Totalcon wrapup: One Guy's Perspective
Feb 24, 2013 18:44:39 GMT -8
Post by jaiden0 on Feb 24, 2013 18:44:39 GMT -8
Totalcon wrapup: One Guy's Perspective
Totalcon(.com) is a yearly convention of 4 days of RPGs and board gaming outside Boston. For a bit of background, this was my third year, and on my first, I attended for the board games, but it's what reintroduced me to RPGs after a 20 year hiatus. One of the local game stores was running a series of D&D 4e dungeon crawl sessions, with one big map made of exceptional cast and painted 3d terrain where they were playing a party on two of the three tables. In other words, as we were leaving the dungeon, another group was entering it. It was a lot of fun, and despite being fundamentally a minis game, we did manage to role play more than you'd probably guess. So, having realized that I still liked the RPG I played as a kid, I descended into two years of increasing RPG activity. A 4e, 2nd ed, Traveller and serenity campaign later, I have found myself a HJer, and avid gamer of both RPG and board games.
7th Sea: Heroes of Altamira, episodes 1 and 2. (see www.guildofsanmarcos.net for more info)
No spoilers (I think)
Heroes of Altamira is a living campaign run in the 7th sea system. They had pregens available, but also had around 40 character templates built with names like "Castillian Theif" "Avalon Merchant" etc. This gave a base with 30 character points available to customize. I rushed through building a pretty diversified character, which I tweaked a bit between sessions with the help of the GM. I enjoyed the setting, and the game mechanics were really easy to pick up on, having listened to Stu's L5R campaign! It's designed by John Wick, and while I'm sure there are a lot of setting differences, the dice mechanic seems the same. I enjoyed the living campaign idea, and being able to build a "one shot" character that I could play again and again. With more prep this would have been even better for me. I may invest in the books and my character a bit more for the next con (gencon? origins?). Each session they hand out a card with a minor buff on it, which you can keep and use once per session thereafter.
Personal Highlight: After earlier discussions of civility and exactly how heroes behave (and that nearly no one ever dies, they're just "down"), brutally executing the badguy and torching the bodies of him and his compatriots in his secret lair. He totally deserved it.
Unfortunately while the GM seemed fine overall, I was disappointed with his having to read blocks of text. I expect he didn't take as much time to prepare as he needed. Still, I really enjoyed the sessions, but did skip the last early morning session. Partly due to him, and partly due to tiredness, beer and the need for bacon. We had some great role players in both sessions, and I learned that I can do a passable Spanish accent, or at least passable enough for me that I wasn't annoying myself with it, and was able to get into the character a bit.
Fudge: Player's Choice (GM: Scott Gray)
Spoilers, but it doesn't matter
Later that day I found my swashbuckling compatriot of the morning sitting on the other side of the table as GM. Scott listed the session as "stump the GM" and asked for any crazy ideas to mash together into a one shot. I was mentally burned out and short of ideas, but the three of us players managed to come up with NFL stars who got superpowers due to tainted steroids, and therefore had to keep them secret. Scott only needed a couple of minutes to get rolling, and handed us each a 4x6 piece of paper with the following handwritten character sheet:
Name
Tackle
Pass
Run/Dodge
Plan/Know
Perception
Superpower
We were asked for a total of 4 points from -2 to plus 4 (I think) which summed to 4, rating ourselves according to our skills relative to other NFL players. I went for telekinesis, another took super speed, and the third guy decided to be the coach, and took super-inspiration. There was much rejoicing.
Moments later, we were off on our adventure, and each player was pulled into the story one at a time. Coach overheard a player "Lenny" who sounded like he threw the last game, and asked me, "Tommy Thomas," to talk to him. After doing so, we brought in another trusted player and we worked to figure out who was bribing him, and what to do about it. It turned out that Lenny needed money for his mother's Lymphoma treatments.
