History.
Well, my history, anyway.
Well, a really bad recap of my history as my first Gen Con predated my oldest email that I have control of and it’s not like I took notes of Gen Con back in the 90s, and, well, one of the primary reasons for this blog is to not lose my gaming history.
There are other people who have gone to way more Gen Cons than I have, much longer unbroken streaks. I don’t know that I can even prove an unbroken streak, though I did find emails that help fill in some of the later Milwaukee years.
I also have a four digit Gen Con ID#.
Possibly in 1996 or 1997, I went to my first Gen Con. I think it was 96 because of when I met Andrew H., no, the other Andrew H., who I met through Ultimate Combat! and who got me into Jyhad.
What I remember of that first Gen Con was that I stayed at the cheapest option available as I didn’t have money and had no idea what I was doing as I was going by myself after, I think, Andrew had to cancel. I wouldn’t have gone at all, I don’t think, unless someone else was planning on going as well. I stayed at the University of Wisconsin, where I had to take a shuttle bus to and from the convention center.
So, you are craving food commentary?
In luck. This was a classic moment of how my life works out. I still use this story for … things.
I was staying in a dorm room. Shared bathroom. No refrigerator. I had no idea about anything, so I decided to walk around one day when I had free time because free time was something I had back when I didn’t understand how to play games whenever I was awake at Gen Con.
I wandered in the hood of a pizza place. Perfect – cheap food that I can eat throughout the weekend … as I don’t think I realized I didn’t have a refrigerator. I get up to the counter and order two large pizzas with no cheese. The guy asks where I’m from. I say California(!!). He asks me if that’s normal.
First time I’m ever in Wisconsin … and I order my first Wisconsin pizza(s) … and I order them without cheese … because everyone knows that Wisconsinites know nothing about cheese. This is how my mind senses the perfect thing to do and unconsciously causes me to say/choose that “perfect” thing.
My real mistake was ordering onions on one or both of the pizzas. I had to pick them off after a day or so.
I don’t remember any of my games, but I think I tried to get into an Immortal: The Invisible War game and may very well have done so.
The next year, I went with Andrew, Donna, and Magic’s first world’s champion. We got a hotel by the airport and commuted in each day. I had a better understanding of the cadence of the con and think this was the year that I tried to get into games in each of a day’s four RPG time slots – 8-12, 12-4, 4-8, 8-12. I don’t remember being tired in the middle of my first game on Thursday; shocking, I know, how times change.
I remember that a bunch of RPGs were in one large room with curtains on temporary curtain rods dividing tables. That actually worked pretty well. This should have been the Gen Con that I played Wraith: The Oblivion with nine other players in a game meant for five. We switched out playing our Shadows. I just pulled my copy of the core book off the shelf behind me, a book I haven’t touched in years, maybe a decade or more. It has a character sheet with my session notes on the back inside the cover. I don’t know if it’s from this event. Probably not, but I’ve played Wraith very few times as I didn’t like it much.
In 1999 and 2000, I stayed with Precedence Publishing. First time I ever went to a Hooters was one of these years. I think it’s the last time I’ve ever been to a Hooters. I already blogged about my insane volunteering schedule from 1999. When I didn’t stay with Precedence in 2001, it had a lot to do with learning a lesson about wanting to spend time gaming and not working.
I met Dave and Bernie through the Babylon 5 CCG, then met Bill. In the early aughts, I went with some combination of them and stayed with Fred, a known VTES player one of those years.
What was most memorable? I was doing a lot of B5 CCG stuff and some Wheel of Time stuff. I wrote an article for Scrye Magazine, yes, I used to occasionally write for a game magazine, about the winning decks for a Wheel of Time championship. I remember that clearly because the winner had played a Shadow Genocide deck that we had playtested against a lot, so we thought it sucked for winning, but, if you didn’t understand how to be cautious with your main character, you would get murdered easily. I played in like one Wheel of Time major and managed to have a proxy in my deck that might have mattered a lot. I only went 3-1 and was something like 5th or 6th.
My B5 experiences were modest and/or painful. My fellow Californians did far better. Bill got pissed when his infinite influence engine got ruled to not work a day before the North American Championships.
I did less RPGing, obviously. I did Dragon Dice for years. I got introduced to DD, of course, through Gen Con and was very interested for a while, though I hardly ever enjoyed actually playing.
I don’t see a lot of reason to get into the Indy years in this post. The Milwaukee years have the least documentation and some of the more memorable events.
