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Real ones, rather.
Wednesday, August 18
The airport was very efficient with lines and all. It was odd, coming in from the parking lot, though - I have never seen a parking lot shuttle bypass a stop, and this one did! There were five or six people waiting with tons of luggage - we already had luggage in the aisle and only two seats available - they would NOT have fit. He radioed it in to get another shuttle to them. We stopped at the next stop, with only one guy - I am sure they weren't thrilled to see that, but....
There were also a couple teen boys who pulled a new one (new to me anyway): they skateboarded down the moving walkway. Fortunately not while I was on it. And I thought wheeled luggage and strollers made an obnoxious noise on that thing - they don't have quite the combination of weight and speed!
Read the first half of The Riven Shield, book five in the Sun Sword series. Book five was supposed to be The Sun Sword and end it, but it became a bit too long (2000 manuscript pages?) and became books five and six. At least, so the intro says, along with an apology from the author. Wait, you're apologizing for giving us more of this world? What??
Nearly had a heart attack when we got to Will Call for the con. I gave the guy my name and - no badge, no tickets waiting. What?? Right, no packet for me. He sent me to customer service, who immediately stopped any chance of a heart atttack - took my id, looked me up, and without telling me what had happened, printed out my tickets and provided me a badge. Good enough! If I had had to pay for the badge, I'd have been angry, but it was the tickets that had me ready for a heart attack - most of the games were full, and I didn't want to compete for 'em. That's why I pre-register!
Thursday, August 19
Scott got up early - he had an 8 am game. I had a bit more leisurely morning since my first game started at 10, though before that I worked out the schedule I wanted (there were many slots on Friday and Saturday that I hadn't been able to get into what I wanted, so I was trying to fill them in). I actually got the tickets after my 10-2 game was over (the line was hellish in the morning; by the early afternoon, all the just-arriveds and people who had to fix stuff for that day were out of the way - I think instead of 3 hours I didn't have, I spent about 45 minutes in the line).
The first game was Fireborn, a new game (first on sale on Friday - they had advanced copies for the GMs running before Friday noon!). Dragon souls reborn through the ages in human bodies. A reawakening of magic begins to bring them to the fore once more....I really enjoyed this game. I have a copy of it now but have not yet read it through, so there may be more commentary later as I do.
In the 5-9 slot, played my first 7th Sea game of the weekend. Got my character straightened out (my GM when I played it to see if I liked it, last year, had hosed up the creation - very insistently told me to do it one way that was wrong - I knew that going into this session and got there an hour early to straighten it out properly before playing - which we did). It was a fun game, as ever; best of all was not having to worry about the confusion on the sheet any more.
9-1 (actually, 1:30), played Deliria. I'd come to the con a bit dubious, figuring it was going to be one of those games that I by-and-large either loved or hated, but not quite sure which it would be. I was guessing "love" was more likely, but ... such things can go very very wrong and still sound cool, and it was so cool that if it were screwed up, it would really really irritate me. It wasn't. Both the session and the game rocked. This is not to say it's perfect - there are some very confusing points in the book (as well as the inevitable printing errors - I particularly like the occasional botched symbol). It's not that the rules are bad - each time I got them explained to me, they were reasonable. It's that it's hard to figure out what they are! Interestingly, some other points that I don't find confusing apparently are - I thought the book (when I read it later in the weekend and on the flight home) was very very clear on some points...and the guy who ran our game (also named Scott) ran them completely differently. At least one of those had an example in the book that matched my reading, but, not right where the rule was stated. Gorgeous setting, lovely ruleset; even the bubbly sheet makes sense to me now and is a useful thing. But the book could use a revision, not to update the rules but to fix the mistakes and clarify the opaque.
Got to bed at 2 am, knowing I would regret it on Friday. And I was right, but it was still worth it. Today, I knew I wanted to own Fireborn. I asked Scott to get it (he had a dragon shirt, which got you $5 off it at the con). I was not so sure of Deliria and told him I'd check it out first - I had not read the book at that point and wanted to skim a couple things and ask whether there was or would be a rule or even a set of hints for creating your own Legaces, y'see.
Friday, August 20
Friday ended pretty early for me, considering it was a "full" day of the con - I was done by 7 or so in the evening, and tired enough to need it. I got up at 6 for a first-slot Dragonquest game that I'd added for the hell of it, and regretted it all day. Without that 8 am game, I could have slept 'til 10 and been sane; and the game itself bit. It reminded me that I discovered last year that I don't like Dragonquest - I don't hate it, but I don't like it - at least not as run by these people. The adventure was somewhat dorky anyway and, at one point, relied on not giving us information our characters might have noticed (mine wouldn't, but we did have people in the party who might have tasted the doctored food). To add insult to injury, everything our characters did was somewhat pointless, since we were protecting a decoy. On the plus side, maybe next year I can remember not to play this thing....
