Spes Magna Games

So, what with the meeting restrictions imposed by governments local and beyond, the game convention has gone the way of the dodo, but with the qualifier that perhaps the dodo will recover and waddle once again. Some conventions have moved to an online format. One of these is Founders & Legends, running the weekend during which I typed up this paltry review.

The Good

Curious to experience the online convention thing, I registered my son Christopher and me for the weekend. I’m not quite sure why I paid as much money to get through the virtual door as I would have to paid to get through a real door at a convention held in a facility somewhere, but, in fairness, I could have paid for a lower level of access, so that’s on me. Also, Founders & Legends has partnered with Extra Life, so some of the money spent goes to a noble cause. That’s a good thing, and kudos to the Luke Gygax team for supporting Extra Life.

The registration system via Tabletop Systems worked smoothly. In short order, Christopher and I were registered and signed up for two Adventurers League (AL) games, a sort of part one and part two of a continuing saga. We made up two 1st-level characters using AL guidelines, which are straightforward and pretty much exactly what the 5E Player’s Handbook says to do. Our characters, from start to finish, took about 15 minutes, all off-line the old-fashioned way, recording information via pencil on paper.

I found two pictures online to represent our characters and uploaded those via Discord to the DM, who turned the pics into tokens for use with Roll20. After this, we relaxed a bit, waiting for the first event’s beginning.

The events amused well enough. The situations the characters found themselves in were clear, and there was a good mix of roleplaying and action. The DM kept the game moving and used the Roll20 tools to keep things organized. While there were a few technical glitches (more on these in a bit), the Roll20 learning curve isn’t that steep (at least from the player’s side), and the same DM had the game running more smoothly during the second event.

I did have a few difficulties early on after registration. I’ve barely touched (metaphorically) speaking Discord. The virtual help desk and the DM proved most helpful for navigating the details of how to get the audio to work, how to access the correct channels, et cetera. The people working “at” the convention were polite and professional.

The Bad

Not everything we experienced with Founders & Legends evoked thoughts of puppies and ice cream sundaes. Fortunately, most of the bad was pretty much beyond anyone’s control.

Discord and Roll20 both had system wide crashes due to some sort of server or something. I’m far from the most technical person you can find, but I do know that both programs were inaccessible for about an hour. That said, the outage occurred after event one ended and before event two started, so it didn’t affect our convention experience. To paraphrase Suicidal Tendencies, it’s not a problem if it doesn’t affect me. We also had players in both sessions who got booted by Roll20 and/or erred with using Roll20, making communication somewhat inconsistent.

Discord was used for audio, which had a mandatory press-to-talk feature. My Discord settings had me designate a key (or combination of keys) on the keyboard that I had to press in order to be heard. When I stopped pressing the key, nothing on my side of the screen was audible. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but too often folks stopped pressing keys before they stopped speaking, especially during session one.

This meant that Christopher and I missed the last words of the DM’s statements. “The monster claws you, inflicting —” proves to be less informative than it needs to be. Another player saying “Can you move to —” does not convey the request. Unlike the system crashes, the press-to-talk problems were nothing other than human error.

The lack of video other than Roll20’s virtual battlemat bugged me. I didn’t particularly enjoy gaming with disembodied voices that I could only hear when the owners of those voices were pressing to talk. Most of human communication is body language and voice tone. With no video of the player’s faces, et cetera, the quality of communication necessarily degrades.

The Ugly

It’s been months, if not a year-plus, since Christopher and I have participated in Adventurers League. When we did, we did so solely to reunite with a long-lost gaming friend. (Hi, Don!) If Don had not been playing in the AL games, we’d have stayed home.

AL adventures, much like the earlier version Living City, occur within the Forgotten Realms, which must be popular, but with which I’ve never been a huge fan. Every AL and Living City adventure) I’ve ever played in or run shared a these characteristics:

1. An Almost to Totally Linear Structure
2. A Preponderance of Do-Nothing NPCs
3. Offenses against Player Freedom

Permit me to explain with reference to a Living City adventure I played in way back when at local gaming convention.

Our party of adventurers were hired as security for a dinner party. The Lords of Waterdeep attended. No character in our group had advanced past 4th or 5th level. The Lords of Waterdeep hired low-level characters for security. The Lords of Waterdeep, who often had double-digit levels in at least one class along the the magic items one would expect powerful characters to have, had no need of low-level guards, and yet there we were. Fine. Whatever.