Later we began to discover that the guy we thought was the villain, was only the first layer, and we were being surveilled by someone with enormous financial means. Specifically, the magnate father of the bookie/briber small time crook. We chased a few leads, eventually flying to china and busting into the board meeting of the chemical company that had made our steroids. I was itching for a fight, angry about the recordings we discovered showing the extensive surveillance of ourselves. They had our sleeping breath rate, and gps tracking going back years! (Long before we ever discovered the son bribing Lenny) Despite my anger at being made a guinea pig, the explanations of the magnate were pretty convincing. He seemed truly sorry that there had been tainted drugs, and their efforts to monitor us were to study us as we changed, and figure out what went wrong.
They offered us a huge settlement, and removal of all hidden monitoring devices, in exchange for our supplying them with voluntary information as convenient to us. I (as a player) was really pretty torn, feeling like their actions were inexcusable, and knowing this was my only chance to shoot this guy in the face. But, I (and Tommy) relented and was talked into the peaceful resolution.
Personal Highlight: Once, earlier we were stumped, and struggling for ideas, so we brainstormed. We got ideas such as "confront John", "Go to the cops", etc. and finally I added "We could cure lymphoma!"
Overall, this was a real learning experience for me, on how well a session can go with exactly 0 prep. I had recently read the FATE rules, so I was expecting a LITTLE more crunch, but FUDGE is as rules-light as you can get and still have stats and dice. If you haven't looked at it yet, I highly recommend it.
Giant Monster Smash:
Home built minis game with a huge table and familiar characters (Godzilla, Mothra, around 30 total choices) played with some version of the Hero system rules. Fun combat game with points for knocking down buildings, killing each other etc. It's a bit less giant this year, since the creator could no longer afford the time/money to transport it around. I felt bad giving the replacement guy crap for being Medium Monster Smash, since he had put a lot of effort into building the whole thing by hand.
Personal Highlight: Learning how OCV/DCV work, after hearing about it so much on the podcast.
1st Edition AD&D: Quondam Fount (GM: Frank Mentzer)
No Spoilers (Quondam Fount is a new published module by Frank, available on drivethrurpg)
I jumped at the chance to play in a game by the author of the D&D red box which first got me into RPGs as a kid! Frank was friendly and approachable, and had no trouble stuffing in a few extra players. My Gnome Fighter/Thief pregen had quite a lot of depth, and a note about his feelings toward each other character. (Please do this for pregens! Love it!) We didn't have a whole lot of time to explore it, but it did come up occasionally. We had fun with this puzzly dungeon, but really only just got past the entrance before we ran out of time. I get the feeling that this module would easily run 3-4 sessions.
Personal Highlight: getting my character sheet signed like a fanboy
Game highlight: After the druid turned into a badger and asked what his new senses detected: "Right away you can tell that there aren't any female badgers."
I'd share more about this but I do want to avoid spoilers. Frank did a great job managing a big group, and tried to give time to everyone, though it was impossible to avoid party splits, and a few guys didn't get as much focus as I did. It was an absolute blast seeing the ease with which he handled the table, and I enjoyed his descriptions and detail. It felt pretty immersive, and the module itself seems quite interesting and well written.
Board game notes for those interested:
2 plays of Kingdom Builder - taught. light, quick and abstract. I enjoy it but still don't have a place for it in my collection
Ra: the dice game - OK, but doesn't have any of the feel of Ra, just similar scoring.
Princes of Florence - Fun. good economic management game with set-matching and a minor auction mechanic.
Giant Monster Smash - see above
1830 - my first encounter with this very heavy stock based game with a train theme. Felt like a guppy among sharks with guys who played it repeatedly for 20 years. enjoyable, but 5 hours of mostly trying to figure out what was going on. I can see why people like this, but I doubt I will play it enough to really get all the subtlety. I did somehow manage to win, but mostly by taking advice and riding coat-tails.
Race for the Galaxy - taught, always love this one
Leave it On the Table - playtest for the creator. decent ideas but needs a bit of work I think
Furstenfeld - taught, beer making game? yes. fun 2nd play of this one
Last Will - played 2 player, Brewster's Millions: the board game. looks like there might be a dominant strategy here that could spoil repeated plays
Merchant of Venus- learned new edition. always enjoy MoV, but this version is too long! alternate win conditions will be used when I run it.