I played another session of 7th Sea - I was going to be in SS03, but there was a guy in SS09 who had not played any Song of the Sea modules before. When will people learn to read the writeups? For 05 (or is 06?) and above, you must have played in one of the intro modules where crew is being hired and characters are created, previously. I'd never played 09, so I swapped with him, which made it all good. It turned out ot be a very good choice as 09 is an excellent module with a fascinating premise. I was amused afterward when the GM said it was written by a 12-year-old. I do wonder what that 12-year-old will create over time, because this was a good one.
That ended early, so that's when I went to the dealer's hall, wandered around, bugged the folks at the Laughing Pan booth (Phil in particular) about the Deliria rules, and after flipping through it and hearing what they had to say, bought my copy. Very pleased with that. This is also when I got dice (like I needed more dice), dice necklaces, and ordered two custom dice bags. The Gamer's Bag will do up custom dice bags in any fabric you like; I asked if they could do zippers instead of drawstrings, and she said she didn't have any like that but sure could do it. I ordered two. I use mini-dice by preference - they're cute, they fit my hands well, they weigh less, and they are unlikely to get mixed up with most people's dice. However, they also slip out of bags if the drawstring loosens a bit, and then I end up fishing mini-dice out of all sorts of places in my backpack other than the dice bag!
Then I went back to my hotel and crashed. This was also the day that, during lunch, I heard (the whole area heard) a guy on his cell phone bitching to IT/tech support at his college. I can't blame him! Apparently, he's a graduate student. He was on leave last term because his father passed away, and he was promised he'd keep his email through the summer. They deleted his email account because he'd "graduated" - which he hadn't - so when he tried to get email, he couldn't. Worse, he hadn't been able to access it for 2-3 weeks (due to being away from computers?) before that, and they didn't have backups. They deleted all his old email, all the new email that he'd received while not checking it, and all his files...and never took a backup of it. He'd been using his account to communicate with publishers and stuff and was very, very unamused. I can understand why, but it was an odd sort of conversation to wander into in the seating area, by the concessions, at Gencon....
Saturday, August 21
Went to a characterization seminar in the 8-10 slot, less because I expected useful new info than because it was in our hotel and filled the time, and I might get something. I got rather a lot of entertainment, a list of books that included a couple I hadn't heard of yet, and a bit of inspiration on an old old project that will likely never go anywhere, less because of any individual point than because of the joys of sitting around such a discussion.
After that, I had Earthdawn 10-2 (so I actually cut out of the seminar about 15 minutes early, since our hotel is a couple blocks from the convention center and I did not want to be late and lose my slot). The room was stuffed (smallish rooms for the number of tables, and in this case, all but two of 13 or so were occupied). Noisy as hell. The GM relocated us to another room with only a couple other games in it and I was much happier. It was...hmmm. It was okay? The module was good, the GM could have used a bit of work. There were times when he sort of screwed us over, like when we said our characters were searching "the whole ship, starting with X and leaving Y until last" - he had us name off where we searched and let us miss areas that our characters, you know, knew were there? Sigh. Areas that mattered. And he wasn't good about helping the folks who weren't used to Earthdawn understand the world. So there were some wobbly assumptions made there, though those of us who'd played before corrected for that (except when we all screwed up and missed one possibility as far as the creation of the cadaver men - oops - spent a lot of time investigating a total red herring as a result). He made no effort to watch time until one player got up at 1:55 to go to his 2:00 game. At that point we were near the end, so he rushed it. Several of us had 2:00 games, and at about 2:02, we were faced with the choice of whether to let the mutinous crew throw their last officer overboard, tied up.
We did. There is no way the characters should have done that, IMO. However, if we tried to stop them, we had an immense combat on our hands, and no one wanted to bother. I think some of the characters sympathized with the crew, but the overal vibe I got was a player-based "just let us OUT of here!"
So then I rushed to my next game, a playtest/run through a pre-release system. It was in the room the Earthdawn game originally had been, which was still noisy, though not as noisy as it had been. I was hungry (having made it out a couple minutes late, I didn't stop for lunch). I was tired. I was overloaded between the noise and stress and annoyance at the previous game (which was, don't get me wrong, still very enjoyable, but...). They spent 45 minutes introducing the basics of the system and the character sheet. And it took that long. Part of this is that it has an annoyingly complex character creation (please note: I say this, having learned to roleplay on GURPS and considering it for many many years my favorite system, and having gotten its character creation rules including point charts memorized) and they explained bits of it as they went through the sheet. Part of it is that the people running it were disorganized and confusing! They kept correcting or doubling back to pick up something they forgot. I handed my character sheet back after the 45 minutes and excused myself on grounds of being too tired to track properly (which I was not, but I did not feel like the headache and annoyance I would feel if I did track properly, if the actual module/game was as confusing as that intro). I think it would have been easier to play than the intro was to deal with - all the rolls seemed to be percentile - but I really just didn't feel like coping at all.