I went to SafeHouse one year. I was bored out of my mind as I waited for my friends to finish drinking/socializing. I watched people play poker. I wandered around and around. As I most recently told someone in Croatia, a bar is normally the least suitable place for me to be.
I liked Milwaukee. Smallish city that was easily walkable without much in the way of awful neighborhoods in the middle of the night near the convention center.
This is a not very useful email I could find from 1999:
<< Also how was your trip back from Gencon?
Dead tired. Weird Midwest Express breakfast. Fairly smooth, though.
And are you planning to meet up with Illka and Harri, since they are
spending a week in Mountian View? >>Unless they get ahold of me, it doesn’t look like it. I don’t think I’m going to try and e-mail Ilkka. OTOH, we seem to do well with visitors. We had someone from Minnesota play in one of our tournaments. We had someone from the UK do a bunch of stuff with us. If only we could get people in the Bay Area to show up …
I’ve sent some messages out to individuals with the hopes of having a comprehensive Gen Con report. We need to have some of the stories. I think you may know something about a couple of them (from the tournament).
Note that we were talking about two Finnish players, Finland being a burning inferno bed of B5 CCG play. Now, I just need to get out to Finland … oh, right, I almost did this year.
I said there was little reason to talk about Indy this time around, but who knows what’s going to happen to my ability to quote myself from 15 years ago? Here’s a Gen Con report from 2005:
I’ll try to break this up a bit so that people can read what they care anything about.
V:TES –
Played a couple of pickup games after the con. First was 6 player with, I think, The Lasombra going first with weenieish Lasombra Potence rush (not mono-Potence like my joke deck). I was second with Abominable (anarch Abominations who learn Quietus). Dave Sisson played my Pariah and friends Path of Death and the Soul deck. Shane played disciplineless weenies. Bernie played my Nagaraja Graverobbing deck. Ben Peal played my Enkidu deck. Shane got popped between the two “rush” decks. The Lasombra got annihilated by Enkidu, which was hilarious considering what the deck’s actually supposed to do. We gave Dave some bad advice at one point, not realizing what he had in hand, and rather than draw the game out some more, I didn’t try too hard to survive as Ben won 4 VPs to Dave’s 2.
Second game, I think Dave went first playing my Lasombra demon deck (you know, the deck that needs more Shades). Bernie played my Hierophant deck. Shane played Nos Archon. Ben played his Corporate Hit Squad deck as seen in the Player’s Guide !Ventrue section. I played Daughters Suppressing Fire bleed. Bernie had all sorts of problems being between Gratiano and the Archon deck and kept Temptationing Shane’s Nossies. Ben kept himself hale but didn’t put a lot of pressure on me. Dave struggled with his deck and I ousted him. Bernie was weak enough that I could get him without effort. Shane finally was able to punk Ben’s Famed Miriam to take Ben out after Ben went low bringing out more dudes. I bled for tons to take Shane out in one turn.
Picked up the new Player’s Guide as some of you all may have noticed already. Ran some demos for WW to get Retribution/Spontaneous Power swag from Oscar. Reminded me how much I like the idea of teaching players CCGs and how much I hate the practice, especially for games with steep learning curves. Otherwise, had almost no idea what was going on V:TESwise. I can’t even remember all that Josh told me about the finals of Nationals.
RPGs –
My ten RPGs were: Read or Drown (Big Eyes Small Mouth d20 with homage to the Read Or Die anime); Fireborn; Heroes of Rokugan (living campaign for d10 L5R); Immortal; Beyond the Supernatural; Obsidian; Four Colors Al Fresco; Everlasting; World of Darkness (mortals); Armageddon.
Read or Drown was weak as the players were too silly. Fireborn I’m underwhelmed by. The concept sounds fine to me of playing a reborn dragon in modern London but the mechanics are awkward and the source material didn’t answer the questions I wanted answered, like where did the dragons come from and why are there these other supernaturals. Funny thing about the game, though, was I was the party traitor and didn’t even realize it because I didn’t understand the GM’s handout at all.
HoR was amusing as usual in the sense that my character just doesn’t suit the modules/situations he ends up in. Of course, my Lion courtier is going to run off to the Shadowlands to fight an evil angel (didn’t know L5R had angels) with a Crab magistrate, desert Unicorn and another Unicorn. The only time I attacked anyone was one of our own ship’s crew when I went mad from fright. Hey, cut off his arm. Immortal 3rd Edition, now downloadable for free off of invisiblewar.com or something, might work and Rick Don might be an okay GM normally, but these demoish games have way too little going on to bother with.