Village - learned. neat worker placement that plays pretty quickly. Neat ideas of older workers dying off. enjoyed it
Alhambra - 2nd play, got housed. same feel as the first time, pretty fun and light, but isn't for me. too random, I think.
Totalcon(.com) is a yearly convention of 4 days of RPGs and board gaming outside Boston. For a bit of background, this was my third year, and on my first, I attended for the board games, but it's what reintroduced me to RPGs after a 20 year hiatus. One of the local game stores was running a series of D&D 4e dungeon crawl sessions, with one big map made of exceptional cast and painted 3d terrain where they were playing a party on two of the three tables. In other words, as we were leaving the dungeon, another group was entering it. It was a lot of fun, and despite being fundamentally a minis game, we did manage to role play more than you'd probably guess. So, having realized that I still liked the RPG I played as a kid, I descended into two years of increasing RPG activity. A 4e, 2nd ed, Traveller and serenity campaign later, I have found myself a HJer, and avid gamer of both RPG and board games.
7th Sea: Heroes of Altamira, episodes 1 and 2. (see www.guildofsanmarcos.net for more info)
No spoilers (I think)
Heroes of Altamira is a living campaign run in the 7th sea system. They had pregens available, but also had around 40 character templates built with names like "Castillian Theif" "Avalon Merchant" etc. This gave a base with 30 character points available to customize. I rushed through building a pretty diversified character, which I tweaked a bit between sessions with the help of the GM. I enjoyed the setting, and the game mechanics were really easy to pick up on, having listened to Stu's L5R campaign! It's designed by John Wick, and while I'm sure there are a lot of setting differences, the dice mechanic seems the same. I enjoyed the living campaign idea, and being able to build a "one shot" character that I could play again and again. With more prep this would have been even better for me. I may invest in the books and my character a bit more for the next con (gencon? origins?). Each session they hand out a card with a minor buff on it, which you can keep and use once per session thereafter.
Personal Highlight: After earlier discussions of civility and exactly how heroes behave (and that nearly no one ever dies, they're just "down"), brutally executing the badguy and torching the bodies of him and his compatriots in his secret lair. He totally deserved it.
Unfortunately while the GM seemed fine overall, I was disappointed with his having to read blocks of text. I expect he didn't take as much time to prepare as he needed. Still, I really enjoyed the sessions, but did skip the last early morning session. Partly due to him, and partly due to tiredness, beer and the need for bacon. We had some great role players in both sessions, and I learned that I can do a passable Spanish accent, or at least passable enough for me that I wasn't annoying myself with it, and was able to get into the character a bit.
Fudge: Player's Choice (GM: Scott Gray)
Spoilers, but it doesn't matter
Later that day I found my swashbuckling compatriot of the morning sitting on the other side of the table as GM. Scott listed the session as "stump the GM" and asked for any crazy ideas to mash together into a one shot. I was mentally burned out and short of ideas, but the three of us players managed to come up with NFL stars who got superpowers due to tainted steroids, and therefore had to keep them secret. Scott only needed a couple of minutes to get rolling, and handed us each a 4x6 piece of paper with the following handwritten character sheet:
Name
Tackle
Pass
Run/Dodge
Plan/Know
Perception
Superpower
We were asked for a total of 4 points from -2 to plus 4 (I think) which summed to 4, rating ourselves according to our skills relative to other NFL players. I went for telekinesis, another took super speed, and the third guy decided to be the coach, and took super-inspiration. There was much rejoicing.
Moments later, we were off on our adventure, and each player was pulled into the story one at a time. Coach overheard a player "Lenny" who sounded like he threw the last game, and asked me, "Tommy Thomas," to talk to him. After doing so, we brought in another trusted player and we worked to figure out who was bribing him, and what to do about it. It turned out that Lenny needed money for his mother's Lymphoma treatments.
Later we began to discover that the guy we thought was the villain, was only the first layer, and we were being surveilled by someone with enormous financial means. Specifically, the magnate father of the bookie/briber small time crook. We chased a few leads, eventually flying to china and busting into the board meeting of the chemical company that had made our steroids. I was itching for a fight, angry about the recordings we discovered showing the extensive surveillance of ourselves. They had our sleeping breath rate, and gps tracking going back years! (Long before we ever discovered the son bribing Lenny) Despite my anger at being made a guinea pig, the explanations of the magnate were pretty convincing. He seemed truly sorry that there had been tainted drugs, and their efforts to monitor us were to study us as we changed, and figure out what went wrong.
