journal in “Tony Stark’s” room that explains that in 1969 Walt Disney made a pact with a demon and ended up with a magic pen that could make ink creatures.  We go down some stairs and find occult rooms.

Scoob and I get bribed with Scooby Snacks** to explore the obvious summoning room. A demon appears behind the others.  I give a player monologue about how Shaggy could oppose evil by shooting the demon with his “musket” (sawed-off shotgun, but musket went with Scoob and I doing civil war cosplay) but instead grabs Scoob, shuts the door to the pentagram room, and we hide as statues.

**  The GM had Scooby Snacks, as well as Scooby Gummies.  I later tried bribing a monk in our True Dungeon run with the Scooby Snacks, but monks gotta monk.

While the others contend with the demon a bit, we come out.  Scoob dressed as a sexy devil in a tight red dress, distracting the demon long enough for Velma to drop it with a couple taser shots.  We pull off the demon’s mask to reveal … some dude.

This releases a Native American trickster spirit, and we realize the Scooby Gang were actually Men of Letters cursed into a cartoon.  We wobble back into the real world, also realize this is our base, and the rooms are ours.  Now, I haven’t mentioned mechanics much.  I found it odd how much of a gun nut Shaggy was built as, but it made a lot more sense when I reverted to being a soldier who got into drugs after leaving the military.

The dude in the mask runs away with the magic pen.  He creates ink creatures to stall us, but Velma throws paint thinner on them.  We corner him in the library, and he starts a ritual to fill in a dragon outline with ink.  As I’m not just a sharpshooter but also took up ritual magic, Velma and I work on countering the ritual while the others fight.  By others, mostly Scoob, who is, of course, a werewolf (thus the bed), and who utterly wrecks the ink creatures he attacks, then kills the guy with the pen.  But, the dragon forms.  I finish off the counterritual, and the meddling kids win again.

7PM – Beyond the Threshold

The sessions of Beyond the Threshold I couldn’t get into were a scenario where you play peaceful nuns of the God of Frogs.  In Tower of Tarot, we played sad, pathetic villagers looking to gain great destinies.  So we become pilgrims along with hundreds of others to descend upon the Tower to Destuna, Goddess of Fate.  Whosoever ascends the tower will have a great destiny.

Gunther, our guide, and five of us are accosted by bandits outside the tower.  We try to get them to just steal Gunther’s silver, as we each had to pay him one silver.  We fight them, anyway.  One of us was the hermit gravedigger, another poopsmith, another someone with a chain, Ezreth was something I don’t remember, and I had a hoe.  The poopsmith dies, and the player takes over Gunther, who proceeds to cover himself in poop and takes the mantle of poopsmith.

We get 5 gold off of their bodies.  We also transform into classes.  Using Tarot cards, we reveal various knight cards.  Gravedigger becomes wizard.  Poopsmith slayer.  Chain guy warrior.  Ezreth cleric.  And, I, I become the thief.  I fail to detect traps on tower door, and Ezreth goes in breaking the thread of fate across the door, not that it ended up mattering.  The tower is made up of:

First up is Strength.  We encounter an armored lion hiding in the brush.  The warrior hits it with a weapon and does no damage.  Wizard perfectly Enlarges slayer, who already had catlike armor.  Slayer punches lion and deals damage.  Perfectly?  Percentile system where crit is usually aught one to aught four, but double aught is supercrit, just as 99 is superfumble and 95-98 or whatever is fumble.  I continue to fail at thief things but do taunt the lion, which the warrior crushes.

The door out is in the lion’s mouth.  I don’t bother looting the hood as my backstory is that I hate flora.  Slayer takes the lion’s claws and adds them to his armor.  I fail search roll, of course, and get stuck in lion’s mouth, which warrior pries open so that we can slide into …

Magician.  We are inside one side of an infinity symbol.  The symbol is a force field, so we can’t escape until we figure out how to get to other side.  On a table are a sword, staff, chalice, and pentacle (pendant).  Warrior takes pentacle and tries to go through force field.  He fails.  He gives it to me as I’m the Knight of Pentacles, and I also fail.  Some red jelly in the chalice starts moving.  I flip the chalice over, but it continues to move toward us.  I drop the pentacle pendant trying to sleight of hand it onto the warrior (another failed thief skill roll).  The warrior splits the ooze in two.  The slayer takes out one of the oozes.  The wizard speaks Infernal to it.  I use the pendant on the other ooze, dealing with the threat.  The pendant is an anti-demon magic item, and the ooze is a demon.  The wizard scrapes up some of the ooze.

The warrior takes the sword, which has the infinity symbol on it.  Staff also has infinity symbol.  Warrior cuts the force field with sword successfully.  Staff can be used to form force fields.  We move on.

Moon.  A large orb with a face is suspended from above.  A rabid dog, a wolf, and a lobster are essentially praying to the orb.  While the others fight, I throw my grappling hook up to the orb and climb up to it.  I get blasted by the moon but hold on long enough to cut the rope it’s suspended by, and we fall.  It shatters, breaking the madness effect it was causing on the animals.  The warrior takes the lobster claws and adds them to his armor.  I pull the trapdoor above us open, and we leave.

In the picture, you can see we had a blank room.  This was a rest room.  We got treasure.

Devil.  Devil asks us for something to not have to fight him.  I offer a gold coin.  He gives me five.  Warrior later offers gold coin … and gets five.  I suggest everyone getting in on this moneymaking scheme.  Slayer quickly offers his soul.  Wizard talks to him in Infernal and eventually cuts a deal to just do evil stuff.  Cleric offers up mind.  Warrior and I eventually just give up our souls as they aren’t that useful.  As part of our contracts, we get to call upon The Devil once.

Death.  A holy man is weeping over couple dead orphans he stupidly brought to the tower while he begs dark night on pale horse to not make him next victim.  Death kills him.  Slayer summons The Devil immediately and gets powered up.  We let slayer focus on Death, while we kill his horse.  I fail more rolls and try to hide among the corpses littering the world we are in.  Fail that, too.  Slayer KOs Death.  We loot corpses, including my looting the orphans’ bodies as we package them up to be buried elsewhere.

Second treasure room.  Warrior chooses the treasure chest and reveals Ace of Swords, giving him the Sword of Kings.

Final challenge is to take out the two guardians of the tower, in our case the King of Swords and Queen of Cups.  The former is a giant, the latter a robot.

Warrior summons The Devil “I want to be able to kick their asses”, so The Devil increases his leg’s/foot’s size and power.  Warrior does in fact kick both of their asses in the fight, breaking the King of Swords’ ass before shoving a sword where the Sun doth shine.  Slayer is dropped by the Queen, the wizard traps himself in with Queen using the Infinity Staff.  Wizard Reduces the Queen, and the warrior perfectly kicks her ass.  Finishes both of them off with the Sword of Kings in one round.

Statue of Destuna glows, door opens, and we are now 2nd level!

I had to rush to True Dungeon run.

11:01PM – Tomb of Terrors

I didn’t have a painful trek, even with hauling tokens around all day.  But, it is tedious going from JW to Lucas Oil Stadium, something I’ve had to do a bunch of times.

I get there in plenty of time as we have a chaotic run with special guests.  The Nicks do technical support for Starship Horizons Adventures, and one of the other volunteers for SHA was on his first TD run.  The Final Boss of True Dungeon, Lori Martin, carried a bassinet on our run so that a special guest’s dog could accompany us.

We were not well organized.  We did only Nightmare, though, so two of us healing the boss monster for more than 200hp still didn’t stop us from defeating it.  We got wrecked by the optional room three combat, where I was running polydruid and both ran out of healing and was casting healing spells during combat rather than murdering monsters.  We failed one of the puzzles.

It was very PUGish.  People had fun.  SHA volunteer pulled a Wish Ring in epilogue treasure.  I managed to sell it for him above his minimum.

Very late night.  I had to work with Jim on trading a legendary for stuff that would allow me to transmute a different legendary.

Saturday

Then, at some point, worked with Dave on getting the transmute stuff together.  I went to breakfast with Jim to talk about Gamehole Con – we were all in the same hotel.  Dave was gone when I got back to head to my 9AM game.

9AM – Fated Hand

I was the only ticketed player to show up.  Another player in the 10AM session of the game joined us after we did some stuff.  We?

GM’s sister, father, and girlfriend played.  So, Fated Hand.  I talked to one of the two designers (GM was recent add for thematic stuff) for awhile.  What he’s going for is an extremely tactical combat RPG.  In Fated Hand combat, one hit takes you out of combat.  If all PCs are dropped, TPK.  But.  You are Fated Ones.  The resolution system is a cards in hand system, which is what attracted me to the description.  Your choosing which cards you play is thematically seeing into the future.  When a TPK occurs, you go back to an earlier point and replay the combat since that is just a possible future.

Designer mentioned that someone else compared the game to a game he couldn’t remember the name of.  As we were talking, I brought up Gloomhaven, and that was the game.  I can see some similarities to Gloomhaven.  The idea that combat is a puzzle that can be replayed as many times as needed in order to win.

Our first combat, we were learning how things worked, then an invincible enemy appeared.  We were supposed to run away or die.  As I was playing a spellcaster, I had an out for our party, where I could reduce the Black Knight’s Speed to zero, so that we could run.  Second combat was basically just an assassination.  Third combat proved rather easy with no PC being dropped.

I pointed out that I’m not the target audience.  I kept comparing the game to a dungeoncrawl boardgame like HeroQuest or Descent or whatever.  I like dungeoncrawl boardgame play to a certain extent.  I just don’t think of them as RPGs.  Gloomhaven is not a RPG.  I have to adjust my thinking between storytelling stuff and tactical murder.  But, it’s interesting to see what else exists.  I also pointed out that I’m not into pure storytelling either, anymore.  Been there, done that.

I want something in the middle.  L5R is a good middle, even if I really need to play other stuff.

I had enough time to get a Grande Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino to stay awake for next game.

1PM – RPXpress

This was another League of Extraordinary Gentlemen game.  Yes, I’ve done multiple LoEG games at Gen Cons.

We were alt versions.  Annie Oakleaf.  Dr. Hellsong.  Nikola Testa.  Sherwood Holmes.  Adam Quartermain.  I was Bridgette Scully(?).  Like X-Files Scully?  I was a fiery Irishwoman who didn’t respect Englishmen.

We contended with Moriarty, Aleister Crowley, Wo Fang (Fu Manchu), Countess Dracona (Dracula), Dr. Miguelito Lovemore, Roburt (airship guy).  We failed a lot of rolls.  Adam and I couldn’t even break into the back door of Wo Fang’s drug lab.  We did succeed at stopping the Queen’s Golden Jubilee from having everyone being poisoned to death through the power of guns, acorns, and an elephant gun.

This reminded me of the other LoEG game I recall playing – the characters don’t work well together, possibly because they are too skilled, possibly because they are individually larger than life.  Way too many die rolls and way too much failing at stuff or not knowing what to do.

As I didn’t have a game until 10:37PM, well, as I didn’t have a TD transaction until 10PM, I hit hotel happy hour briefly, lay down, got Thai food … Thai hot.  Amazingly for getting food in the Midwest, this was actually spicy.  I was able to hit end of happy hour at hotel to get some Coke and to make … coffee!!

I headed over to SHA area as I knew Dave was over there waiting for 8PM game.

8PM – Starship Horizons Adventures

Jim had an extra ticket to the sold out event, so I … sat at engineering console while we did parts 3 and 4 of this season’s adventures.  With a ship as powerful as ours, I really didn’t need to do anything.  I remain bewildered as to how the game is intended to play as we blew through scenarios as quickly as possible.  I still haven’t played parts 1 or 2.  We couldn’t hear the NPC, but it didn’t matter as some of the group had already done the scenarios.  The real value I’ve gotten out of SHA has been the hang out factor and not really anything to do with the game.

Maybe engineering has something to do with weaker ships.  Weapons certainly had more to do.  Navigation or whatever it’s called certainly has a lot to do.  Science has something to do.  Whatever the other role with a console is might have something to do.  Captain, of course, just gives orders.

I wonder what failure is like.

I got out of there around 9:20, so I could do my last transaction, which was important because I was dealing for someone else (as well as getting rid of stuff I wanted to get rid of).  Dave had done my transmute in the morning.

10:37PM – Tomb of Terrors

More SHA volunteers.  Friends of Jim’s.  We did Epic Weird, though it was only sort of Weird.

First room, we did combat and got special dispensation to take pictures because …

I was the cause of the stacked puck.  Jim managed the edged token.  On the same round of combat.

We did well.  Pain demon did hurt us some.  I took over 50 damage, though I forgot I could heal myself.  Enjoyed rm3 puzzle a lot even though I did little (as is typical).

Room 7.  We had two options – win off of probability, lose to funny.  We lost to funny.  Without Russian Roulette thinking, we would have won in probably one more round, definitely two rounds.  This run was so much more coherent, and I had actual thoughts on the dungeon, where I had no real thoughts on what I’d do from first run.

Another late night.

Sunday

However, I didn’t have a game until 1PM.  So, no breakfast.  No checking in for flight at 5:30AM.  I did get up around 10AM and checked work email.

I eventually decided to get lunch at A&W in food court of mall.  This was my most enjoyable food/drink, even though I didn’t like my double bacon burger.  The fries were actually crunchy.  The float was really good.  The ambience was not bad.