So I went off and got food! That made my day a lot better. Wandered the exhibit hall again; didn't buy anything this time but just took pictures of booths and people, some of which even came out. At one point, I was stopped so I could get my picture taken with someone's wife, because he was so amused that we were wearing the same shirt. *facepalm* If he did that to every person wearing that shirt, he may have been removed for annoyance factor. I was wearing the phoenix shirt, with the orange-yellow-red tie-dye color behind the phoenix print. I saw no fewer than 5 people wearing it inside an hour in that room...and I wasn't looking. It's not a rare or unusual shirt, and while I got mine last year, they were selling it this year. I'm amused, but...I really don't see what was so cool about the fact that I had on the same shirt she did. Really, I think wearing a shirt like that to Gencon showed lack of originality on my part (and I thought it as I put it on, but the black shirt I'd meant to wear would have involved freezing my butt - actually my upper body, more - off).
Now that I was out of my 2-6 game and had eaten and photographed, I went over to the Crown Plaza hotel for the 6-7 seminar. I'm glad I could go early - it's not as far from the convention center, but once inside I managed to get lost. Had plenty of time to correct for that. (Also: the decor in that hotel is hideous. Hope I never have to stay there. I may go back with a camera next year, though. Should have done it this year, if I was thinking. The horror is immense and impressive. Plaster-like - not real plaster, methinks - status of people; replicas of the sides of full-size train cars in the hallways with the rooms....) Seminar was on adapting box sets for campaign usage, which I expected to be somewhat boring and obvious. It didn't even mention box sets, once. They just discussed how to keep players active and involved, in between swapping gaming stories among themselves and with the audience. The gaming stories were amusing, at least. Oh, well. Free seminar, which I took a chance on because it was free; sometimes, you really do get only what you pay for, and that was one of 'em.
Back to the convention center and grab dinner; Scott joined me there. I hadn't expected him to. He'd had a LARP he really wanted to be in and was going to miss our evening game of Deliria, and I was going to tender his apologies. It had gotten cancelled, and I think in a way he may have been relieved - I know he had fun at the Deliria game. In any case, he joined me for dinner and then we went upstairs to where we'd agreed to meet and waited for Scott (the other one, our GM) to be released from the dinner meeting (about Deliria) that he had not realized was scheduled then until, well, a bit late. Once he showed up, we headed over to the open gaming area and played until...what, I think 2 or 2:30 am? Sounds about right. Sixish hours, more or less. This was not a Gencon event; it was the second module, the one that follows the one we'd played Thursday night, and we'd pretty well talked him into running it again because he made the mistake of saying our group was very well-suited to it. It was a great deal of fun, especially as two months elapsed between and so I got to play my character as a bit more clueful, less of a doubting Thomas - though still frequently disoriented. She was no longer disbelieving, but she was often flatly astonished. *grins* We did not get to see the unfortunate effects that might have ensued had she gone to the magic bar. (Someone ordered a whisky and only specified it shouldn't make them blind. It made them temporarily deaf instead. Someone ordered liquid courage and, well, got it. And so on. My character was just barely too young to drink legally yet, and actually followed that rule, so if she had gone to the bar, she'd have ordered a Sprite. In a way, I'm sorry she didn't, as I'd love to know what would have happened if she had. But mostly, I think it's best that didn't happen....)
Sunday, August 22
First game of the day was 7th Sea again. SS07, I think? Two players showed up who hadn't played Song of the Sea before, and since there were no lower-level modules running, they were just refused (and their tickets signed, I think, so they could get refunds). It absolutely rocked. The guy running it was a bit annoyed as they (Game Base 7, not Gencon, I think) had put it in a 4-hour slot when it's an 8-hour game. He rushed it a bit, and we only had three players, so it worked. He warned us that it might be a bit much for three characters to handle, but we still played it - it was greatly, greatly fun. A very cool module.
It's funny, the other two (a couple) were fretting that their characters have seemed underpowered compared to folks they were gaming with. I think they maybe they were just not realizing the subjective issues - you tend to remember the other guy's cool moments. Because when it came to combat, his character made mine (who is combat-capable but not specialized) look like some sort of joke. And when it came to socialization (a big part of this module) and research (also relevant), her character made mine look like a joke. And when it came time to load something critical onto the ship safely, or to spot things, guess who got to shine? Yep. Because that's what Nora's best at. She's openly violent and armed, for a woman, but she's still not primarily a fighter. She's a sailor and a lookout, and she spends a lot of time in the rigging, either fussing with it or looking around. So that's where she shone - when tasks resembled something she was used to. Of course, a lot of people focus only on the combat - and if you specialize in it, you can be even more impressive (after several games) than his character was. But ... yeah. To my eyes, they were about on a power level with me and all the other characters I've seen in this particular set of games. I've never seen (in this campaign) anyone whose character was an uberman, other than those that were such in a very narrow specialty and sucked mightily in other areas.