Beyond the Supernatural is actually a pretty old Palladium “there are supernaturals among us” that predates a lot of other stuff. Second edition just came out or something. I don’t have much respect for the Palladium mechanics, but this was my best game of the con. I’m actually getting to really like 3 player, investigative con games as the ones I’ve been in recently have had players who were all on the same page such that the plot moved along well with the party doing smart stuff.
Obsidian is a post apocalyptic, multiple gates to hell dimensions have been opened on Earth game. Had a bit of a Star Wars (d6) mechanic thing going. I was the party healer and our main struggle was trying to escape the 35′ demon in plate armor before it killed anyone it could catch. Didn’t do a ton of healing as some of the bad stuff was too deadly. One character died when a cultist caused kitchenware to erupt *out* of the victim’s body.
Thought the Four Colors game was going to be trouble as I wasn’t thrilled with the GM at first and it looked player shy, but we got a full boat. Amusing to me at least, I had the party leader character. Actually got a pretty cool story eventually, though the players were generally too passive. For those that don’t know, this is a free downloadable game of superheroes in Renaissance Italy.
Our party for the Everlasting game: x2 vampires, x1 gargoyle (real gargoyle not vampire variant like WoD), x1 faerie, x1 dragon, x2 gods/demi-gods, x1 angel. We created characters in the first hour with the GM being the owner of the company putting the game out. I was one of the godlings, playing what has to be the wussiest god ever. I figured with that many players and all of the cheesiness, that others would make combat monsters, so I tried for knowledge/diplomacy/supernatural. I used random character creation and got low stats but high completely useless to this game numbers. Besides the basic god package where you can control emotions and regenerate, my awesome godlike power for being a/the Milesian god of magic – Levitation. Not flight, oh no, just levitation. Fortunately, none of the 100 werewolves or so ever attacked me as I was so pathetic in combat that the GM was shocked I had a speed of 1 (think Champions speed chart). I wasn’t even better than the other godling in supernatural knowledge, diplomacy, or the like. All I ended up being good at was not becoming excessively lusty in the presence of werewolves, admittedly something the rest of the party found challenging to various degrees. Most notable thing about this game was how the faerie helped us out in negotations by passing a most magnificent note to the GM involving copious amounts of under the table sex with a werewolf leader (*during* negotiations). We came up with a quite productive solution to the whole vampire/werewolf war by setting up a duel between the leaders. With larger con games of the sort I sign up for, generally two things happen; either the game sucks or the game’s highly amusing. This tended toward the latter.
WoD game didn’t seem like it was going to go well either as the GM was simultaneously eager to move forward and easily distracted into long, irrelevant conversations. We got a couple RPG newbies and actually had an okay game investigating who beat up a neighbor in our apartment complex. I “won” the Nomads book, which doesn’t look terribly fascinating.
I really liked last year’s Armageddon game. Bit of gratuitous sex and way over the top violence. Not a lot of games where the GM leaves the choice of grenade launcher or rocket launcher up to the player playing the magically inclined Knight Templar assassin with brutal antiangel powers. This game wasn’t nearly as interesting as it was way too simplistic. We got tired of debating whether to kill some guy who surrendered to us, so the party “leader” blew his brains out. I incinerated the body when everyone else bailed only to release the giant praying mantis thing. I mismanaged my mana and, though secretly an exiled angel, was knocked unconscious during that fight. Rest was anticlimactic. I still find the over the top power levels in the game terribly amusing where a bullet to the head, antitank rocket, being set on fire by a psychic, elementals and Nephilim beating on you, true immortal in Iron Man like armor blasting you doesn’t really do a whole lot to one of the Mad God corrupted angels/demons. If only we had better guidance from Michelle (archangel Michael as a woman), Odin, and the ghost of Benjamin Franklin in fighting the Dark Apostle’s minions.
Elsewise –
I guess the rest of the stuff I picked up the dealer’s room isn’t terribly interesting to you all. Still recommend Wok’n’Go for your Thai food needs when in Indianapolis. Had an interesting CCG discussion with Kevin Tewart, lead designer or developer or whatever for Yu-Gi-Oh! (I know him from Precedence, same with Vs.’s Mike Hummel), not entirely for public comment. But, it was interesting that the big three CCG companies are WotC, Upper Deck, and … Bandai.
Assuming nothing weird happens the rest of 2020, more Gen Con stuff as I dig up more emails … or, maybe, just more Precedence Publishing related stuff as I dig up more emails as I have way more emails about playtesting CCGs than I do about Gen Con.