I have no sense of what to do about food, anymore.  Everything is either too far, too expensive, too crappy.  I might have to breakdown and try a food truck again, as it may address one of my issues with getting food in the area, even with the inherent ickiness of food trucks.

1PM – Nahual

Finish up with the usual Mexican shapeshifters who slaughter angels and turn them into food.  Three hour game with only 1.5 hours of playing as this was a PbtA (Powered by the Apocalypse) game.  While I’m the target audience for things involving Nahuatl words and angels, I’m not the target audience for wasting time establishing character relationships before playing and, especially, in one-shots.

I did find it amusing that the GM’s wife was running a session of something else at the next table in Spanish.

We chose for our Changarro cantina with features of Chalan and Popular and problemas of Dirty Competition and Nosy Neighbors.

I had interest in playing the Camazotz, but not the Jaguar, Venudo, Tlacuache, Mono.  I ended up playing the Perro.

A NPC needed our help.  I Opened The Doors Of Perception to detect an angel, who turned out to be the leader of the dirty cops chasing our latina friends.  Fight started where I supported the Jaguar with Jauria, then ran off to protect the innocent while the rest of the group finished off the nine-eyed angel.

In the short amount of time we did stuff, it was good stuff, so it was a positive experience.  But, it should be more.

RPGs should not be less than 3-3.5 hours of playing (4 hour slots).  Character creation is just a waste of time – I am perfectly happy to play fully realized pregens.  Sure, it’s different with living campaigns where it’s your character.

Even if the point of a session is an intro into some system, world, or system+world, I want to play enough to actually see it.  I guess I got enough of this world to know that it’s close to what I want but isn’t.  I want to see mechanics in operation.  If I end up buying a book because game seems cool and go run it at home for my local group, the more mechanics I see, the easier it is.

I went and lay down for awhile.

Then, we had a team dinner … without two of the team (one felt sick last minute).  While A&W in food court was better food, this is the type of meal I want.  I like hanging out.  No, I love hanging out.  I know a bunch of people at an out of state con, yet I spend hardly any time doing things with them.  While I don’t need to play stuff with others, as I get my esoteric RPGs in, the meals, the talking about each day at night, even in such a short event as Gen Con feels due to its density, make it different from feeling like I’m just going to these things on my own, like I used to.

My calzone was way too dry.  The tomato dipping sauce should have been like three times the size.  The place was too loud.  I miss Granite City not because of the adequate food/drink but because it was amenable to social activity.  Thai Paradise is no Wok ‘n Go.  Sure, Steak and Shake and Subway are equally just protein and fat to get through the day.  But, I just don’t care about the hotel breakfast as food.  I can just get a second Subway footlong.

Monday

Our 5:30AM flight meant getting up at like 2:15AM.  Harsh.

Still, our Ubers all worked.  No lost luggage.  I wasn’t in a lot of pain at any point, not even when my face was vibrating from the Thai food.  As tired as I would get at times, I was much less tired than other recent years.  I probably need to leave a Friday morning or Saturday morning hole in my schedule to be able to sleep in earlier in the con, then just force two RPGs on Sunday or something.

If not for the brutal travel, like B+.  B.  CHEW was more memorable than a lot of stuff.  Scoobynatural was more fun than a lot of stuff.  There were smaller moments – I found a shirt I got in high school before the trip and got to point out some of its history, offering Scooby Snacks.  Not small by any means were my token transactions.  For the most part, smoother than expectation.

Origins 2023

I just skimmed through Origins 2021 post.  Very relevant in at least some ways.

Anyway, I played 13 card tournaments, 11 VTES tournaments this year.  There’s no way I’m remembering all of the things that entertained me.  I won’t even write about The Grandest Trick that occurred as the payoff is really for someone else to deliver.

I stayed with True Dungeon teammates, as did two North Carolinian teammates.  This enabled my actually attending all of Week of Nightmares and led to the weirdness of flying into the con and not renting a car but driving at least some on four different days.  Was interesting at times, had to tell myself to calm down and drive slower a lot as I never had to rush anywhere when I drove.  Drove two different vehicles.

They were all focused on Starship Horizons (Adventures).  I was (obviously) not.

Prior to Saturday, I had a bunch of stuff to deal with.  Work, car not starting, mother’s health all distracted from getting VTES decks built.  Shadowfist decks were easy as I only had to build two decks, one for Modern tournament, one a theme deck.  I built another and had some old decks in my one Shadowfist box.  I had no plan to play in the Classic tournament, but I wanted some backup for whatever.

I wrote up various decks.  Friday, I pulled the cards for 10 VTES decks, including throwing together a deck based on what was lying around in piles surrounding me.

Saturday morning flight was 7:15AM, so I was a wreck getting from Bay Area to Columbus.  I am increasingly realizing I’m too decrepit to have these early morning flights as they involve way too much lost sleep.  A host picks me up from airport.  We end up ordering in food for dinner.  I find out that mashers are mashed potatoes.

Hosts have four dogs.  I spend much of my vacation ttentionating the canines.

Sunday #1

I arranged with Jay that I’d drive to his place, and he would drive us to and from comicbook store for tournament.  I didn’t think about how it was Father’s Day as my life has never involved celebrating Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, or whatever.  This, at least, made more sense than what happened Monday.

I had a sense of what order to play decks in.  Play something I might replay later with some modifications as I might discover something with my 10 new decks to where I’d want to actually play a deck more than twice in my life.

I played Daughters Polaris Coach/Zip Line bleed with Concert Tours to pay for Polaris Coaches and bleed pump.  First round, don’t draw bleed stuff so do little before being eliminated.  Second round, don’t draw bleed until later but actually be bleedy for a bit before being eliminated.  Not feeling much from this deck.  I could have done vote instead or Shattering Crescendo, but I was trying to keep it simple when conceiving an updated take on this.  Just kind of dull.

I did play Art’s Traumatic Essence on The unnamed.  Lack of familiarity with the card meant it didn’t get removed.  I had to relook through my deck to even remember that.  I guess I should just run Crescendo more often to do something interesting.

Monday

Jay agreed to drive me to and from events on Juneteenth.  After he discovers how far to the North I am from downtown, we go with a plan of my figuring out transportation for other days (ignoring travel between tournament venues).  Very kind to drive me at all.

Game store, I go with Thing deck.  First time ever playing Thing (unless my mind has gone and I played someone else’s Thing deck sometime).  I had to break open packs to get my Things for this deck.  Lot of dumb things I had to do to get cards for my decks like hunt through lots of unsleeved cards to find things like VTES versions of Jyhad vampires.

I guess I did stuff.  Oh, not Thing in first round, at least not until it was too late to matter.  I did get a Jackal in one round or both rounds.  In both cases, needed my prey out of the way to get my permastealth.  Somehow, I didn’t manage to oust anyone in either round.  Did survive a fair amount in second round when it wasn’t looking good … this sentence is meaningless.  I played VTES.  I enjoyed it.  I can’t recall doing anything all that cool.  Shape Mastery-ed something, which got me to thinking about Shape Mastery in the current meta.

Got a Barq’s and got BBQ from City BBQ.  BBQ was not great.  Maybe I oversauced it.  I would not get the sausage again, which wasn’t cut.

Jay drives us to Biergarten.  The tables are small.

Three straight nights (well, expected three) of Gemüt Biergarten with expecting to get back to sleep headquarters late at night meant playing all of the fast decks.  Fast to lose, anyway.

I went with less bad on Monday, so it was Madman’s Quill time.  First round bleed out my prey.  Whoa.  What’s going on here?  What’s going on is a joke that took much of the week to pay off due to how it was observed that my prey might have been the only one to ever be ousted by ole Ian (of course not technically true, but I’ve been playing since 1996 and more prey than not have been secure in their knowledge that at least their predator wasn’t going to oust them).

I got two VPs through the power of dropping Madman’s Quill on The unnamed and my grandprey not getting his star vampire until so late in the game that he was irrelevant.  Kelly S. was my grandpredator just recursing Banishments.  I mention this detail because it has some relevance to later in the week.  I did Sudden three of my prey’s masters to stop him from bringing out a second minion.  I did not Sudden any of Kelly’s plays.  I did Touch of Clarity some stuff.

Well, two VPs is more than zero by old math.

First round got fast start with The Call.  Second round played some chumps with Mark as my prey, Karl his, Brad his, Jay his.  Did not get The Calls to accelerate.  Put some pressure on Mark, but not enough.  Didn’t draw bunch of Suddens early.

Jay drove me to HQ not too late.

Tuesday

I’m a drivin’.  Park at library.  Play Transfusion.  In one round, I didn’t draw The Path of Bone early, so I played Transfusion to move blood around/cycle.  I was bleeding.

May have been same round that I misplayed by using Gear Up to get Spiritual Intervention when I should have gotten Delaying Tactics as my prey was Stanislava, my grandprey had no game with Giotto allies, my grandpredator !Salubri, and my predator something I don’t recall that kind of fights.  I blocked a Bowl of Convergence by !Salubri and Karl asked why I did that.  Gave my two reasons.  This had to be second round as I was thinking I needed table win, something I hadn’t achieved in three tournaments.

Matt C. beat up Francis Milliner depriving me of some bleed two ways due to my having Margaret Milliner as my major Stanislava threat.  Didn’t rush backwards.  Stanislava eventually won.

Oh, I remember first round, now.  My predator’s first turn, he puts out two 2-caps with Dominate.  My prey sweeps.  Prey did number of Con Boons Giovanni to delay my demise.  I don’t fear bleed.  Bleed predators hardly ever seem to oust me due to my deckbuilding and playing styles.  Fame or votes kill me way better.

This should have been easier to remember as Jamie and I talked about his deck between rounds while we walked around the topiary with others.  We (in the game) think Jamie shouldn’t have equipped Saturday Night Special with one of his many minion actions as it cost him a pool that made Marshall’s game easier.  I played a fair amount with Marshall.

I didn’t notice the concession in the library had smoothies.

I drive to Gemüt Biergarten early, which was unnecessary.  I was more comfortable at library.

I get lunch/breakfast at HangOverEasy across the street.  Chili burger cooked medium rare (I asked) with sweet potato tots.  I missed the drink menu until after I had ordered lemonade.  So, one takeaway of cuisine in Columbus is that lemonade is much more watery than I expect it to be, true here and at HQ.  Burger wasn’t open face chili burger like I’m used to and was okay.  I don’t like sweet potatoes, so my unbridled thrill at having a better than fries option was defeated and my life descended into unending misery yet again.

Since I’m driving, I can leave as soon as I fail.  I have to choose from one of two terrible decks, deciding to go with Ahrimanes stealth bleed for Tuesday leaving Nosferatu … um … Nosferatu for Wednesday night.

I only remember one of my rounds.  Eric A. (only Eric?) didn’t know what Spiritus does.  He ousted me with Bang Nakh deck, so let’s say he didn’t get much sense.  I did concern Mark, my prey, who was running NewToreador, when I did things like bleed for four with not my The Siamese with Heart of the City.  I Engling Furyed some to pay for stuff.  Discarded Vulture’s Buffets early.

Agent of Power was interesting to me in this deck.  I did AoP for Protean on like Cynthia at one point for the possibility of Donnybrook … yup, Ahrimanes Anarch SB.

It was okay tournament.  I wasn’t enjoying food at Gemüt Biergarten, though.  I did enjoy my fruit punch Monday, but neither currywurst nor paprika schnitzel were doing anything for me.

I drive to HQ.

Wednesday

NCers drop me off at library as they all go to con to do Starship Horizons install.

We are in different room, maybe better room.  I direct folks to new room for a while.

I try to play less bad deck, so I go with 8-cap (vote) bloat.

First game might have been four player as I remember Vinny was my prey with NewBrujah Debate, axe was Jamie with Ventrue with Obfuscate, predator was Kelly S. with Cybele Striga.  Vinny’s game was rough as he basically could only act with one minion, while I got Creepshow Casino to avoid not-Second Tradition.  I had a fine start and bloated a lot.  I’d get bled for three at times.

Kelly was more amused than I was when he declared a Nergal bleed, I try to block, he plays I Am Legion specifically stating that “You aren’t Auspex bouncing.” since we were late in the game, and I Auspex bounce with one of my two Telepathic Misdirections.  Bleed gets bounced back.  He was under pressure from Arika and friends.

I Golconda Nergal at one point, having to spend a lot of time thinking whether to Golconda one of my dudes, Marcus Vitel, or Nergal.  Kelly has to think, where I hope he takes the pool.  He doesn’t.

Kelly and I agree I blew this game as I recognized that Jamie was low on cards but didn’t process how much easier the endgame was likely to be for me than having Cybele and Nergal behind me.  I did Entrancement Veneficti at some point to reduce pressure.  I thought this was a good game with my making a bad tactical decision of not backousting but where I got to do a lot of stuff and be relevant.

In the second round, my predator is playing Imbued and my grandpredator (playing Nephandi) doesn’t know Imbued stuff.  He doesn’t get to learn a lot as I Entrancement with Force of Personality my predator’s second Imbued with a Living Wood Staff as always happens in games with Imbued.

The playmat, btw, was borrowed from HQ, as one of two things I forgot to bring with me.

Alex R. (only Alex?) is my prey with British Museum version of Recruitment Exercise.  Brad C. (only Brad?) his prey.  I steal a Nephandus with Force of Personality from Eric.

Time grows short.  Alex is looming threat to Brad.  Brad ousts Eric after Matt’s game was long over.  With little time left, I use all of these minions to oust Alex with Aire of Elation.