Then, Trouble started, and the Lords of Waterdeep huddled in the ballroom and imperiously ordered our low-level characters go deal with the trouble. Any one Lord of Waterdeep could have solved the problems single-handedly, but Do-Nothing NPCs don’t solve problems. They do nothing unless interacted with, and then they stick to the script. They’re tabletop RPG versions of MMORPG shopkeepers.

Then, our characters moved from A to B to C. Each encounter ended with rails leading to the next encounter. Even being presented with a choice going from A to C doesn’t change this since C leads back to A, then to B, et cetera. Sure, this isn’t linear strictly speaking, but A becomes the center of a wheel with spokes and no rim. In another scenario, this one an AL adventure, the final act of the adventure was prescribed. Nothing our characters did at any point during the adventure would avoid or alter the final act. The adventure’s author dictated that the adventure end This Way Only.

Again, every single AL adventure I’ve run or played has these problems. The wiser DM retools the adventure’s structure to remove or at least reduce the severity of these problems, which are purely the result of bad adventure design.

The End

Would I participate in an on-line gaming convention again? Probably not.

Supporting a worthy cause such as Extra Life is a good thing to do, but I think my time and money would have been better used donating directly to Extra Life and spending time with Christopher (and perhaps my wife and daughter as well) doing something else. I don’t regret Founders & Legends, and I only experienced one small part of it, so it’s possible (even likely) that my experience was an anomaly.

Tags: Convention Gaming, reviews

Last OwlCon, I played in an Arabian Nights-inspired adventure that used Barbarians of Lemuria for the rule system. It was quite a hoot. Our characters explored a lost jungle island, fell victim to the machinations of the serpent people, and alternately engaged in fleeing in terror and fighting for their lives. As the session came to an end, we got to “epilogue” about what happened to our characters after the adventure.

I narrated briefly about how my character, who had killed the ship’s captain during the adventure, managed to set himself up as the new ship’s captain, much to the delight of the crew and the gaggle of wenches being entertained by my character’s tale of adventure. Every other players did the same for their characters, and then the GM added his own epilogue, revealing an unexpected twist. In each case, the epilogues could serve as plot hooks. So, if that session were not a convention game but part of an ongoing campaign, the GM could use my epilogue to explore another sea adventure with my character as ship’s captain.

I liked epiloguing so much that I added it to both sessions of Stars Without Number I ran at OwlCon. It seemed to be a big hit with the players. Best of all, at the end of the session, I had one potential plot hook per player, plus the epilogue that I added as the GM. (I remember one of my two GM epilogues describing the lost space yacht shifting out of warp near inhabited space while on board the Cthulhoid horror in the form of a long dead mother comforted her long dead son.)

I remain intrigued by epiloguing.

The basic idea is simple. After an adventure is over, each player gets about two minutes to describe some of that adventure’s consequences as they relate specifically to that player’s character. Each player does this, taking turns in whatever manner seems appropriate. Then, after all the players have epilogued, the GM gets to add his two cents worth. The events of the epilogue are assumed to happen during the downtime between adventures.

Unless things go horribly awry, Man Day Adventures meets again this Saturday. I don’t know if we’ll get an entire adventure done that day. I’m thinking not, but, regardless, I think I’m going to introduce epiloguing to the group and see what happens.

Might be fun.

Tags: Convention Gaming, game play

Day 4 of the 30-Day D&D Challenge is supposed to be about my favorite gameworld. Well, that’s easy: the 1E world of Greyhawk from the boxed set. It included just enough information to establish a background setting without providing the overwhelming amount of campaign specific data that, in my experience, made the game more about the game world than the characters. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Forgotten Realms.)

We used the Greyhawk boxed set extensively as a backdrop for years. Sure, we may have ventured into other campaigns, such as Dark Sun or the Forgotten Realms or Birthright‘s setting, but we always ended up back in Greyhawk. This was true regardless of edition. My 1E games were largely set in Greyhawk. The same was true with 2E, 3E, 3.5E, and Pathfinder (although it was less true with Pathfinder as I tended to use my own material for that game).

In Other News

My son Christopher and I attended Space City Con 2013 here in Houston this last Friday evening and most of Saturday. I’m going to do a longer post about my thoughts, activities, et cetera, but for now here’s the short version: If I’d paid to get into the convention, I would’ve been really irritated with the experience. I’ve been to several cons over the years, and, in my opinion, Space City Con ranks very near the bottom of them. I don’t won’t to get into too much of the why right now, and I must also admit that it wasn’t all bad.

But, as I tell my students, it’s ontologically impossible for something to be all bad.