They offered us a huge settlement, and removal of all hidden monitoring devices, in exchange for our supplying them with voluntary information as convenient to us. I (as a player) was really pretty torn, feeling like their actions were inexcusable, and knowing this was my only chance to shoot this guy in the face. But, I (and Tommy) relented and was talked into the peaceful resolution.
Personal Highlight: Once, earlier we were stumped, and struggling for ideas, so we brainstormed. We got ideas such as "confront John", "Go to the cops", etc. and finally I added "We could cure lymphoma!"
Overall, this was a real learning experience for me, on how well a session can go with exactly 0 prep. I had recently read the FATE rules, so I was expecting a LITTLE more crunch, but FUDGE is as rules-light as you can get and still have stats and dice. If you haven't looked at it yet, I highly recommend it.
Giant Monster Smash:
Home built minis game with a huge table and familiar characters (Godzilla, Mothra, around 30 total choices) played with some version of the Hero system rules. Fun combat game with points for knocking down buildings, killing each other etc. It's a bit less giant this year, since the creator could no longer afford the time/money to transport it around. I felt bad giving the replacement guy crap for being Medium Monster Smash, since he had put a lot of effort into building the whole thing by hand.
Personal Highlight: Learning how OCV/DCV work, after hearing about it so much on the podcast.
1st Edition AD&D: Quondam Fount (GM: Frank Mentzer)
No Spoilers (Quondam Fount is a new published module by Frank, available on drivethrurpg)
I jumped at the chance to play in a game by the author of the D&D red box which first got me into RPGs as a kid! Frank was friendly and approachable, and had no trouble stuffing in a few extra players. My Gnome Fighter/Thief pregen had quite a lot of depth, and a note about his feelings toward each other character. (Please do this for pregens! Love it!) We didn't have a whole lot of time to explore it, but it did come up occasionally. We had fun with this puzzly dungeon, but really only just got past the entrance before we ran out of time. I get the feeling that this module would easily run 3-4 sessions.
Personal Highlight: getting my character sheet signed like a fanboy
Game highlight: After the druid turned into a badger and asked what his new senses detected: "Right away you can tell that there aren't any female badgers."
I'd share more about this but I do want to avoid spoilers. Frank did a great job managing a big group, and tried to give time to everyone, though it was impossible to avoid party splits, and a few guys didn't get as much focus as I did. It was an absolute blast seeing the ease with which he handled the table, and I enjoyed his descriptions and detail. It felt pretty immersive, and the module itself seems quite interesting and well written.
Board game notes for those interested:
2 plays of Kingdom Builder - taught. light, quick and abstract. I enjoy it but still don't have a place for it in my collection
Ra: the dice game - OK, but doesn't have any of the feel of Ra, just similar scoring.
Princes of Florence - Fun. good economic management game with set-matching and a minor auction mechanic.
Giant Monster Smash - see above
1830 - my first encounter with this very heavy stock based game with a train theme. Felt like a guppy among sharks with guys who played it repeatedly for 20 years. enjoyable, but 5 hours of mostly trying to figure out what was going on. I can see why people like this, but I doubt I will play it enough to really get all the subtlety. I did somehow manage to win, but mostly by taking advice and riding coat-tails.
Race for the Galaxy - taught, always love this one
Leave it On the Table - playtest for the creator. decent ideas but needs a bit of work I think
Furstenfeld - taught, beer making game? yes. fun 2nd play of this one
Last Will - played 2 player, Brewster's Millions: the board game. looks like there might be a dominant strategy here that could spoil repeated plays
Merchant of Venus- learned new edition. always enjoy MoV, but this version is too long! alternate win conditions will be used when I run it.
Village - learned. neat worker placement that plays pretty quickly. Neat ideas of older workers dying off. enjoyed it
Alhambra - 2nd play, got housed. same feel as the first time, pretty fun and light, but isn't for me. too random, I think.