I play inefficiently with 2 minutes left and Brad has too much pool for me to oust.  I doubt I could have done anything to oust him in time, anyway, but it was sloppy of me to not have my actions planned.  I had very few votes to call late in this game.  Miller did get agged into torpor trying to oust Alex.  Imbued and Nephandus kept bleeding for 1, so those helped a lot as I only did exactly enough damage to get Alex.  Time running out affected a lot.

It was fun.  More importantly, I discovered that the library smoothies (well, the one type I got) were really good and very reasonably priced, so I was well chilled.

Still no table win.

Played only pickup game of WoN.  I played Blood Brothers agg stuff.  I bled for 4 early against prey unfamiliar with Sanguinus.  I rescued a vampire crosstable, first time playing against Shadowfist Matt ever, then used Haven Uncovered on his dude to rush him so that I could cycle a dodge.  I Breath of the Dragon predator’s Rafael de Corazon and eat him.  Jay, my grandprey, gets ousted by “Stanislava” prey when KRC passes while Jay is at 4 pool.  I screw up something that could have probably saved Jay’s Lasombra deck.  Votes were everywhere except on my board.

I don’t remember much else of the game.

Jay takes me over to Gemüt Biergarten, where we also use The Olde Oak as Biergarten wanted outdoor space for other folks.  I get food from Oak, and it’s okay.  Weird to get chips and salsa as side with my BBQ burger.  Chips are supersalty, so I rub off a bunch.  Burger was pleasant enough.

I play Nosferatu figuring I’ll get done quickly.

First round, predator does nothing much.  I try to block grandpredator with Tusk the Talebearer with 4, one more than three, intercept and fail.  I was amused.  Second round, I try to burn Pentex Subversion on grandpredator that was grandprey’s (Karl winnie Presence), get Tusk blocked, who proceeds to Song of Serenity, Immortal Grapple, Disarm.  Nobody really cares.  The unnamed … yawn … behind me puts pressure on.  I put no pressure forward on Brad’s Ministry, though I do fail one of his votes against Karl by accident.

I get ride to convention center with others.  We get badges after I finally can get to QR code.  I check in with HQites.  We return to HQ.

Thursday

Not-VTES day for ole Ian.

9AM Shadowfist cube draft.  I am always amazed at how people draft niche CCGs.  Sure, my deck was flawed with lack of reliable faction resources.  But, I had tons of power generation that never should have been passed to me.

Quanqiu Wishing Well should not have been passed to me.  Nor should the second.

Summoning Circle shouldn’t have been passed.  Xin’s Tome of Knowledge also passed to me.  Decklist:

2x  Blue Flower Society

1x  Confusion Stability

1x  Finding Your Balance

1x  Fu Lions

1x  Into the Light

1x  Li Po

1x  Shaolin Supplicants

1x  Sifu Beumer

1x  Warrior Poet

1x  Yung Chang

1x  Alfar

1x  Auramancer

1x  Chiu Bagong

1x  Fakhir-al-Din

1x  Fire Warriors

1x  Soul Fire

1x  Summoning Circle

1x  Wasteland Rangers

1x  William Franklin

1x  Abandoned Old Shop

1x  Beached Supertanker

1x  Medicinal Flower Garden

1x  Phlogiston Mine

2x  Quanqiu Wishing Well

1x  Rainforest Bridge

2x  Sulphurous Cenote

2x  Walled Enclave

1x  Xin’s Tome of Knowledge

1x  Discerning Fire

1x  Spirit in a Bottle

2x  Violet Meditation

1x  Chainsword

I had tons of Jammers hitters in card pool, so I looked for Jammers’ foundations late, but it was too late.  I hate drafted a lot.  I passed White Ninja!!

First game, I win at time after not having resources to play faction cards for much of the game and just keep playing Feng Shui Sites.  I played Summoning Circle early, so I also got to participate with that in addition to site abilities.  Sulphurous Cenote may have prevented Josh from winning earlier.  Second round, didn’t win.  Third round, played Chainsword on Paul’s superleaper to try to help contain Tim K.’s weenie horde, which only caused Paul to win when I didn’t attack his superleaper but his site that could move Chainsword with my Li Po and/or Yung Chang.

I have to get going to Starship Horizons Adventures as tournament is running an hour late, and I left an hour between events.  I find out later I got third place.

SHA just ends up being bewildering to me.  I do a run with three volunteers, two I’m staying with, in part four of a four part series when I’ve never played before, and they had played the first two parts …  Why we didn’t play part three wasn’t superclear, maybe they had it scheduled for later.

The 20 seconds of useful training on tactical meant I wasn’t clear how to load and fire Devastators (nukes) or the railgun.  Turned out that our ship specs weren’t loaded correctly, so I would have seen boxes for those.  We apparently succeeded in our mission even as badly as things seemed to go.  We playtested some the basic ship on mission 1 in our remaining time.  I learned a little of tactical and engineering.

Was it fun?  I guess.  I just didn’t know what was going on or how to do things, so I committed war crimes unintentionally rather than intentionally.  I have too little sense of what would want me to get seriously into the game.  Maybe I just tag along when my friends need another player.  I suggest that anyone who likes Star Trek try it out at least once, and it … much like True Dungeon or RPEX … is likely a much better example of play if you run with others who are newbs.  Of course, you can always just download SH and practice roles before trying SHA at a con.

Thursday night is Shadowfist Modern.  I suck.  One game, I might have had a chance if I attacked right not noticing Matt had two FSS in play early.  The game swung wildly between Troy and Matt due to Cat Stance.  I wasn’t that into this.  Draft was vastly more interesting to me.

Because the HQites can leave early Thursday night, I drive a car back to HQ.

Friday

In the morning, because I got little sleep any night and had plenty of time in the basement trying to avoid setting off dogs, I build a VTES deck.  As I had 11 tournaments and only 10 new decks, this meant I could run a different deck every event, however I had lost interest in my Recruitment Exercise deck after watching how tediously boring they were in other players’ hands.  So, my plan was to run Vic SB in first tourney, if I win, run precon mashup in second, then play I Love Cheap Thrills in the NAC.  If I continue to suck (zero table wins in 7 tournaments), run I Love Cheap Thrills Friday night and precon mashup in NAC.

Morning tournament, I suck.  I don’t remember much from first round.  I got Lolita Houston in play and bled some and eventually petered out against … whatever.  The second game was vastly more memorable … because it was a complete travesty and shall not be talked about, not even my amusement over something.

Evening tournament was vastly more fun, even if I sucked.  One round I didn’t do much.  Other round, Marshall, predator, plays Smiling Jack early and table doesn’t get rid of it.  I get 2 VPs from it as it builds up to eventually 9 counters.  Could have gone away if grandpredator ousts Marshall, but my prey Annekes the killing bleed.  In the two player endgame, I Inscription Marshall’s Anima Gathering Isabel de Leon and … eventually he Direct Interventions the Inscription.  I was trying to cycle, and I dug one less card because of that.  Nine counters on Smiling Jack kills me.

Having enjoyed I Love Cheap Thrills a lot, even in first game where I just played cards that weren’t Inscription, I decided to rerun it on Sunday Funday (with no changes after what happened on Saturday).

Failing to have gotten into finals for a ninth straight time, I check in with HQites, and they are busy.

So, I go to Local Cantina and get two Americano tacos.  I liked this food the best of any meal, though it wasn’t perfect – tacos would have been vastly better with hard shells as they just fell apart.  Ambience sucked, with weird cover songs, lots of noise, and my being by myself.  My talking about weezy tacos causes the crew to want Taco Bell as we head back to HQ.

Saturday

NAC.  Time to play a real deck.

First round, Pete is my prey with group 5/6 Ventrue, Mark is Nocturning, other two didn’t much matter.  Mark Nocturns them.  I comment that Pete will crush me in endgame, so my game sucks.  Pete Daring the Dawns for kill bleed on Mark as I spend time trying to figure out how to survive, The Uncoiling The Unmasking (coin flip as FBI came down early) after sitting on The Uncoiling in my hand for ages waiting for The Unmasking.  That bleed is great … especially for me.  Not only do I lose Nocturn pressure, but Mary Anne Blaire being in torpor for a round buys me time to pass votes and contest with Pete, who contests with me, so it’s my two Ventrue to his one.  I win the endgame.  2/2/1 split was amazing for how game looked.

Second round, more people join tournament, so our 40 player tournament with all fives now has me play a four player with prey playing The unnamed, axe playing !Salubri, and my predator is … Mark.  I make the comment that expect him to run over me.

That might have happened if Matt (!Salubri) didn’t drop Tension in the Ranks on turn one and hadn’t started rushing forward right away.  Mark’s game completely changed as he kept Dreamsing to get to point of blowing up Tension.  With lack of pressure, The Uncoiling coming down to blow up The Unmasking again, no interference from prey that I cared about, I built up.  Prey ousted !Salubri.  I get 3 VPs.

So, great tournament points, first TW in 10 tournaments and 5 VPs after two rounds means I’m doing amusingly well.

Third round is the easy game.  Some chump named Darby is my prey.  Three of the decks at the table just stealth bleed, including my predator’s … Nocturn deck.  Grandprey has no game as Huitzilopochtli to my left just bleeds him out.  I have no vote competition, no meaningful intercept, and only some pool pressure.  I get rid of Unleash Hell’s Furys repeatedly as I can just Freak and rescue.  I bloat a ton.  I hit John, grandpredator with Platinum Protocol action with KRCs as I know he will get my predator eventually.  I Daring the Dawn past an UHF for the Darby kill.  In the endgame, I have too much pool to get ousted.  I grind through John’s pool for another 3 VPs.

I commented to Darby that I didn’t think I made a single mistake in this game, where I notice mistakes all of the time normally.  Sure, the game was easy due to the matchups, but I still made good decisions on every turn.

As top seed, my placement decision is painful.  I didn’t want to be in front of Malk22 (or whatever it’s called).  I didn’t want to be next to The unnamed gets The Great Beast.  But, mostly, I just wanted to be across the table from the other Ventrue deck as it was 5/6.  I thought a bunch of times later about maybe being Bill’s predator, but Kelly S.’s deck just made mine bad.  Kelly L.’s prey might have been interesting as Kelly on Kelly crime would have happened sooner with Banishments likely coming Malk way.

Kelly S., whom I had spouted nonsense to for much of the week, commented that I didn’t seem happy.  I wasn’t.  For various reasons.

Consider that the only tournament of the first 10 where I got even a TW, let alone got to the finals was the one tournament where I didn’t really build the deck, where I played a deck that was just good stuff cards that get played all of the time and that didn’t do anything interesting strategically or tactically.  While Bill’s deck was interesting in the finals, I just didn’t have anyone to root for in the finals outside of myself, and I did very little all game.  Also, I didn’t expect to live the dream and win the NAC as a bottom quartile player.  My response to Kelly S. was “Let’s see how this game goes.”  I did start to feel better after I was ousted.  I was somewhat disappointed in the Kelly on Kelly endgame that Lyons didn’t try to play to time for the win, but it was an honorable seppuku.

I was late for the Shadowfist casual event, not that that mattered as it was play however much you wanted to play.  I was horribly not in the mood to play SF at this point or possibly anything.  But, this was when people were supposed to play their theme decks, so I toughed it out while waiting for people’s games to end.

It was not a good game as one of the theme decks did winning things, and the other three did not.  I did get to go at a reasonable time …

… only to discover that the SHAfolks were doing tear down early, rather than waiting for Sunday to do everything.

I did some minimal help, and we all headed back to HQ, well, with a stop at Wendy’s as they wanted food.  I did end up finishing some leftover nuggets, so it got me food to.

I got like one hour of sleep Saturday night.

Sunday #2

Pain around my left eye until I have a soft drink and some nuts.

To the con!

There are at least four things I’m supposed to remember from round one.  I got Information Highway on my first turn, so I bring out 6-caps on round one, round two, round three, a Tupdog on round four, 6-cap on round five.

My Tupdog gets Dominate, and I eventually just rush Pete’s Blood Brother and torp it with hands of 1.  I debated bleeding for 2 with it.  I had an easy game, with Mark as my grandpredator with Recruitment Exercise.  Easy in that I played for the time out table win by leaving Marshall alone as much as possible with his Garrote deck.  Vinny was my predator and defended well with punching for 4+ with NewBrujah Debate deck.

I Illegal Search and Seizure Marshall’s Ivan’s Ivory Bow.  I play Ecstatic Agony and Vinny comments not knowing what the card does, then Marshall makes a comment, then I comment “I’m not sure I know what the card does.”  So, as is usual in VTES, prey has first opportunity to read the card followed by predator then Eagle Sight/Falcon’s Eye players, then the person who played the card.  Marshall reads it out loud.  Couple times later, I have to read the card to make sure I can abuse Mark with it.

I torp Mark’s vampire with a .44 off of the press punch for 3 from Ecstatic Agony.  I oust Marshall for second VP with no more than 10 minutes left, though not with Melange because I’m bottom quartile.  I chose to discard The Name Forgotten.  I torp one of Mark’s minions with Machine Blitz …

2.5 VPs.  Second round, Kelly L. is my prey and Inside Dirts + Thuggees one of my two 6-caps into torpor.  Tom is his prey.  Tom and I played in the Bay Area a long time ago, and it was good to talk some.  Pete was my grandpredator and didn’t do anything to Norm, whose NewBrujah “do it all” (as opposed to toolbox, which I was explaining to Brett, whom I never played with but talked to for extended stretches) deck ripped me apart, even with Ecstatic Agony on one of my two minions.