After that, the White Wolf demo game. Now, according to the GM running it, this is the official White Wolf demo. In which case, I gotta say, COME ON PEOPLE. *shudders* It sucked. It really sucked. They had pre-generated characters, just enough for a full session. Two of which were virtually guaranteed to do nothing useful for the entire scenario, unless the player broke the described character. As the GM freely admitted. I had one of those two - a housewife, with no fighting skills to speak of (over half the game was a combat) and every reason to sit back and let others take the risks.
The GM ran it about as well as you can run a dorky scenario. If this were the start of a campaign, it might be cool. As a standalone scenario, it had too many unanswered questions, and you cared (I did, anyway) more about them throughout the session than you did about what was going on. To add insult to injury, the handouts for this "official" scenario looked like they were written by an 8-year-old and not proofread, in terms of grammar and usage. I wanted to beat them over the head with a barrel of punctuation and a copy of Strunk & White. And while they're at it, perhaps removing the duplicate paragraph on the character I got would be called for? It's harmless, but leaving it in shows perfectly that you didn't care enough to even have someone read through your rmaterials with an editorial eye....
The system. Um. This is supposed to "streamline" the game over the old system? *shudder* Someone will have to sell me on a cool new setting to get me to give it another go. That's not likely to happen. I am very much not impressed and want NOTHING more to do with it. There are some things I liked - I am not saying that it sucks from one end to the other - but on balance I think it is harder than the original, though it may only be equally bad and I just know the original better. Now, 8-10 is a success, always. Okie, fine, that's cool. If you end up with 0 or fewer dice (more on this later), you roll a single die - a 10 succeeds, a 1 botches, all else is failure. That's the only time a 1 means anything; it's the only time you can botch. I dunno. Botches were too common in the old system, but even the most skilled person can screw up royally now and then!
It was the dice pools stuff that really pissed me off, though. Immensely. We'd been talking at the Deliria game the night before about dice mechanics that pull you out of your character to deal with them. Some people are pulled out whenever the dice come out, others only by certain things. For example, I have no problem with "toss the dice, count the successes/add the result" without having to leave RP space much at all - such as in the old White Wolf system or in GURPS. In Earthdawn, as long as the step doesn't change, I can just look-roll-add and have no problems; when the step changes and I have to calculate which dice to use, I get lofted out of the RP space and get annoyed.
This system did that EVERY BLOODY ROLL. Because, you see, now all your modifiers add/subtract dice. Combat in particular has become immensely, annoyingly complex, since there's always a dice modifier for natural defense (which I don't think is ever 0), and often for armor. Gather up dice equal to your dex + brawl. Remove as many as your opponent has in his/her defense score. Remove as many as your opponent has in his/her armor score. (Which means you know those values, of course....) Remove any for wound penalties or situational penalties. Add back as many as you get for situational bonuses. Add any you gain from your merits. Add 3 if you spend a willpower point. And if you have a merit that lets you do two attacks, remove one die on your second attack - unless you spent a willpower, which only applies to the first attack, in which case you remove 4 dice...and you can't ever spend willpower on your second attack. Update: silly me, I forgot a couple. Wound penalties, which could be situational modifiers, I suppose. And if you have a specialization in a skill, and it applies to this situation, you get +1 die.
It's not that addition and subtraction are hard, but when you're trying to stay in character, having to juggle that many and try to remember which ones you've added/substracted is a PAIN. It's too many numbers. Knock it off, people. Knock it off.
So, yes. I hate the new system; I find it annoying, difficult, distracting, and hard to maintain character through. I also think that, while it does a couple things I like, it is on balance very STUPID. (They are also doing some other things like organizing books sanely, as I understand it. I approve of organizing books sanely. I approve of it a lot. I still don't like the system.) I was real dubious of the whole thing going in, in the first place. And somewhat annoyed by the whole "we must end the world for our artistic integrity - but now we have nothing new to do, so we'll remake something very like it with some changes we want to make" instead of just saying they wanted to rework it at the outset instead of saying the storyline and ending the world and all ... I don't know. It wasn't the actions so much as the wording that irritated me. But all of that would have gone by the wayside, had the system/demo been good. Part of the reason I was in it, was to give this beasty a chance. I gave it one. I'm not sorry I did, because I won't now wonder "what if I had tried it" - but I don't think they gained anything from my giving it a chance (except the price of the ticket, however that gets divided up).
Scott liked it better - he played two games of it, neither one the scenario I was in. He's got a copy. It's alllll his.