Tags: 30 Day D&D Challenge, Convention Gaming

Well, Texicon 2012 has come and gone, and Giant Boy and I rest comfortably at home once more. So, you wonder, how was the convention? Well, let me tell you, breaking things down in Leone-esque categories. Feel free to play this music in the background while you read.

The Good

I’ve never been to Fort Worth, Texas, even though I’ve been nearby Dallas several times. I enjoy visiting new places. Norris Center, the convention’s downtown venue, was easy to find, close to free parking, and there were at least a half dozen eateries within easy walking distance. With an hour break between each gaming event, that gave me and Giant Boy plenty of time to chow down, relax a bit, and then dive back into the convention scene.

Texicon is a small convention, all of the gaming crammed into two rooms, one for board and roleplaying games, and the other for miniature battles. A few seminars were held in another rooms. Everything was on the second floor of the Norris Center, so getting from event to event was not difficult. Contrast this with OwlCon, for example, which last year was spread across Rice University over an area roughly three city blocks square sometimes without clear instructions about what was where.

A wide variety of board games were in play. As I type this paragraph, it’s session 2 of day two. I count nine tables for board games. Two aren’t being used. The other seven have seven different board games going on. The miniature battles room was similiarly well-attended, although I spent little time therein.

As small as Texicon was, I was pleased to see a number of children — preteen and teen — in attendance. Again, glancing around the board/roleplaying game room, I see four kids, not counting Giant Boy. The gaming torch is being passed to a new generation.

Saturday morning, with no one signed up for my “Metro Gnomes” game, Giant Boy and I both played in Stan Shinn‘s excellent Savage Worlds sci-fi adventure. I was the brave ship’s captain, and Giant Boy was “Phase”, our crew’s resident hacker and tech-jockey. The crew also included Corey, my faithful firstmate; Bryce, our face-man; and “Stitch”, the ship’s doctor and molecular knife enthusiast. We were hired by a wealthy political pariah to liberate his abducted daughter from the clutches of a ruthless warlord. We completed this daunting task with much aplomb, saving the damsel, capturing her father’s traitorous employee, and sending the warlord and several of his goons hurtling from the warlord’s stolen spaceship into the rugged landscape passing below at many kilometers per hour.

After this game, Giant Boy and I popped across the street to Five Guys for a burger each, and then visited the small vendors’ room. About eight vendors were on hand, selling used books, back issues of comics and gaming magazines, et cetera. I chatted bit with The Game Closet (purveyor of fine games), The Tangled Web (purveyor of lovely handmade dice bags), and Roll2Play (purveyor of fine dice). I plopped down some money with the latter on some more dice since Giant Boy’s half-orc falchion monster needed more d4s, and I never seem to have sufficient d6s to fireball people. I’d’ve bought a crocheted dice bag, but they were a little too gamergrrl to fit in at Man Day. I did, however, purchase my daughter Adrienne a zipper pouch with a lovely, hand-embroidered bunny rabbit on it.

Since no one other than Giant Boy was signed up for the day 2/session 2 Pathfinder event, the lad played in a Rifts adventure while I wrote parts of this blogpost and took some pictures. I watched much of this event from afar. The GM was animated and personable, and appeared to be good at keeping both experienced and novice Rifts players engrossed in the game (and with two of those novices being younger than 16). Giant Boy played some sort of power-armored samurai.

Near the end of Giant Boy’s Rifts game, I started a delightful conversation with Paul Cardwell of the Committee for the Advancement of Role-Playing Games. Mr. Cardwell is a fine, elder scholar and gentleman who is passionate about gaming and history. What’s not to like? Our amiable, rambling discourse covered topics such as old-school gaming, kids today, the influence of Charles Dickens on the latest Batman movie, Glenn Miller, ostrich-riding knights, Vatican II, and the moral failings of dystopian gaming.

I also must applaud Texicon’s staff, the vendors, and the players for how genuinely friendly everyone was. (Well, not the T-shirt vendor guy; he was churlish.) Texicon was small, but it had a mighty heart.

While it’s not game related, I must mention St. Joseph Catholic Church in Cleburne, Texas. Giant Boy and I attended services there Sunday morning. The crucifix in the jay-peg collage hangs above the tabernacle there. Strictly speaking, we didn’t attend Mass since the parish priest was out of town. A deacon conducted a communion service, and he movingly spoke about the monstrous shooting spree in Aurora, Colorado.