I waited quite awhile while needing sleep badly as 1 TW 2.5 VPs almost made the finals.  I just needed Mark to not get more than 1 VP in his second round, but some folks are like top quartile.

Because the SHAfolks only needed like an hour to load up vehicles, NCers headed home, and I drove a SUV full of electronic equipment back to HQ.  I tried napping and got some rest but not a lot.  We went for pizza final meal.  I think if I went there again, I’d get Sicilian style as thin crust really isn’t my thing.

Watched some YouTube.

I got up before my 2:45AM alarm, so total about four hours of sleep in two nights before my 6:15AM flight.  I got home without any issues, too tired to read a book on my long flight, where I just conked out shortly into flight.

Had work to do Monday.  Kept falling asleep throughout the day.

Great experience.

I just enjoy playing VTES.  I’m discouraged by how boring decks are, including my own, as I’ve built (as in pulled the cards, I write a lot of decks I never play) maybe 500 decks in my life at this point, and it’s all so similar.

Shadowfist could have been better, but it may have been how much I was focused on VTES that made it harder to care what happened outside of the draft.

SHA was just an incomplete as a game to me.

Hanging out with my True Dungeon team and the hosts’ dogs was … the sort of thing I would be happy to do a lot.  Both at HQ and in the SHA area.

Jay was very kind to drive me around … when I wasn’t learning the freeway system around Columbus.

I got to hang out with VTES players, try to help some with deck change ideas.  I got to amuse myself by giving rather than taking.  I got to hang out with ‘Fisters, even one in my hood that I don’t spend a lot of time normally talking to.  I got inspired with VTES deck ideas on the flights home, serious ideas in some cases.

Nothing really went wrong other than being top seed going into the finals of the NAC.  Well, I was horribly sleep deprived a lot of the time, but that’s to be expected.  Maybe I don’t do Sunday Funday in future and just sleep all day.  Hopefully, I don’t have 6:15AM flight on Monday after con.

KublaCon 2023

As usual, I blow off Friday.  I don’t really go to these local cons to play anything anymore, which is why they feel more like chores than events.

I do work on Shadowfist decks during the week as well as a couple Traveller demo decks (that never got used for demo purposes nor have I ever played them).

Saturday, head up about 10AM to go get breakfast/lunch at Shanghai Dumpling Shop.  Predictably get there half an hour early so look through everything at Dean’s Produce before finally getting some pears.  Get the two things I care most about for food.  Hard on body to eat that much these days.

Get to con at noon.  Dump stuff in Jeff’s room, which I decided I’d stay in for the con rather than commute back and forth – thanks Jeff for putting me up.  Go hang out with ‘fisters who are not ‘fisting.

Play a couple of games of Tsuro.  I don’t dislike filler games, I just think of them as filler.  Could just spend time talking, but whatever.  Go through some new fan cards and build a couple decks as I complain about how one of the cards should have the Acrobats designator.

As some folks disappear and others are into a game they care about, I start falling asleep, so I go lie down.  Yup, game conventions – places to nap.

I get up and get Traveller stuff together to head down to the dungeon that is the CCG room.  I was reminded that this room was the same type as on the other side where CCGs were located for years.  In recent years, we got a room with natural light and plenty of space.

Traveller demos are stressful as the game is complicated, so I want to explain in excruciating detail how to play in each game.  Well, when six of the eight people who signed up show up, I have to divide my attention.  Admittedly, the family with two young children left early for good reasons as the game is not easy.  The other three finished up their game after a very long time.

It helped that Jeff could come by between his staff rounds.  Generally, I end up with the most people with the fewest people to explain how to play.  I don’t know if it’s night demos or earlier in the con or what, but I consistently get more people Saturday nights than other times.

Jeff and his brother finish up what they are doing, and we go for hot pot.  The green onion pancake was quite good.  The hot pot was not.  I never know with these places what the sauce situation is, so I didn’t go to try to find the sauce bar, which I only saw on the way out.  Sauces would have helped a lot as our spicy broth was just bland.

Barely get any sleep.  Get up and go to Little Lucca’s to get same sandwich I don’t generally end up enjoying that much.  Problem with LL’s is that their bread, which I like by itself, so dominates the filling that the sandwich is unbalanced and pretty tasteless.  I think I try to remember to ask for more mustard so that there’s some flavor.  They have garlic spread and whatever, but I’m going to be around people, so that’s out, and sandwiches should actually taste like something without special sauces.

I help set up Traveller being run by Jeff’s sister and brother-in-law.  I finally get to ‘fisting.

Apparently, I only played five games.  It felt like more, but they did not go that fast.

I started out playing a game with deck entirely of the new fan cards.  The deck was Hand, and I had all sorts of damage redirection text to parse.  I did do a little bit in this game, played The Master, Underworld Coronation went off, and I did nothing for the rest of the game.  In fact, I even started a turn with the thought of making a bid for victory, playing Revolution to take everything in play, except two things – one, it was ruled differently than it should have been ruled, two, it didn’t matter as it got Catching Bulletsed anyway.

The games were casual even though we had 10 players as it allowed people to come and go.

Same three of us played again.  I played Lotus with bunch of cards I don’t normally play.  I played one 3c character who got murdered by Who’s the Monkey Now? after I tried The Withering of Souls.  I, then, didn’t do anything else.  Yeah, Shadowfist.

Then, I played another three player with a deck entirely of new cards.  Ascended.  I have problems getting enough resources to play things, so I just keep putting out FSSs and get a bunch of power.  I finally get to play Kennedy Rose, who gets stolen.  I play Puppet Dictator, who also gets stolen.  Jason is playing a Song of the Assassin deck and makes a final bid for victory by drawing the rest of his deck, which fails.  Merlin effortlessly wins at that point.

Four player game – yeah, the slow, regulation heavy format I was made to play.  I play Purists!!  Why, when I hate playing Purists decks even though the individual cards are so interesting?  Because it’s the only deck I have that combines old cards with fan cards.  I do stuff.  I actually play character removal in this deck and remove some characters.  My Secret Headquarters survives the whole game.  I can’t keep the other Purists deck from becoming defenseless after I block a Mutator with Jirani Parker and Discerning Fire away his Voice of the Unnameable and Inoue Oram (masterminds!), so the weenie Lotus/Jammers deck which was closest to victory most of the game won.  My Fermat’s Soldiers actually had Ambush at times, also gave Ambush to an Orange Master off of RigDis.  While the Orange deck did get lots of power, it was regulated for the most part.

Finally, time to become legendary.  Jammers.  Time for unparalleled sleaze.  I get power off of Solar Farm, Jury-Rigged Dynamo on … Möbius Gardens (the one true way), Scroungings, Lighting the Fuse, Dr. Ivan Vasilovich.  So, I get to do stuff like play Napalm Addict and 401k Squad and … Netherflitters.

Miguel whiffs on Glimpse of Brief Eternity due to the pure awesome of this deck.  I manage to twice … twice … forget to use Bustling Metro Stations.  I need to stop playing the card as I forget about FSS abilities all of the time.

Yet, I run through my opponents, even as Miguel is playing my Purists deck and got to see a couple new cards in action.  He didn’t pay attention to my stating that my Netherflitters gave Mobility, so his bid for victory just ran into two extra interceptors.

Yup, win one game.  Well, admittely, that’s 20% of the games, where the expected number of wins would be 1.6.

My Gazelle piracy deck (Traveller) didn’t get played by Jeff’s brother-in-law.  I go to bed, lying around for hours.

Monday morning, go to Lucky’s for sandwich, takes forever and costs 50% more than it used to, so I think I’m finally done with getting from this Lucky’s even though I’ve had some good sandwiches from there.  Get stuff in car that isn’t Traveller.  Talk to two people before my Traveller event.  Set up in dungeon.

Talk to couple people up from SoCal for a while.  Jeff gets done with his staff stuff, so we do some playtesting of the Gazelle deck.  I win three games.  I don’t dispute that there are answers in our game to things like generating 20+ Attack Value on rounds 2 and 3, but I don’t think they are good enough to make the game fun to play when people build serious piracy decks.  We don’t want extremes.  We want piracy as both a tactical play, which it often is, especially with starter decks, and a path to victory with some interesting interactions.  I just don’t find pure piracy to have interesting interactions.  I couldn’t care less about what complications people play – my adventure deck is entirely designed to suppress opponents’ victory points.

So, I got to talk to various people I used to do stuff with.  I got to play some Shadowfist and with different folks.  Got some interesting prizes from that – thanks Merlin for running Shadowfist locally.  Got to finally test Gazelle deck, a deck I don’t really want to play.  Got to teach some.  It was a good weekend.  Got out of the house.  But, I just don’t feel local cons as they aren’t adventures, aren’t special, and require way too much work as I hall around 60 pounds of Traveller stuff and worry about how to give people a decent experience.

Gen Con Events 2023

So, event registration opened up last Sunday.

And, I have complaining.

Some complaining, not nearly as much complaining as people who didn’t get the True Dungeon events they wanted or whatever.

I’m used to the process taking like 30 minutes.  Admittedly, now that there’s a last minute True Dungeon run organization process the team goes through, can expect it to take longer.  But, my initial wish list took 2.5 hours to process.  I don’t recall with the first year of wish lists what my number was, but there were a couple years of being in the 2000s.  This year, 6980th in line.  After an hour and 45 minutes, I was still 4400th in line.

I got into a few first choices and a bunch of second choices for the RPGs I was two levels deep on in the eight non-Sunday slots I tried to get into.  I got none of the 20 TD runs I had in my wish list.  With teammate getting two runs, I resubmitted my wish list with like two changes (I started trying to drop useless events, but that took too long as I had Sunday supers game starting).  4652nd in line.  Done in 15 minutes.  My third and fourth wish list submissions were so fast I don’t know how long they took.

I think someone had returned a ticket for the one Sunday event I tried to get into as it didn’t hit first submission, but I got into it on second submission.

I have an event in every “RPG slot” except Sunday morning when there wasn’t anything I cared about.  I dropped the event I got into Saturday night due to when our run is then.  Friday night’s run is late enough that I have a game in the night slot.

So, I could go into how to try to get TD runs … note that I don’t care about individual tickets – I only want to get full runs.  But, whatever, who cares about premier events or whatever that cause ten thousand people to submit within seconds of event reg opening up?  Sure, Lorcana was this year, but, in theory, there’s something a big deal every year … beyond TD that essentially was sold out within four hours and had one event listed as having tickets one day into event reg.

I don’t go to Gen Con because of True Dungeon.  I play TD because I’m at GC.

I did look at a much wider range of events this year as one of my friends who has never been wanted to go and would have different interests than mine.  But, here’s my normal process.

Check TCG and non-collectible card games because people don’t seem to understand the difference to see if there’s anything sexy.  Look at the start times of games I might want to play and give up on CCGs because people schedule them at unacceptable times that overlap “RPG slots”.  I thought about Dragon Dice a number of times, especially the Monster Bash event, but noon is only acceptable on Sunday.

In recent past years, only look at LARPs to find the Heroes of Rokugan event.  I have done parlor LARPs at GC in the past, but I’m not really into LARPs, not even the HoR ones, and I’m not doing HoR5.

Create two additional columns in my spreadsheet, breaking datetime into date and time.  Filter to RPGs, sort by either game system or date or time first then like the others next.  I might filter to only ones that are at least 3 hours long as it’s dumb to have a RPG session less than 4 hours, yet some stuff is only 3 hours long.  At one point, filtered out expensive RPGs as it makes zero sense to me to have the norm be $4 and have other stuff be $8 or whatever.

Look for systems or interesting descriptions in systems I don’t eschew.  I ignore anything D&D, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, or pretty much anything popular.  I look for obscure systems that don’t sound like comedy or sci-fi or teens or too horrory, especially this year where I want a more light-hearted experience.  Toon events started at noon or I would have tried for one of them.

End up with around 25 different RPGs I want to do.  It’s impossible to do more than 11.  So, I don’t feel that strongly about not getting all of my first choices.  Sure, I want most of my first choices and it becomes complicated how to layer back ups in a given time slot.  When HoR was much of my schedule, things weren’t that complicated as they don’t care which event you have a ticket for just a ticket (or generics) for that slot.

I try not to have too many 8AM games.  I avoid games longer than 4 hours as they either overlap or run too late.

I would have gotten into a Starship Horizons slot with other folks before our TD run, but there weren’t enough tickets left, so I got the last ticket for my friend who is volunteering for TD this year.  No Magic events as only three Magic events were even on the schedule.  There is a BattleTech Alpha Strike event I could do before the TD run, but it’s rather expensive for an event where I don’t get any stuff.  I could just take a nap or have a slow dinner.

Rest of the 17,000 events?  Who cares.  I can effortlessly fill my schedule just doing obscure RPGs.  You can read about some of the ones I found most interesting in the past.

Sure, I have a hole in my schedule to where I could set foot in exhibit hall, but why would I do that?  I need to get rid of stuff not chase more stuff.

No concerts, no parties, no planned dinners.  I thought I was going to do a lot more stuff with Dave, but his volunteer hours are 10-6 every day, so I just revert to the norm of:  Babylon RPG, Four Colours Al Fresco, How We Came To Be Here, Fate of the Norns, all the other stuff I don’t remember off the top of my head.  Btw, I am doing Fate of the Norns again this year, but it’s an Irish FotN event, which is different.