Monday, August 23
Out of the hotel early and off to the airport. Everything went pretty smoothly from there, really - I've already posted about the luggage, and they got it to us, and I still think we came out ahead. Nothing exciting there that I have not already mentioned.
It was a good con. I want the next one, please.
Wednesday, August 18
The airport was very efficient with lines and all. It was odd, coming in from the parking lot, though - I have never seen a parking lot shuttle bypass a stop, and this one did! There were five or six people waiting with tons of luggage - we already had luggage in the aisle and only two seats available - they would NOT have fit. He radioed it in to get another shuttle to them. We stopped at the next stop, with only one guy - I am sure they weren't thrilled to see that, but....
There were also a couple teen boys who pulled a new one (new to me anyway): they skateboarded down the moving walkway. Fortunately not while I was on it. And I thought wheeled luggage and strollers made an obnoxious noise on that thing - they don't have quite the combination of weight and speed!
Read the first half of The Riven Shield, book five in the Sun Sword series. Book five was supposed to be The Sun Sword and end it, but it became a bit too long (2000 manuscript pages?) and became books five and six. At least, so the intro says, along with an apology from the author. Wait, you're apologizing for giving us more of this world? What??
Nearly had a heart attack when we got to Will Call for the con. I gave the guy my name and - no badge, no tickets waiting. What?? Right, no packet for me. He sent me to customer service, who immediately stopped any chance of a heart atttack - took my id, looked me up, and without telling me what had happened, printed out my tickets and provided me a badge. Good enough! If I had had to pay for the badge, I'd have been angry, but it was the tickets that had me ready for a heart attack - most of the games were full, and I didn't want to compete for 'em. That's why I pre-register!
Thursday, August 19
Scott got up early - he had an 8 am game. I had a bit more leisurely morning since my first game started at 10, though before that I worked out the schedule I wanted (there were many slots on Friday and Saturday that I hadn't been able to get into what I wanted, so I was trying to fill them in). I actually got the tickets after my 10-2 game was over (the line was hellish in the morning; by the early afternoon, all the just-arriveds and people who had to fix stuff for that day were out of the way - I think instead of 3 hours I didn't have, I spent about 45 minutes in the line).
The first game was Fireborn, a new game (first on sale on Friday - they had advanced copies for the GMs running before Friday noon!). Dragon souls reborn through the ages in human bodies. A reawakening of magic begins to bring them to the fore once more....I really enjoyed this game. I have a copy of it now but have not yet read it through, so there may be more commentary later as I do.
In the 5-9 slot, played my first 7th Sea game of the weekend. Got my character straightened out (my GM when I played it to see if I liked it, last year, had hosed up the creation - very insistently told me to do it one way that was wrong - I knew that going into this session and got there an hour early to straighten it out properly before playing - which we did). It was a fun game, as ever; best of all was not having to worry about the confusion on the sheet any more.
9-1 (actually, 1:30), played Deliria. I'd come to the con a bit dubious, figuring it was going to be one of those games that I by-and-large either loved or hated, but not quite sure which it would be. I was guessing "love" was more likely, but ... such things can go very very wrong and still sound cool, and it was so cool that if it were screwed up, it would really really irritate me. It wasn't. Both the session and the game rocked. This is not to say it's perfect - there are some very confusing points in the book (as well as the inevitable printing errors - I particularly like the occasional botched symbol). It's not that the rules are bad - each time I got them explained to me, they were reasonable. It's that it's hard to figure out what they are! Interestingly, some other points that I don't find confusing apparently are - I thought the book (when I read it later in the weekend and on the flight home) was very very clear on some points...and the guy who ran our game (also named Scott) ran them completely differently. At least one of those had an example in the book that matched my reading, but, not right where the rule was stated. Gorgeous setting, lovely ruleset; even the bubbly sheet makes sense to me now and is a useful thing. But the book could use a revision, not to update the rules but to fix the mistakes and clarify the opaque.
Got to bed at 2 am, knowing I would regret it on Friday. And I was right, but it was still worth it. Today, I knew I wanted to own Fireborn. I asked Scott to get it (he had a dragon shirt, which got you $5 off it at the con). I was not so sure of Deliria and told him I'd check it out first - I had not read the book at that point and wanted to skim a couple things and ask whether there was or would be a rule or even a set of hints for creating your own Legaces, y'see.
Friday, August 20
Friday ended pretty early for me, considering it was a "full" day of the con - I was done by 7 or so in the evening, and tired enough to need it. I got up at 6 for a first-slot Dragonquest game that I'd added for the hell of it, and regretted it all day. Without that 8 am game, I could have slept 'til 10 and been sane; and the game itself bit. It reminded me that I discovered last year that I don't like Dragonquest - I don't hate it, but I don't like it - at least not as run by these people. The adventure was somewhat dorky anyway and, at one point, relied on not giving us information our characters might have noticed (mine wouldn't, but we did have people in the party who might have tasted the doctored food). To add insult to injury, everything our characters did was somewhat pointless, since we were protecting a decoy. On the plus side, maybe next year I can remember not to play this thing....