After church, we ate yummy breakfasts at Susannah’s Homestyle Cooking and then went and saw The Dark Knight Rises. It was adequate. I won’t toss out any spoilers here, but will say that the storyline was muddled, Bruce Wayne was whiny, and Bane’s voice often unintelligible. At one point in the film, I swear Bane threatened to reduce Gotham City to “asses”. The Dark Knight Rises is in no danger of being lauded as the Nolans’ best movie.

The Bad

Roleplaying game offerings were sparser and less well-attended. For example, no one other than Giant Boy signed up for my “Metro Gnomes” game. I had three people signed up for my Go Fer Yer Gun! game. By start time, the sign-up list had one name scratched off, and by about 20 minutes after start time, I only had one player (Giant Boy). On the roleplaying game sign-up sheets, blank spaces outnumbered claimed player slots by a substantial margin. Most RPG rounds did not have sufficient players for them to run.

Friday evening, since my “Metro Gnomes” game couldn’t run with just one player, Giant Boy and I jumped in on a 2E D&D game. It was just about thoroughly blah, in part because of the environment (more on this below), which complicated the fact that the DM was hard of hearing. The scenario, such as it was, had a lot of potential. Giant Boy, some other guy, and I played military recruits of sorts on maneuvers in a Bad Lands of the Dakotas sort of place. What was meant to be a simple training run for a search-and-rescue mission turned into a life-and-death struggle against orcs and ogres. Like I said: potential. Unfortunately, even factoring out environmental issues, the scenario seemed to be entirely and clumsily ad-libbed. It often felt more like a showcase for the DM’s meticulously conceived homebrew campaign than a convention event.

Now, about those environmental issues. Above, I noted that it was a good thing everything at the convention was in a single location and easy to get to. This good thing was also a bad thing. As I glance up from the keyboard to guesstimate, the board/roleplaying game room looks to about 900 square feet of floor space with 20 tables set for at least six people each. That’s crowded. It’s also loud, and lots of background noise really bugs me. It hampers communication, and it can be a mood killer for a game. If I had my druthers, the space used for seminars — about which I have zero interest — could have been better used for gaming to cut down on the hubbub.

The Ugly

When I first started typing this while Giant Boy played Rifts, I counted five people I saw last night. Three of them were wearing the same clothes, and one of the three had probably not bathed judging by his bedhead hairdo. I mean, seriously, people. I’ve written in this space before about how the stereotype of gamers being hygiene-challenged, socially awkward basement-dwellers is unfair. Unfortunately, it’s not always unfair.

Here’s my public service announcement.

My fellow gamers, personal hygiene is not optional. It is a basic requirement for participating in civil society and for your own physical health. Except in extremis, put on clean clothes every day. Bathe everyday. Brush your teeth. That logo, cartoon, or slogan on your T-shirt isn’t so awesome, funny, or witty that it somehow makes personal hygiene optional.

Much in the same vein, the men’s room was a disaster. To start with, the sign adjacent to the entrance read “Mens Room”. That makes no sense. How much extra money would an apostrophe have cost? Every time I had to avail myself of the facilities, wadded up paper towels littered the floor. I mean, seriously, men. Put trash in a trash can. You want to be a pig and toss trash on a bathroom floor, go do it in the privacy of your home. Likewise, if you feel compelled to urinate near a urinal, do that at home also. Along the wall to which the urinals were attached, there was a foot-wide smear of moisture that looked like it had both depth and resilience (as well as hair).

To be fair, that level of build up couldn’t have taken place solely within the scope of the convention. I’m willing to go on the record and state that much of the urinal wall zone of gag-reflex-triggering horror was present Friday morning before Texicon began. Norris Center staff: Buy a mop and some extra strength floor cleaner, and use them zealously.

Tags: Convention Gaming

Well, Texicon 2012 is almost here. Giant Boy and I are heading up to the Dallas/Fort Worth area this Friday. At the convention, I’m running Dyson Logos’s Geodesic Gnomes and a Go Fer Yer Gun!/Call of Cthulhu mash-up. The former adventure, Metro Gnomes, is going to be made available via the regular sources for Spes Magna PDFs by the end of this month (in theory). I’d like to publish the other adventure, but I need to contact GFYG!‘s author Simon Washbourne. I’d like to note that my adventure, BR&ND, is compatible with GFYG!, but I won’t use someone else’s product identity like that without their permission.

I’m also behind the curve on getting the metric system version of Dodeca Weather done. Once I get caught up, it’ll be made available as well. Those of you who’ve already purchased Dodeca Weather will receive the metric system version for free when I update the files.

Tags: adventure design, Convention Gaming, Dyson Logos