I didn’t get into the adventure I was most interested in, but, you know what, the system is light years ahead of the pre-wish list years, and I don’t see how it could be a better system, even if it seems like back end technical processing could be handled vastly better.

Generic tickets?

Who gets those?

Gamehole Con 2022

Flights on Wednesday are unusually late for traveling East so can get some stuff done in morning.  However, I had forgotten about desleeving Wheel of Time cards for the new Age, The Age of Notplayability.

Two of us get in on schedule and get picked up by his roommates, who happen to have an empty beer barrel in the back of the van.

I talk with folks in one room for a while.  Then, achieve my absurdly large accessible room … by myself.

Thursday

I have to drop off WoT cards at 9AM and plan on going to True Dungeon area for the great smoothening of tinker toys (this makes more sense if you care about TD).

I go down for breakfast, figuring it will be typical hotel stuff (when there’s hot food) of bacon, sausage, and whatever it is that other people eat.  There was something like that, on premade sandwiches – already a fail – that had eggs on them.  So, I had four tiny muffins that weren’t good.

Now, while four CCG boxes isn’t that heavy, tokens are always heavy and cards exacerbates.  I had to move about 12 pounds from my suitcase to get it under 50 to my carry on.  While I didn’t need my laptop while gaming, that dropped a trivial amount from around the 50 pounds of carry on I was hauling.  I also could leave some tokens in room, so I crossed street to drop off WoT, crossed back, got tokens, crossed again.

I had good amount of time to get through some stuff.  A higher tier tycoon transmuted various stuff for me, then I sold him old gold, including all of my woodie gold, and a few Rothfuss monster trophies.

I sold a cursed token.  I made a lot of progress on another tinker set.

We get together late for team run.  One of our team betrayed us for Platinum Ticket run, but “friend of team” filled in.

11:49AM – Epic Double Down, initial run of Darkhold Keep

A common rant recently is that vastly more players should only play Epic (or don’t max out their builds), but they either don’t understand how easy TD is, don’t want to be challenged, or have some other defect.

I play Illusionist, which was a mixed bag.  See, I find spamming Daze on monsters to be just as bad as having overpowered builds on a run.  I play Illusionist to have monsters make Will saves so that my spells don’t do anything.  But, with Epic DD plus lack of familiarity, I had to actually take combat seriously.

Others played barbarian, bard, druid, fighter, where only druid was unusual for the player running it.

Since DK isn’t done, guess I’m going to not spoil any rooms.  Nice aesthetic.  I like brighter, but it was pretty in the dark.  Puzzle rooms were fine, though one of them was great idea and rough execution.  We could make virtually no progress on that one, even if it looked cool.

I Dazed three times in one combat, and we won.  My group did first puzzle proud, where I was just extra pair of hands.  But, anyway, perfect example of how TD isn’t nearly as hard as certain players seem to think.

Lunch

We go to BBQ place next to hotel.  It sounded good.  It wasn’t.  My rootbeer was fine.  My chips were okay.  My smoked brisket needed way more BBQ sauce, as my salad needed real lettuce and more dressing.  To a certain extent, I’m to blame for ordering brisket as I like brisket to either be crunchy or to be thin.  Local Armadillo Willy’s does lean brisket just the way I want it and is much cheaper – yes, California restaurant much cheaper than middle of the country.  I wonder if they jack their prices during convention, as I thought they were cheaper than they were.  Actually, I don’t find Bay Area food to be expensive, though I pick places based on price.

I had to rush through my meal as I had RPEX at 3PM.

RPEX 3PM – Ogre’s Lair

My first RPEX, um, ex-perience.  I had no idea what was going on logistically.  I had never played.  Everyone thought I was on a run with guy who sold me ticket until he told us I was on other run at same time.

I could see trying it again.  Just not with this sort of group.  This was just like playing True Dungeon for first time with veteran players who don’t let you just play as a newb.  Only two of us hadn’t done the dungeon, so we were incessantly being asked what we wanted to do and were expected to do everything.  I can do that.  I just need you four people to go away so that I can focus on playing instead of being patronized.

It’s as one person says – it’s 99% True Dungeon and not True Dungeon at all.  It’s much more of a live action D&D than TD is, where TD is its own inspired by D&D experience with vastly more production value.

5:37PM – Darkhold Keep fiver Hardcore

Some of us picked up random tickets to fill out schedule.  I picked up one of these and two of the team joined me at last minute.  Two newbs were on another run by themselves, so they lumped us together.  We proceeded to info overload the newbs but hopefully made the experience not be worse than it should have been.

I played “I Can Heal That” cleric (that’s my actual name for the build in the phone app).  Incompetent at offense, +35 heal.  Not that I needed to do anything as the two new players’ stats were insanely overloaded for Hardcore.

This was fun.  We still didn’t get that one puzzle.  Two newbs seemed to enjoy fine.  We succeed.  I don’t really have any reason to do anything as nobody took significant damage, but I got to Turn Undead with Greater Holy Symbol of Pelor and Searing Light in same combat without that being broken.  That justified playing one of my least favorite classes.

8PM – Ebony Bay eighter Hardcore

There were two players who didn’t have substantial collections, so we played on irrelevant mode.  I played bard.  A player appreciated my bardsong that I crafted for specific room.  Nobody else cared, including my teammates.  I kept casting the bad bard songs in room 7 (Ebony Bay should be done for any con I care about).

This was not particularly fun.  You know what makes TD fun?  Play with the people you want to play with and play with far less than 10.  Well, that’s the experience I want.  More than like six players and the others don’t add anything to the experience.

The payoff for rando run was teammates got a legendary in treasure.  I got trash.

Friday

We had a breakfast/brunch planned.  My comment on Thursday breakfast was, “I’m looking forward to tomorrow already.”

I met with someone I game with online beforehand who was kind enough to drive to the hotel even though wasn’t attending the con.

We went to family diner/coffee shop that was like a chain my mother took me to all of the time when I was young.

My bacon cheeseburger with chiles was too bland.  I should have asked for mustard.  It had a strange burnt taste to it, which I think was the bun.  My side salad was quite pleasant.  My oreo milkshake was entirely decent.

12:24PM – Ebony Bay sixer Epic all alt classes

This was our full group (of who went to the con).  I played Drunken Master, so I practiced monk sliding … and still sucked on first combat.

The +3 Initiative for drunkenness mattered.  I crit undead.  Multiple times.  No matter how much a certain somebody tried to deprive me of coolness.  We had a truly, um, epic way of getting past the siren.  Our couple did a scene from Romeo and Juliet, where we didn’t get the entire performance recorded.  It was even funnier as he took off his wedding ring and tried to get other player to play Romeo.  I got some poetry practice in on the side as I can’t coordinate with other people – I think too much about what I do to sync with others.

We had an Illusionist on this run, so Daze locked monster between that and Druid Summoner’s Summon Swarm.  But, more importantly, we got a player card we got to keep because of what was written on it (something about thespians – I wasn’t shown it … by the team).

2:25PM – Darkhold Keep elevener Nightmare

PUG (pick up group).  This was bad.  We were so overpowered as to be ridiculous.  I played paladin.  My combats consisted entirely of “I Guard the bard”.  We still had tons of time to kill after the killing phase that was combat.

What redeemed this was another teammate got a legendary in treasure.

4:48PM – Ebony Bay solo(!!) Hardcore

I had a ticket to fill out my schedule and the team abandoned me to my fate.  Coach says when I walk in “I have good news and bad news.”  I respond “Am I doing solo?”

I play a monk build designed for solo Nightmare, but I was on third run in a row and knew I couldn’t do a minimum of one of the puzzles, so I went on easy mode.  I just didn’t want to have to be sharp.  And, I was dull by the end of the run.

First ever in person solo run to my recollection.  I took push on room two.  Talked with room DMs a lot to pass the time.  I caught eight of the balls in GPS room as they only shoot them to one side for solo run.  Ella got the other two.

Room 5.  My humble monk upon his pilgrimage was able to achieve the lofty title of Associate Siren with some singing, poetry, and more juggling than I thought I was capable of doing, possibly the weight of the three d20s helped me actually catch one before I dropped them.

Room 6.  I never actually did this puzzle in previous four runs of this dungeon.  The room is small, had plenty of other people, people who cared to do stuff.  I knew too much to be challenged by the room, but I actually had to spend a little time thinking for a change.

Room 7.  I forgot I was running greaves that could reduce the Darkrift damage.  I only took damage in room 2 (from push) and this room, and I healed six of the nine damage I had taken, so I was at 50hp going into this room.  I almost got hit three times by Warden.  First I Shadowskinned.  Other two were absorbed by my valkyrie.  So, if I wasn’t dulled, I would have known this was an easy win for me.  I critted multiple times in this combat on my non-cheating slides.  I need to look up how you handle when monk doesn’t do second slide in timely manner as I did that at least once on this run.

I pop out to epilogue and get my survivor pin and only 21 treasure draws.  I get bag out of bag check and rush over to Trent’s Pizza Party.  I get there in time for choices of cheese pizza (abomination) or veggie pizza.  People.  First of all, never order cheese pizza – that’s just a cheese sandwich.  Second, order way more meat lover’s than you think because people destroy that stuff.  I do win something cool – hand crafted wooden box for holding whatever, limited edition #25 of 50.  I sell it before I leave the party for $100 (80% of list) to “cut weight”.  I forgot to mention above.  The reason for selling the old gold at not a great price was to cut weight.  I embraced my inner ascetic monkihood for like the only time in my life at this con by constantly making decisions that cut weight.  I kept giving away stuff from 10-packs and treasure to the TD folks to not have to carry chaff back with me even though my suitcase would hold that and I lost a lot of weight from the WoT cards and the sidemutes.

My two Critical Hit Sodas over the con?

First was brown sugar cinnamon, cherry, grenadine, peach, peach puree, and raspberry lemonade and was quite good after they added more peach, but I felt bad about wasting a bunch of puree that wouldn’t go through the straw.

Second was same without puree.  Maybe not as well balanced or as powerful, but it was solid.  I also had a wild berry blast smoothie during the con from whoever had booth inside con – that was really good at first and overall solid.

I went back to room to do various admin stuff, like put my drop off transmute order together to transmute two Elfstones, two Totems, and a 5k bar.  I had traded my only Elfstone for two Elfstone components as party of a cash and trade deal.

Saturday

Let’s go to breakfast at same place only one hour earlier!

My hash browns were fine, should have been crunchier.  My bacon was too crunchy.  My sausage patty was not good, way too thick/dense.  My sweet tea wasn’t my level of sweet.  My hot fudge sundae was good.  Tried teammate’s pancakes and they were good.

10:13AM – Darkhold Keep tenner Hardcore

I played bard again (same build) as people wanted other classes.  My 15 token build did what it was made to do – bardsong.  I got hit once for 20.  I spent a lot of time explaining how mage powers worked to someone who hadn’t played in years and had never played VTD.

I don’t know what people thought of this run.  Did it with two teammates.  I hope the other people I didn’t interact with enjoyed the run, but I mostly was thinking about logistics for leaving con and going to airport.  I did sell some tokens to runmate, which made me happy even if I didn’t get top dollar.  I just need to cut … investment level.

Got my stuff together.  Teammates kind enough to take me to airport.  (They also had lent me stuff to get my transmutes together.)  I kept falling asleep in terminal or on plane as my body was crashing hard.  Had half a rack of ribs with fries and greens in Denver.  Ribs were fine, thought the ketchup on my plate was more BBQ sauce because I forget that other people care about ketchup and do weird stuff like use tomato-sugar on fries, so could have used more BBQ sauce.  Fries were not terrible but people do not understand what crunchy means, and the salad was trash as people don’t understand that there’s one true lettuce and that “greens” are for people who like pretentious junk.

I didn’t hang out with one teammate enough as he was busy with other folks a lot of the time.  I got enough TD runs in and even bad runs had value, especially monetary value to teammates – best thing I got in treasure all con was crap UR.  Tried RPEX.  Couldn’t try Starship Horizons as it got canceled, which affected others way more than I.  But, schedule worked out.  Met someone in person didn’t get to meet earlier in year as didn’t end up going to Weekend in Rokugan.  Got virtually no sleep.  Food was okay, better than Gen Con, though also vastly more expensive as I didn’t plan meals.  I sold at least some stuff and talked to people about selling other stuff later.  We completed as many tinker sets as we wanted to.

Gen Con was about finishing up Heroes of Rokugan.  I enjoyed HoR but not much else.  This was far more generally enjoyable, even though I did almost entirely TD.

B+?  Sure.

Gen Con 2022

Been home since Monday morning, but each year is getting harder and harder on the body.  Sure, last year was different, but last year had many fewer things to do to where I had nothing I needed to do Sunday and didn’t have True Dungeon runs after 11PM …

Tuesday

Start packing.  Getting together the stuff I’m supposed to take to people.  Have boxes and bags of tokens all over the place.  Try to set boxes aside that I know I won’t need.  Things like trade goods since I’m not transmuting any tokens at Gen Con …

Wednesday

Get up at 2AM, right before alarm, which is good sign.  Around 3:30AM, Dave arrives and we head to SJC.  We have to wait until 4AM for Unitedfolk to appear.  Flight to DEN is fairly pleasant – too much legroom, actually.  Layover is short.  Flight to IND is far less comfortable.  Kind of late, but we land before 3PM, so we are still way earlier than the norm.  Uber to hotel, check in easily enough, get vast mountain of drink coupons, vast, vast mountain.