I played another session of 7th Sea - I was going to be in SS03, but there was a guy in SS09 who had not played any Song of the Sea modules before. When will people learn to read the writeups? For 05 (or is 06?) and above, you must have played in one of the intro modules where crew is being hired and characters are created, previously. I'd never played 09, so I swapped with him, which made it all good. It turned out ot be a very good choice as 09 is an excellent module with a fascinating premise. I was amused afterward when the GM said it was written by a 12-year-old. I do wonder what that 12-year-old will create over time, because this was a good one.
That ended early, so that's when I went to the dealer's hall, wandered around, bugged the folks at the Laughing Pan booth (Phil in particular) about the Deliria rules, and after flipping through it and hearing what they had to say, bought my copy. Very pleased with that. This is also when I got dice (like I needed more dice), dice necklaces, and ordered two custom dice bags. The Gamer's Bag will do up custom dice bags in any fabric you like; I asked if they could do zippers instead of drawstrings, and she said she didn't have any like that but sure could do it. I ordered two. I use mini-dice by preference - they're cute, they fit my hands well, they weigh less, and they are unlikely to get mixed up with most people's dice. However, they also slip out of bags if the drawstring loosens a bit, and then I end up fishing mini-dice out of all sorts of places in my backpack other than the dice bag!
Then I went back to my hotel and crashed. This was also the day that, during lunch, I heard (the whole area heard) a guy on his cell phone bitching to IT/tech support at his college. I can't blame him! Apparently, he's a graduate student. He was on leave last term because his father passed away, and he was promised he'd keep his email through the summer. They deleted his email account because he'd "graduated" - which he hadn't - so when he tried to get email, he couldn't. Worse, he hadn't been able to access it for 2-3 weeks (due to being away from computers?) before that, and they didn't have backups. They deleted all his old email, all the new email that he'd received while not checking it, and all his files...and never took a backup of it. He'd been using his account to communicate with publishers and stuff and was very, very unamused. I can understand why, but it was an odd sort of conversation to wander into in the seating area, by the concessions, at Gencon....
Saturday, August 21
Went to a characterization seminar in the 8-10 slot, less because I expected useful new info than because it was in our hotel and filled the time, and I might get something. I got rather a lot of entertainment, a list of books that included a couple I hadn't heard of yet, and a bit of inspiration on an old old project that will likely never go anywhere, less because of any individual point than because of the joys of sitting around such a discussion.
After that, I had Earthdawn 10-2 (so I actually cut out of the seminar about 15 minutes early, since our hotel is a couple blocks from the convention center and I did not want to be late and lose my slot). The room was stuffed (smallish rooms for the number of tables, and in this case, all but two of 13 or so were occupied). Noisy as hell. The GM relocated us to another room with only a couple other games in it and I was much happier. It was...hmmm. It was okay? The module was good, the GM could have used a bit of work. There were times when he sort of screwed us over, like when we said our characters were searching "the whole ship, starting with X and leaving Y until last" - he had us name off where we searched and let us miss areas that our characters, you know, knew were there? Sigh. Areas that mattered. And he wasn't good about helping the folks who weren't used to Earthdawn understand the world. So there were some wobbly assumptions made there, though those of us who'd played before corrected for that (except when we all screwed up and missed one possibility as far as the creation of the cadaver men - oops - spent a lot of time investigating a total red herring as a result). He made no effort to watch time until one player got up at 1:55 to go to his 2:00 game. At that point we were near the end, so he rushed it. Several of us had 2:00 games, and at about 2:02, we were faced with the choice of whether to let the mutinous crew throw their last officer overboard, tied up.
We did. There is no way the characters should have done that, IMO. However, if we tried to stop them, we had an immense combat on our hands, and no one wanted to bother. I think some of the characters sympathized with the crew, but the overal vibe I got was a player-based "just let us OUT of here!"
So then I rushed to my next game, a playtest/run through a pre-release system. It was in the room the Earthdawn game originally had been, which was still noisy, though not as noisy as it had been. I was hungry (having made it out a couple minutes late, I didn't stop for lunch). I was tired. I was overloaded between the noise and stress and annoyance at the previous game (which was, don't get me wrong, still very enjoyable, but...). They spent 45 minutes introducing the basics of the system and the character sheet. And it took that long. Part of this is that it has an annoyingly complex character creation (please note: I say this, having learned to roleplay on GURPS and considering it for many many years my favorite system, and having gotten its character creation rules including point charts memorized) and they explained bits of it as they went through the sheet. Part of it is that the people running it were disorganized and confusing! They kept correcting or doubling back to pick up something they forgot. I handed my character sheet back after the 45 minutes and excused myself on grounds of being too tired to track properly (which I was not, but I did not feel like the headache and annoyance I would feel if I did track properly, if the actual module/game was as confusing as that intro). I think it would have been easier to play than the intro was to deal with - all the rolls seemed to be percentile - but I really just didn't feel like coping at all.
So I went off and got food! That made my day a lot better. Wandered the exhibit hall again; didn't buy anything this time but just took pictures of booths and people, some of which even came out. At one point, I was stopped so I could get my picture taken with someone's wife, because he was so amused that we were wearing the same shirt. *facepalm* If he did that to every person wearing that shirt, he may have been removed for annoyance factor. I was wearing the phoenix shirt, with the orange-yellow-red tie-dye color behind the phoenix print. I saw no fewer than 5 people wearing it inside an hour in that room...and I wasn't looking. It's not a rare or unusual shirt, and while I got mine last year, they were selling it this year. I'm amused, but...I really don't see what was so cool about the fact that I had on the same shirt she did. Really, I think wearing a shirt like that to Gencon showed lack of originality on my part (and I thought it as I put it on, but the black shirt I'd meant to wear would have involved freezing my butt - actually my upper body, more - off).
Now that I was out of my 2-6 game and had eaten and photographed, I went over to the Crown Plaza hotel for the 6-7 seminar. I'm glad I could go early - it's not as far from the convention center, but once inside I managed to get lost. Had plenty of time to correct for that. (Also: the decor in that hotel is hideous. Hope I never have to stay there. I may go back with a camera next year, though. Should have done it this year, if I was thinking. The horror is immense and impressive. Plaster-like - not real plaster, methinks - status of people; replicas of the sides of full-size train cars in the hallways with the rooms....) Seminar was on adapting box sets for campaign usage, which I expected to be somewhat boring and obvious. It didn't even mention box sets, once. They just discussed how to keep players active and involved, in between swapping gaming stories among themselves and with the audience. The gaming stories were amusing, at least. Oh, well. Free seminar, which I took a chance on because it was free; sometimes, you really do get only what you pay for, and that was one of 'em.
Back to the convention center and grab dinner; Scott joined me there. I hadn't expected him to. He'd had a LARP he really wanted to be in and was going to miss our evening game of Deliria, and I was going to tender his apologies. It had gotten cancelled, and I think in a way he may have been relieved - I know he had fun at the Deliria game. In any case, he joined me for dinner and then we went upstairs to where we'd agreed to meet and waited for Scott (the other one, our GM) to be released from the dinner meeting (about Deliria) that he had not realized was scheduled then until, well, a bit late. Once he showed up, we headed over to the open gaming area and played until...what, I think 2 or 2:30 am? Sounds about right. Sixish hours, more or less. This was not a Gencon event; it was the second module, the one that follows the one we'd played Thursday night, and we'd pretty well talked him into running it again because he made the mistake of saying our group was very well-suited to it. It was a great deal of fun, especially as two months elapsed between and so I got to play my character as a bit more clueful, less of a doubting Thomas - though still frequently disoriented. She was no longer disbelieving, but she was often flatly astonished. *grins* We did not get to see the unfortunate effects that might have ensued had she gone to the magic bar. (Someone ordered a whisky and only specified it shouldn't make them blind. It made them temporarily deaf instead. Someone ordered liquid courage and, well, got it. And so on. My character was just barely too young to drink legally yet, and actually followed that rule, so if she had gone to the bar, she'd have ordered a Sprite. In a way, I'm sorry she didn't, as I'd love to know what would have happened if she had. But mostly, I think it's best that didn't happen....)
Sunday, August 22
First game of the day was 7th Sea again. SS07, I think? Two players showed up who hadn't played Song of the Sea before, and since there were no lower-level modules running, they were just refused (and their tickets signed, I think, so they could get refunds). It absolutely rocked. The guy running it was a bit annoyed as they (Game Base 7, not Gencon, I think) had put it in a 4-hour slot when it's an 8-hour game. He rushed it a bit, and we only had three players, so it worked. He warned us that it might be a bit much for three characters to handle, but we still played it - it was greatly, greatly fun. A very cool module.
It's funny, the other two (a couple) were fretting that their characters have seemed underpowered compared to folks they were gaming with. I think they maybe they were just not realizing the subjective issues - you tend to remember the other guy's cool moments. Because when it came to combat, his character made mine (who is combat-capable but not specialized) look like some sort of joke. And when it came to socialization (a big part of this module) and research (also relevant), her character made mine look like a joke. And when it came time to load something critical onto the ship safely, or to spot things, guess who got to shine? Yep. Because that's what Nora's best at. She's openly violent and armed, for a woman, but she's still not primarily a fighter. She's a sailor and a lookout, and she spends a lot of time in the rigging, either fussing with it or looking around. So that's where she shone - when tasks resembled something she was used to. Of course, a lot of people focus only on the combat - and if you specialize in it, you can be even more impressive (after several games) than his character was. But ... yeah. To my eyes, they were about on a power level with me and all the other characters I've seen in this particular set of games. I've never seen (in this campaign) anyone whose character was an uberman, other than those that were such in a very narrow specialty and sucked mightily in other areas.