Go to ICC for vacc line.  Takes us about 30 minutes to get through, head to TD hangout area.  I complete my sale of tokens to a reseller … oh, wait, I don’t.  I give unto the reseller a stack of tokens minus … come on, you know what’s coming because this guy is a true master of the literary form … trade goods.  Fortunately, the trade goods amounted to only 1.7% of the value of the deal.  (Do not try to figure out how large this deal was as it will depress you.  Not try.)

Forget Failure #1 – check.

After reseller starts packing up, since not really anything to do, decide to get food.  Go by Steak & Shake and I nix that as the whole point of going to S&S before the Flood was that it was $3.99 for the burger combos.  Why would I spend $8-10 for this stuff?  We eventually end up at Taco Bell in the mall.  I remember why I don’t go to the mall for food.  Actually, in terms of all aspects of meal, this was my favorite meal.  We ate at hotel during their happy hour thing.  So, the ambience was better than any other meal.

Trying to sleep was miserable.  Kept waking up.  In the middle of the night, realized I had not put my treasure enhancer sheet (the one with Charms of Avarice) back into my binder after Skull Con, as didn’t need it there.  Typical pro move to put something out of normal spot for “reasons”, pro as in pro-blem.

Forget Failure #2 – check.

This one mattered more in that I could just mail the trade goods to reseller when got home, which I did today.  Sure, wasted $10, but that’s a minor punishment.

Other thing did in middle of the night was shogi puzzles to get sleepier.

Thursday

I had bought out a TD run the day events went on sale.  Sure, the better move is to leave in cart, figure out who is getting what, release without buying as sitting on $880 of tickets was uninspiring.  I finally sold all of the tickets for it to people through forums.  Some vets.  Mostly casual/new players.

So, two things I needed to do for a run I wasn’t on:  one, deliver rares and stuff I sold to one of the players; two, dump consumable stuff on new(?) players.

My run was 10:26AM.  I was in TD area before 8:30AM.  Because I.  I am a genius.

We eventually do our run.

Ebony Bay

First time for group, which included various people who aren’t regular players.  We only did Nightmare as we wanted a casual stroll to victory.

Because no organization of classes, I ended up doing melee wizard.  We failed one of the combats and one of the puzzles, but we won.  The physical puzzle was amusing.  I was not good at physicality.  Even worse on second Ebony Bay run.

Guess it’s time to speak generally about my TD play at GC because that’s how my mind works rather than having the patience to wait until after all of my runs.

What do I get out of in person TD play?

I don’t care much about puzzles.  There are exceptions, of course.  But, I often don’t engage much with puzzles.  I particularly don’t care about physical puzzles, and I pretty much hate any puzzle involving colors due to prior experiences with color puzzles.

I don’t care about combat hardly at all, unlike VTD where combat interests me for optimizing number crunching with quirky builds.

So, what do I actually enjoy about in person TD play?

Some dungeons are aesthetically pleasing.  Felurian’s tree back when she first appeared.  N2’s ice and snow.

Hanging out and talking with people I know.  People I know.

Almost as if I’m going to foreshadow rather than follow up on this theme.

After TD

I had taken an insane amount of weight with me.  We had time for lunch.  Andy took my bag back to the room, removed the tokens, brought it back.  That bag almost killed both of us.  Somehow, my blue bag which has been used for innumerable CCG cards boxes over the years and gone on most, possibly all, of my international trips since my mother bought it (for her to use) did not tear.

We went to Thai Paradise.  In terms of food, this was my favorite food of the con.  I ate it very late while playing a module, so the ambience was a fail and the enjoyment of eating leisurely was nonexistent.

2PM – HoR4 CIT70

Everyone’s favorite mod.  We played for about 2 hours but it felt dense.  My favorite GM GMed it.  Three of us played with folks I played a bunch with in 2021, which was a nice player entangling.  While it might have been somewhat over the top and nonstop, I like high fantasy.

7PM – HoR4 CIT71

The final mod of the campaign.  Whereas 70 involved feeling like doing something even if a bunch of stuff did didn’t really matter, this just felt like entirely on rails with no meaningful decisions and being dragged around to do something didn’t care about doing.  Played for like 2 hours.

11:26PM – TD Ebony Bay

So, went over to TD area early.  Just removing one binder of the three and not carrying tokens for other people vastly decreased weight.  I bought a Totem of Heroism from someone I’ve dealt with in the past by mail.  Bunch of people had gotten Totems from the Golden Ticket runs, including two of my teammates.  I tried to figure out whether we could be done trying to make more; it turned out we still cared about making more beyond the ones we had either made or could make with what we already had.

I ran staff monk as I wanted to see if anyone noticed my only sliding one slider.  Never came up.  We were playing Epic, and we failed.

So, first time at this con got out of a run about 1:30AM.  That means getting to sleep 3AM or later.  Spent time updating Totem of Heroism component spreadsheet.

We old folks were already hurting walking back to hotel.

Thursday done.

Friday

9AM – HoR CIT69

I was on my own for the intro mod.  I could have enjoyed this for its story.  Has a NPC I care about.  Got to use a Language rarely used.

But, here’s the problem with playing intro mods in person – you get people who don’t know what the Jigoku is going on.  Not just from a HoR4 standpoint.  Get people who don’t know what L5R is suddenly playing some mod that means nothing to them narratively.

It’s just painful playing with these types of players.  Sure, everyone is that player at some point.  But, there are mods that actually suit people who need to be introduced to L5R.  I’m not sure there’s a HoR4 mod that qualifies – I’m too tired at moment to access the memory hovel.

I was fading, predictably.  I considered going to the room for a nap, but I tried instead getting a mocha cookie crumble frappuccino venti where I noticed that napping at this hotel might have worked.

2PM – HoR CIT68

This was fine.  Of course the obvious thing to do in the middle of a war for the fate of the Empire is to stop to help finish a tax audit.

7PM – HoR CIT67

This was not.  Where every other mod went like 2 hours, this took 4.  I was worried about this possibility, which is why I kept bringing a bunch of tokens with me to things that had nothing to do with tokens.

Because I forgot the only tokens that actually get used on every run and our group has a token tycoon with builds for Epic for every class, I didn’t need any tokens for runs.

I rushed back to room to get tokens but also to carry 15+ pounds of CCG cards.  Yes, I did not play a single CCG at Gen Con, not even demo a game I was supposed to demo but forgot about until too late.  But, I took five 800 count boxes of … Wheel of Time(!!) … cards to my True Dungeon run!!  I got to coaching right as it ended, where my build had already been figured out for me.  But, coaching did have the person I was passing WoT cards to as I trade my WoT collection in two shipments for a token [sic] sum.

11:13PM – TD Weird Magic

So, I missed Felurian’s Feast, though I had three cracks at doing a run Thursday morning.  This was the only run of Weird Magic I have ever done.  The final fight was far more interesting to me mechanically than Ebony Bay’s, but I’ll never in my life metagame for it.

Being physically and emotionally spent didn’t help my engagement level.  I did actually cast spells as a wizard.  I could have played more knowledgeably as people knew the dungeon, but it’s hard for me to take combat seriously when playing in person as I have no sense as to how combat is going, which makes me not care about it.  I should just ask people how seriously I should take combat on in person runs, as others have different interests and it’s not like I’m trying to fail.

Saturday

9AM – HoR4 Battle Interactive

We had five going into Gen Con.  We had figured out who to fill out table earlier in con.  I forgot that my Battle dice pool was higher due to burning Book of Water.  I rolled above median … and like one slot too low to get the scenario packet we wanted.

We wanted to face the Undead Champion of the Badger so that our Badger could strangle him to death for some Badger on Badger action.  Instead, I chose for us to face the Harbinger of Hate, us serving under Yoritomo Arashi, Champion of the Mantis.

Ended up we were the only Hold The Line table.  In theory, if we failed, would be quite bad.  In practice, I don’t know that the PC side would ever lose.  If it did actually matter, other tables could drop bonus Victory Points on the Hold The Line encounters no one chose.

We had Hiruma Reikokuna, Defender of the Wall thus the only reason we had a chance on some of these encounters, Kasuga Nekohono’o, two players from Eric’s online group, Ichiro Yuuki and Shinjo Narantsetseg, our only shugenja, Doji Tsudoken, and the least useful battle commander outside of actually making Battle rolls, Kaeru Odayaka.

BR1

I roll 61 on my Battle roll.  Beiden Pass suddenly becomes an Ivory Kingdoms jungle.  Trees 50′ away camouflage 4 Yoritomo Bushi, Mirumoto Bushi, and Crane Bushi.  We never learn their names.  I get a 47 on Initiative.  I fire a fleshcutter at someone coming and do 33 wounds.  I get hit for 16, 11 after reduction.  Reikokuna takes out Mirumoto.  Nekohono’o does 90 wounds to Daidoji who was Guarding Mirumoto.  Round 2, I shoot someone for 51 wounds.  Combat is over, and I Medicine myself to go from 11 wounds to 9.

So, you may not know what Kaeru Bushi School does since a full basic school is a HoR4 thing.  The school is all about staves/unarmed knockdown/disarm.  Do get simple attacks with katana at SR-4, but I’m never going to care with my Kenjutsu 1.  By using a yumi, that I only had because of the favor system in the campaign, exactly none of my five school techniques mattered.

This is known as winning.  Frog blood winning.

We crushed this fight.  But, then …

BR2

I roll 73 on my Battle roll.  The jungle is an illusion!  Still can’t see through the trees.  I roll 48 on Investigation, half our party avoided pit traps.  Yoritomo zombies join Daidoji Scouts and a Soshi Shugenja.  Get hit with Fear 5 from spell, make roll.  Roll 57 for Initiative.  Swap with Doji Tsudoken.  We get hit with Slayer’s Knives from shugenja and take 55 wounds.  All of us.  I’m also knocked Prone.  Zombie hits me and I drop.  There’s a light and an explosion in the distance from what’s going on at another table.  We negotiate a resolution to a fight that can easily kill everyone except Hiruma Reikokuna.  Doji Tsudoken lifecasts to heal everyone else.

His new character is Daidoji Hasai, Daidoji Iron Warrior.  So, lots of simple attacks where ATNs in the 40s are useless is fine for the OP PCs in the campaign but pretty uninteresting for fair PCs like our Ichiro and Shinjo (Moto Bushi).  This wasn’t a group with a bunch of campaign certs.  Only Nekohono’o and Reikokuna were really suited to this level of play in what was supposed to be IR 4+.  Now, if you really want to kill PCs at the end, then, sure, it made sense.  Tsudoken was an Asahina Shugenja, so we did have Soul’s Grace sleaze, but he wasn’t really designed for combat of this level, only having like 37 ATN, when this level of play should have like 47 ATN to start with.

GM was really easy on us.  He had a ton of attacks go to the Defender of the Wall who couldn’t be hurt by the zombies.  Already, this was losing any real sense of satisfaction, even though my goal was to just get the table to the end.  I probably should have sacrificed myself this round in our negotiated failure as it would have helped everyone else in next fight as I switch to a fresh shugenja with the same Battle roll.

BR3

I roll 76 on my Battle roll.  Illusionary trees go away.  “Jun” in black armor with an aura of violent heat causes rage zombies to rise.  We have to make a Rage Roll (like Fear but affected by various disads).  I succeed with 35 as I have no sworn enemies or the like.  Nekohono’o fails … multiple times.  Forced into Full Attack stance while I go into Full Defense.  We are facing the Harbinger of Hate and 12 crazed zombies.  I get 27 on Initiative.  I don’t switch with anyone.  My ATN goes to 65 from FD.  I get hit twice by zombie.  Harbinger of Hate has Init of 99, kills Nekohono’o on round 1.

Yeah.

Round 2, I Guard the Iron Warrior since I fight like a courtier.  Get hit again.  Shinjo and Ichiro are dropped.  Round 3, we are running out of time, so I do the ultimate Frog move – I drop my yumi, switch to Full Attack, and punch the Harbinger of Hate activing my Blessing of Fu Leng(!!) to deal 33 wounds, then miss with second punch.  Iron Warrior finishes Harbinger off after Reikokuna had done most of the work.  Zombies don’t collapse and eat three of our party members or tear them apart or whatever.

Again, we could have easily just been overrun by zombies.  Only Defender of the Wall could ignore them, where I got hit multiple times with ATN 65.

This was also a pretty boring fight.  Really, none of our fights were all that interesting.  Round 1 fight was faceless.  Round 2 did have Investigation rolls but we were so overwhelmed that we never even attacked the shugenja.  Round 3 was just one boss dude with some faceless entourage (that would occasionally jump in the way of attacks on the Harbinger).

I had 3 bonus VPs to give out every round.  I put 3 into killing Bearer of Vengeance first round.  Second round, 3 into saving Mirumoto Daimyo(?) in a Hold The Line packet.  Third round, 3 into saving Seppun Nekono of the Imperial Legions.

Only two of us qualify for going on to final tables.  Reikokuna goes on to fight Toturi the IXth, and I go on to die against surviving lieutenants.

I sit at lieutenant fight table.  I roll Init.  I have 42 wounds already, earthquake does 28 more, dropping me.  The Dark Harrier walks over to me lying on the ground and beheads me, 1 minute in to combat.  Eventually, some of the people at our table flee under Legion of the Moon invisibility.  The assessment of the only PC who was suited to this challenge level was that it was just a pointless exercise to play this out, which I agree with.  We had like three IR-3 characters out of six at the table, including people without much L5R experience as new players were given IR-3 characters for the event.  GM asked if Tsuruchi Archer had a nemuranai weapon at one point.  Of course the new player didn’t.

You know, I feel like making this rant, as the attitude pisses me off.

There is a mod in which players get to choose a nemuranai object.  After that mod, there are tons of situations where not having a nemuranai weapon makes you irrelevant in combat (for those who need mundane attacks to inflict damage).  So, anyone who chose something interesting got fucked over by the campaign.  I then had people argue to me that it “punished people who did choose a nemuranai weapon” to not have people become useless in high rank combats.  That “there were other weapons in the mod”.  So, take a high rank bushi who has Heavy Weapons 7 and base damage of 8k3 or 9k3 and simple attacks with main weapon and have them use some other skill with 1/3 ranks with a weapon that does like 5k2 damage once in a round instead?  That’s completely reasonable.  So, sure, I can have my cool nemuranai biwa for my own personal story that has zero mechanical relevance as a biwa.  Or, I could deal damage to invulnerable enemies.  Mechanics matter, and you just fucked over anyone who didn’t choose a weapon that allowed them to function normally.  And, you didn’t tell them that at the time to make sure they understood the implications of a decision.  And, what about the people who didn’t play the mod, like two of our party members at the end of the campaign?

There’s a reason I’m done with HoR.  HoR was fun at GC22, much more fun than TD was for me.  I enjoy hanging out with people I only see at GC.  Not every mod in HoR4 sucks.  I can survive most of the lack of editing as, actually, some of the HoR3 mods I really liked were a disaster to try to run with how poorly they explained mod specific mechanics.  I prefer L5R to other RPGs I get to play, and I’d put up with the FFG version of L5R (probably).  I just am tired of feeling like I’m a second class citizen when I can just go play L5R in a home game, instead.

I also probably play too much L5R.  My decline in enthusiasm for L5R 4e play has something to do with not playing the vastly inferior other systems more often to remember how bad it could be.

I didn’t mind getting killed not doing anything.  The character never mattered that much to me and should have died at least three times before being irrelevant in what was an activity that never felt relevant to the campaign, anyway.

5PM – HoR4 Political Interactive

I played my deceased character as I did have unfinished business with the character.  I kind of forgot that I was supposed to gain sympathy for the Fortune of Torture.

The PI started as many do – with my not caring remotely about the politics in the campaign.  I was going to contend for shogun, but dead characters couldn’t compete for positions, which just left me to get a chance to talk to people I didn’t have much chance to all con and, eventually, help get Nekohono’o made Fortune of Companionship.  I also helped Moto Jochi get made family daimyo, maybe helped the only imperial do whatever he did.

It was amusing.  Nekohono’o not only got made into a god, he got to see the Scorpion Champion off himself, what with his Sworn Enemy: Scorpion Clan, which contributed to his failing the Rage roll against the Harbinger of Hate.  There was other hilarious stuff involving him, but you kind of had to be there.

Dinner

We went to Yard House.  The lemonade was watery and my Carnivore pizza had plenty of meat that all tasted the same.  At least got to hang out with Bill for a while.

Sunday

I didn’t have an 8AM game.  Not a 9AM game, either.  I did get breakfast after 10AM to get my free bacon and sausage with syrup and a muffin with Coke.  You know, the breakfast of dead Frogs.

I did have a noon game.

Gods of Metal – Ragnarock

The GM asked how we decided on this game.  My first response was “I like esoteric RPGs and found this in Gen Con schedule”, but, actually, I think I’ve read the Kickstarter entry for the game and decided not to back it.

This is what I used to do a lot before devoting most of my schedule to HoR and TD.  Four Colours al Fresco, which I overdid.  Babylon (not 5).  Fate of the Norns.  How We Came to Live Here.  Lots of stuff I can’t think of the name of, but you can read my old blog posts for some of them.

This was okay but very awkward.  I never understood what the setting was trying to be.  It was very freeform world creation with some music theme, but I didn’t feel like enough of a music theme as it didn’t seem to matter mechanically.  I can see an album cover of my turning into a griffin and eviscerating a bearded dragon, but the final enemy being on a roulette wheel didn’t seem to have anything to do with music.

How metal were we?  Kind of metal.  I don’t know anything about different types of metal, which may have mattered.

It was just an odd experience that was pretty neutral where I’ve been far more into other experiences with exotic games.  Maelstrom gave me achieving enlightenment as a puppet, for instance.

Post Con Dinner

My roommates and I waited quite a while for dinner with TD teammates, but they were too busy with Starship Horizons Adventures breakdown, so we went to Punch Bowl Social for dinner to try something different.

I debated wedge salad or patty melt as nothing else on the menu appealed to me.  Yes, overpriced iceberg lettuce was almost my choice.  It should have been.  My patty melt was ridiculous.  I ordered my fries crunchy and they were okay, if still not cooked properly – french fries are supposed to be red.  Because you cook them until they are crunchy on the outside shy of burning them black.  The rye bread was too large for the burger.  It wasn’t grilled.  The onions were raw.  I was surprised the burger had pink in the inside as it had the texture of a frozen patty being cooked.  Didn’t have enough cheese.  It wasn’t a good burger, but it didn’t even try to be a patty melt.

Are my patty melts great?  No.  Some are good, though.  Sure, I don’t make them short enough.  But, I saute the onions, even have done them well before by sauteing them long enough then throwing in the right amount of mustard and vinegar at the end.  And, of course, I grill the bread.

I used to live off of Steak & Shake because it cost $4 for a combo meal, was open at 7AM every day, and gave me protein and fat to get me through the day.  I switched to going to Subway every day because they have sweet teas and are still under $8 for a foot long.  I’m interested in trying Thai Paradise’s “Thai hot” because my curry that was supposed to be “hot” wasn’t spicy at all and because I still enjoyed it.  There are some other places I’d try like a ramen place and a bar and grille.

Overall, the con was a mess.  I meant to lead with this.

I kept expecting to have time to talk to people, even people in same hotel, and everyone was doing their own things.  Even doing TD runs together, there were so many friends of friends who needed attention that couldn’t spend time talking to people, plus runs were too often late at night.  The vast mountain of drink coupons never got used.

The late night runs are too hard on us aged folk.

Next year should be fascinating as I don’t have any HoR commitments to build my schedule around, so I can do things like spend a day doing TD only, spend a day doing something like Starship Horizons Adventures only, spend a day doing Magic two-headed giant sealed.

Maybe I will go to sleep before 3AM and not need to set an alarm for 6:50AM.

The gaming was okay, not significantly worse than other recent years, though I really didn’t care about any of the TD runs after they were over.  I expect Gamehole Con to be different.  Maybe I shouldn’t – expectations are bad, m’kay.

The hotel was fine, flights were fine, Ubers were fine, but I just felt like I didn’t know what I should be doing much of the time, where I usually have my Gen Cons completely nailed down.  The downside of knowing more people and the focus being more on people than on gaming.

The weight of tokens was brutal.  I say this every time, but I need to figure out how to manage having to drag around tokens rather than the beauty of playing VTD from home where I barely touch my tokens.

My forgetting things at home just dragged down my experience.  My mind has been going for years.  I need to simplify.  Though, I really did need to sell tokens this year.

Skull Con

Skull Con was a one-time event held at Walker’s Bluff Winery in Carterville.  But, then, for anyone who plays True Dungeon, they already know this.  It’s in Southern Illinois because TDHQ is in Carbondale.  To participate, had to have a specific token, so it was analagous to invitation only.

There was an earlier event – True Dungeon Celebration – held in the same place, so other people had a better idea what the place was like.

At one point, the Western branch of our group had four Skulls as there was a thought that Andy’s brother could go, but his interest in TD is too casual, so Andy sold his second Skull.  I would cover Dave and myself with my two.  Dave had to do a family thing, instead.  Neither Andy nor I were patrons, so the addition of a patron event to this promised event wasn’t of any value to us.

We decided to pass on some flights early not realizing Russia would invade Ukraine.  After that, became a lot of angst over flights, only complicated by our ride from the airport to the Carbondale hotel preferring we fly through Nashville when there were far better flight possibilities through St. Louis.  There’s a small airport near Carterville/Carbondale that does flights to Nashville and St. Louis.

Eventually, Andy and I were on Alaska Air from Oakland to Seattle to St. Louis and Andy was on Cape Air from Marion to Nashville, then American to DFW to SJC where I was STL to DEN to SJC to arrive about half an hour later.  Our flight from Oakland to Seattle got canceled.  We rearranged to have same flight from Seattle to STL but fly out of SFO two hours earlier, giving a very long layover in Seattle.

Thursday

I wake up from my alarm at 1AM.  I finish packing, prep the house for absence, get out the door close to 2:30AM.  I get to Andy’s around 3:10AM never having driven there before.  As I wasn’t supposed to arrive until 3:30AM, I sat outside for 20 minutes as it was very pleasant temperaturewise.  Per the plan, his wife drove us to SFO, where we got there in under an hour.

Meanwhile, Jim and Blaine were driving from Raleigh, NC to Meet Me in St. Louis, um, meet us in St. Louis.

Andy’s wife had vouchers for the Alaska lounge, so we hung out there quite a while.  Had a bunch of sausage and had a decent grapefruit juice and grenadine mocktail.

They check into our hotel.

We arrive at STL.  It is oppressively hot.  So, so miserable.

We get settled into hotel and try to figure out where to eat.  My first BBQ choice isn’t open.  My second BBQ choice is about to close because weeknight in St. Louis means 8PM is late.  We end up at Salt + Smoke.  After having gorged on sausage, which was not in my mental travel plan, having a heavy meal was going to be harsh.  But, the point of staying overnight in St. Louis was to try to engage some with St. Louis on the trip as I had never been to Missouri nor Illinois and, if I’m going to go somewhere in the world, want to feel like I’m actually in that place and not just passing through.

So, we shared ribs and hush puppies.  I thought about getting a pound of brisket, which I would have done if circumstances were different, but I got a double cheeseburger instead.  And, thus, began the trip’s blandfest.  I dumped a bunch of BBQ sauce on my burger.  My brisket chili side got mostly a mustard BBQ sauce to give it any flavor.  Ribs were better than those (the chili was a tasteless paste), but the thing I enjoyed the most was my Coke as it was a good sweet Coke.

We retired for the eve.

Friday

Wanting to interact with the Gateway Arch in some way, especially as it’s a few blocks away, I set out to walk over to the park and either take a picture or touch it, like how I’ve never been inside the Sydney Opera House, but I’ve touched it.  It was fine temperaturewise.  Maybe had something to do with how it was raining …

Jim and Blaine were part of a major fetch quest.  So, we head out to get sourdough bread.  Two people from the San Francisco Bay Area head out to get sourdough bread in St. Louis.  We head to Little Italy because other options are either not open or lacking in the sourdough.

I made a critical mistake here.  This was the perfect opportunity to “do something” in St. Louis by going into a bakery and not buying anything.  But, I’m so used to not caring about going into stores that I waited in the car.

We proceed on to Carbondale to hit TDHQ to check in and do some transmutes (well, I had some transmutes to do, unimportant ones) before hitting the hotel we couldn’t check into yet.

We get there, and I had my next case of dissonance between mental picture of how things would work and reality.  Oh, not in terms of not having anything to do but check in and do transmutes as I figured workshop tours weren’t going to happen, but in terms of how busy things were.  I somehow thought the whole weekend endeavor would be much more … open.

Because I didn’t have slips in my bagged stuff, I stood outside and slipped my bags.  The weather kept changing as I was standing there from decent when clouds blocked Sun to unpleasant and back and forth.

Having wasted everyone else’s time, without getting a Critical Hit Soda from the truck parked at TDHQ, we were finally off to get food.

I had researched some places.  I don’t like making decisions that affect other people, and I don’t like most food, anyway, so I avoid deciding where to go.  I didn’t realize how indecisive this group is.  We ended up going by a Mexican option that I found.  I say go by because it was a grocery store.  It may have been closed, too.  But, since I wanted to eat someplace comfortable, I was happy to go elsewhere.  We went to some Mexican place nearby.

The chips and salsa was okay.  The chips really needed the salsa, but it was fine.  Jim hated his nachos.  My enchiladas were what I wanted in terms of components, but the entire plate was pretty tasteless.  I dumped a bunch of salsa on it and ate chips with it to give some textural variation.  It was food.

We go to the liquor store next door for sour beer as part of the fetch quest.  Andy has next to no idea what’s going on with the fetch quest.  That I don’t partake of alcohol outside of cooking or on special occasions sipping something for toasts hardly mattered.  That both questers don’t partake made this funny as Andy was beer consultant.

We go back to TDHQ to pick up my transmuted trade goods.

We go to hotel to check in.

Eventually, the Nicks arrive.  They shall heretofore be referred to as the Nicks.

So, outside of Dave, we had our entire team together for the first time, including Garry Shambling, our growing Shambling Mound.

We went over to Walker’s Bluff as other folks had transmutes to do.  We watched the very short meta puzzle resolution that got everyone blessed for our runs as Raven, Laz, and Mike stacked skulls.  We eventually had the buffet at 7PM.  I’m not surprised that places have inferior versions of food for their group events than their normal food.  But, there were virtually no choices.  Either burger or chicken burger.  Three side choices.  No dessert options.  It just felt bizarre.  Their tasting room had stuff you could order that was vastly superior in terms of options.

We did our run.  It was six of us plus two folks related to each other.  I played druid to get polyaction in.

It was hot.  The dungeon was pretty miserable (until you got to room 7).

Room one, I poly into earth elemental.  In VTD, this would have been cooler as the monster did sonic damage, but in person is so much less mechanical.

Room two, I poly into air elemental.  We didn’t realize this room was dangerous as we critted right off the bat, preventing the everyone takes lots of damage monster attack and the physical damage immunity effect.

In two combats, I think we Quick Striked twice and won combat after two full rounds.  We also were close to time in both cases.  Damn, in person play was slow, more like what people online claim about how much time you have where I’ve routinely had combats that were far more rounds than the essentially three we were getting in.

Room three, I tried to recall AD&D 1e psionic attack/defense matrix and couldn’t.  I had minimal involvement in the puzzle, as is typical in my in person play.  It was fine.

Room four, my least favorite room, though I really hadn’t thought much of the dungeon to this point as the first two rooms lacked decorations and really felt like you were in a winery rather than a TD dungeon.  I turned into a fire elemental.  The magic immunity(?) meant nothing to me.  By this point, the elf wizard and I had talked as he didn’t realize we had meaningful healing in the party, so he had started doing more maho.

Room five was my favorite set up, but the execution had some problems.  It was just way too slow.  I turned into an ice elemental and was the only one sliding against the fire monk, but the group couldn’t even take out the ice monk.  In VTD, this would have been so much more mechanically interesting.  A major reason I prefer VTD to in person play is that combat is so vague in person.  I have no sense as to what’s going on in terms of crunching numbers.

What in person play has that VTD doesn’t, of course, is sliding.  Sliding can be interesting.  I think I critted on my first slide in this room, though it didn’t matter.

Room six was a perfectly fine puzzle that I had no engagement with.  If it didn’t feel incredibly derivative of prior puzzles, it would have seemed much cooler.  Also, having different colors that didn’t matter brings back bad memories of prior puzzles where colors did matter.

Room seven had the coolness.  The layout was very awkward.  The NPC was a really good aesthetic.  I polyed into earth elemental again.  All three Freezing Orbs I cast through Quick Blessing succeeded, so I dealt about 320 damage myself (before any DR).  Everyone survived due to Sacrifice and bad rolls on Cavadar’s part.

In epilogue, we found out about the curses.  The obvious preference was to get curses as it’s a collectible token.  I didn’t get cursed.  Treasure was trash, as usual in 2022.  The bonus reward for the meta puzzle being solved was meh to me.  I despise the design of Mystic Orb.  I found the methods of acquisition obnoxious.  It’s just power for the sake of power.

So, having done the dungeon once, I enjoyed room 7 the most, which helped my overall feeling towards the dungeon, I thought the puzzles were fine even though I didn’t really do anything [again, typical].  Our group was enjoyable.  Oh, our bard was a younger person who asked about 80s pop rock songs.  I offered up two songs that she had just heard recently that she wasn’t particularly familiar with.

We did get dumped out into the darkness of what’s a very confusing layout.  We managed to get back to the hotel through the deep, dark (and hot) night, where I’m not sure we could say it was Paradise By The Dashboard Light.

Saturday

I had a run at 10:48AM.  Jim had run at 1:24PM.  Jim and Nicks had patron run at 7:12PM.  Jim and Blaine had Grunnel’s Gift ritual at some undefined point.  We ended up going over to Walker’s Bluff as group rather than have me jump on someone else’s traversing.  I told my best hat ever story to the Nicks.

We got there too early to transmute stuff.  To this point, I hadn’t had a Critical Hit Soda soda as there was too much water to be had.  I had four trades to do at the con and had only completed one on Friday night.

I cashed in some Aragonite for treasure draws – all trash.  We hadn’t done anything about figuing out tinker toy sets.

So, while the quest to complete sets to transmute Totem of Heroism was an activity to do, it also was a distraction from doing other things.  I was very much trying to push to get stuff completed as I like getting things over with.

My run was only me from our group.  I knew BC to a minor extent.  I met Rob.  Our bard had never played in person before.  He was borrowing from his quartermaster, and I could tell he was underpowered for this level of play (not nearly as much as if this was a VTD Nightmare).  Oh, neither of my runs were Epic.  Given how easy they both turned out, Epic might have been more interesting, but …  I’ll come back to this.

So, I asked him if he wanted to borrow more stuff.  I’m reluctant to loan out weapons to people I don’t know even though his options were not exciting.  I tried to focus on places that didn’t really change his build but just upped numbers.  I “lent” him Goggles of the Deadshot as he was more ranged oriented than melee and Boots of the Four Winds to just up his damage by four.

I was thinking going in that I’d play like paladin, but, when I got there, only options left were two wizards, monk, and rogue.  I went wizard as I had a melee wizard build already in the app.  I was +21 to hit and +41 damage with melee, +21 spell damage.

Room one was much the same.  Room two was not.  In my prior run, we smashed monk’s face magic item immediately so never knew how much it mattered.  Here, we took 34 damage each before I critted with my staff.  Room three I probably did about as much as I did first time around, which worked well as I knew the solution and my trivial involvement didn’t spoil anything.  Room four, still didn’t cast a spell.  By this point, people realized I had the highest physical attack damage bonus in the party.  In one of these rooms, I hit on a 3.  In one of these rooms, I critted, then immediately slid too short to hit on next round.

Room five was different.  This time, I focused on ice monk because I knew of the fire monk’s retribution damage and because I had generally the best saves in the party and figured the reflex save for fighting the ice monk wouldn’t affect me.  They did their elemental shield things by dumping gems on the boards.  Like everyone else, I liked that.  I just slid right through the stuff.  We still didn’t kill either monk.  In the moment, I forgot about the option of a late Lightning Storm to try to multitarget murder.

Room six, I pointed out like one, minor thing and the group solved it just in time.

Room seven, I stole the barbarian’s crit by bumping him out and critting myself.  We won without any real deaths – paladin had to Sacrifice.

I still have my wizard card.  My wizard card with zero spells marked off.  While it’s possible to cast and not have any marked off, I never actually cast a spell.

So, neither run was hard.  But, that was fine because it also wasn’t stuff like effortlessly crushing monsters and because in person play is much more about puzzles than combat for me … … …  Perhaps you see why I vastly prefer VTD.  Where I mostly ignore both combat and puzzles in in person play and just spend much of my time looking at the dungeon decorations, in VTD I actually find combat interesting and can find puzzles more interesting when I do things like solo runs before doing other runs so I can see if I can solve stuff on my own.

I actually had a lot of good slides.  I had some bad ones.  Now, rogues’ flanking helped immensely with crits, but I did some pretty sweet bumps at times to get others into 20s.  I played two spellcaster classes and cast a total of four spells in combat, one of which was healing (needlessly against one-punch monk).  Since it had been so long, I wanted to slide to see how it felt.  It felt better than it had in the past.  I think the intense studying of numbers in VTD has helped me care somewhat more about people getting hits or crits in person, even if I still have little sense how I contribute to combats outside of smashing magical face items or adding my 100 damage on a crit with a staff.

The bard was extremely happy with his first in person experience.  When we left (into sunlight), he was talking to people about wanting to play again immediately.

Then, I had trades to complete.  Then, I had nothing necessary.

I talked with Arnold for a while as he gave me some ammo and I gave him some Traveller stuff for his friends who like the game.  Endgame came by for our reverse transmute trade.  I traded him an extra Drue’s +5 Baton of Focus for various stuff.  I sold Arnold’s friend the +3 Baton of Focus for under list price as I already had one I was trying to get rid of.

I found Arcanist for my final trade.  A trade that didn’t seem to make a ton of sense as it largely didn’t affect either of us, but I was done with required stuff at just after 2PM on Saturday.

I found the team, that had finally done something about trying to complete tinker sets.  I put together the stuff to transmute a Pharacus’, which was useful not just because I would rather 2x Pharacus’ and 1x GCoD than 1x Pharacus’ and 2x GCoD but because it allowed me to turn a bunch of tokens into a single token, aka cut weight.

We continued to have tinker stuff going on, then headed over to the tasting room for food as I kind of needed to eat something at some point during the day.  Oh, I had finally gotten my first Critical Hit Soda soda between final trade and meeting up with the team.  I got lemonade with grenadine and peach puree.  It was good.

We ordered food.  They were out of the Caesar Salad, so I got the Creole Burger instead to go with chips, which was unwise as it was yet another heavy meal, but chips alone wouldn’t have done it.  I got my second CHSS with lemonade, blueberry, brown sugar cinnamon, no cherry because they were out, and grenadine.  It was not good.  It was very watery where I tasted everything with CHSS #1 and barely tasted the lemonade base with CHSS #2.

Food was okay.  Andy’s fries were cooked better than mine in that some of his were actually crunchy.

I had played a couple hands of hearts earlier.  I avoided playing Codenames not because I dislike the game but because I’m offended by the idea of jumping through a bunch of hoops to do a game convention only to play something could play at any time anywhere.

I did play Galaga.  Yup, arcade machine.  I didn’t come close to the high score, which was in the 130,000’s.  My second go was only 70,000+.  Only two tries, some three and a half decades (probably) since I last played, while I was trying to screw the knob on the joystick back on during my first try while simultaneously playing, gives various excuses for not displaying the culmination of vast amounts of quarters being traded for joystick action in my misspent youth.

The three of us who lacked patronhood went back to hotel.

Andy, neither a patron nor a double runner nor a Grunnel’s Gifter, had nothing he needed to do on Saturday.  Blaine had only the single Friday run and GG.

Saturday was the end of the con.

I enjoyed the event.  I actually quite enjoy hanging out with people, even people who aren’t gamers but mostly gamers so I can tell geek stories and have people understand them to some degree, though I talk story about other things which only likely made people realize how poorly I suit this world.

But, it was horribly executed.  I sent a message to Endgame when we were trying to sync up for the trade that my take on the event was that it was busy and dense with nothing to do.  There were way too few events.  The staggered times on Saturday meant less coordination of our group, though my missing out on a great breakfast place was fine as food doesn’t actually matter to me a whole lot.  Seriously, the con started 3PM Friday and was done Saturday night.  No trivia.  No auction.  No True Grind.  No effort to mix players outside of Trent’s Thursday night side pizza get together which we weren’t going to as I wanted to spend time in St. Louis.

I barely met people I didn’t know.  Now, it made sense to spend a lot of time with teammates that I hadn’t met in person before, so that did reduce trying to spend time with others, but the format of the event would have seen me largely not meet people if things were different.

I didn’t even get out to the cool fantasy themed park in the Carbondale area because Walker’s Bluff is so isolated and there weren’t like tour groups organized for people who didn’t have a car to just run off.  I suppose we should have gone there instead of hotel Saturday night but forgot about it as I was still wondering whether it was better to wait until Jim was done or just bag the day.

The location is just terrible for people flying.  Not because of the flying, though people who don’t fly don’t seem to realize that folks like me do things like get up at 1AM to fly only halfway across the country to end up someplace at 6PM.  Because of the 2.5 hours from St. Louis to Carbondale or trying to time using Cape Air.  It’s just so awkward.

Sunday

Leave day.  Andy has to go to local airport.  I had ride worked out with dragon6483 and Kermit.  We go to Miniature Market first as I didn’t need to get to airport until quite late.  They get me to airport with like three hours before my flight.

I finish a massive water bottle Kermit got me as Pelor forbid I waste even water.

I’m fading.  At various times over the weekend, I would nod off as the lack of sleep was brutal.  Finally fly to Denver.  Andy and I exchange texts while I’m stuck sitting on tarmac in Denver waiting for our gate to clear while he has a real flight delay.

My first flight was okay, only two seats on each side.  Second flight someone was in middle seat.  It sucked as it nearly always does.

So, I was supposed to get in like half an hour later than Andy into SJC.  He got in more than a half an hour later than I did.

His wife drove us back to their place.  Then, maybe due to adrenaline, I was not too tired to drive home.

The tiredness actually hit me much more today.

I would absolutely not want to do this same sort of thing again.  I would happily take all of the hanging out talking with people, especially teammates, but this event wasn’t just a mess of travel logistics but prevented me from going to Origins where I could have hung out with VTESfolk and gamed vastly more.

I spent more time in cars driving from and to St. Louis than I did playing games, even including Galaga.  I don’t know how to emphasize how absurd that is.

Now, this event was probably not terribly different from say my going to Gamehole Con.  But, GHC is not a one time ever event.  It’s not in a state I had never been to before or involved going to another state I had never been to before.  (I got to tell my first ever Gen Con pizza story to dragon6483 on the ride to St. Louis.)  I could have had pretty much the same experience at GHC and played way, way more TD.

My expectations weren’t high, especially with how obviously disorganized things were, but it still failed my expectations as I’m a scheduled event sort of gamer not a social butterfly sort of gamer who finds pick up boardgames interesting.  I actually enjoy talking about and thinking about gaming more than the act of gaming much of the time, but I still go to conventions to actually play games, and there was four hours of TD in what took two vacation days and wrecked me physically with all of the heavy meals and lack of sleep.

Have this event in early Spring (maybe my hayfever won’t kick in outside of this area), have way more organization to enable people to do more special stuff and not just stuff they could do anywhere, enable people to do everything together not segregate people by having events only some people can do, be longer, have better dungeons in a better location as I actually don’t find the winery a good location – the immersion is way worse than is typical for in person play.