After that, the White Wolf demo game. Now, according to the GM running it, this is the official White Wolf demo. In which case, I gotta say, COME ON PEOPLE. *shudders* It sucked. It really sucked. They had pre-generated characters, just enough for a full session. Two of which were virtually guaranteed to do nothing useful for the entire scenario, unless the player broke the described character. As the GM freely admitted. I had one of those two - a housewife, with no fighting skills to speak of (over half the game was a combat) and every reason to sit back and let others take the risks.
The GM ran it about as well as you can run a dorky scenario. If this were the start of a campaign, it might be cool. As a standalone scenario, it had too many unanswered questions, and you cared (I did, anyway) more about them throughout the session than you did about what was going on. To add insult to injury, the handouts for this "official" scenario looked like they were written by an 8-year-old and not proofread, in terms of grammar and usage. I wanted to beat them over the head with a barrel of punctuation and a copy of Strunk & White. And while they're at it, perhaps removing the duplicate paragraph on the character I got would be called for? It's harmless, but leaving it in shows perfectly that you didn't care enough to even have someone read through your rmaterials with an editorial eye....
The system. Um. This is supposed to "streamline" the game over the old system? *shudder* Someone will have to sell me on a cool new setting to get me to give it another go. That's not likely to happen. I am very much not impressed and want NOTHING more to do with it. There are some things I liked - I am not saying that it sucks from one end to the other - but on balance I think it is harder than the original, though it may only be equally bad and I just know the original better. Now, 8-10 is a success, always. Okie, fine, that's cool. If you end up with 0 or fewer dice (more on this later), you roll a single die - a 10 succeeds, a 1 botches, all else is failure. That's the only time a 1 means anything; it's the only time you can botch. I dunno. Botches were too common in the old system, but even the most skilled person can screw up royally now and then!
It was the dice pools stuff that really pissed me off, though. Immensely. We'd been talking at the Deliria game the night before about dice mechanics that pull you out of your character to deal with them. Some people are pulled out whenever the dice come out, others only by certain things. For example, I have no problem with "toss the dice, count the successes/add the result" without having to leave RP space much at all - such as in the old White Wolf system or in GURPS. In Earthdawn, as long as the step doesn't change, I can just look-roll-add and have no problems; when the step changes and I have to calculate which dice to use, I get lofted out of the RP space and get annoyed.
This system did that EVERY BLOODY ROLL. Because, you see, now all your modifiers add/subtract dice. Combat in particular has become immensely, annoyingly complex, since there's always a dice modifier for natural defense (which I don't think is ever 0), and often for armor. Gather up dice equal to your dex + brawl. Remove as many as your opponent has in his/her defense score. Remove as many as your opponent has in his/her armor score. (Which means you know those values, of course....) Remove any for wound penalties or situational penalties. Add back as many as you get for situational bonuses. Add any you gain from your merits. Add 3 if you spend a willpower point. And if you have a merit that lets you do two attacks, remove one die on your second attack - unless you spent a willpower, which only applies to the first attack, in which case you remove 4 dice...and you can't ever spend willpower on your second attack. Update: silly me, I forgot a couple. Wound penalties, which could be situational modifiers, I suppose. And if you have a specialization in a skill, and it applies to this situation, you get +1 die.
It's not that addition and subtraction are hard, but when you're trying to stay in character, having to juggle that many and try to remember which ones you've added/substracted is a PAIN. It's too many numbers. Knock it off, people. Knock it off.
So, yes. I hate the new system; I find it annoying, difficult, distracting, and hard to maintain character through. I also think that, while it does a couple things I like, it is on balance very STUPID. (They are also doing some other things like organizing books sanely, as I understand it. I approve of organizing books sanely. I approve of it a lot. I still don't like the system.) I was real dubious of the whole thing going in, in the first place. And somewhat annoyed by the whole "we must end the world for our artistic integrity - but now we have nothing new to do, so we'll remake something very like it with some changes we want to make" instead of just saying they wanted to rework it at the outset instead of saying the storyline and ending the world and all ... I don't know. It wasn't the actions so much as the wording that irritated me. But all of that would have gone by the wayside, had the system/demo been good. Part of the reason I was in it, was to give this beasty a chance. I gave it one. I'm not sorry I did, because I won't now wonder "what if I had tried it" - but I don't think they gained anything from my giving it a chance (except the price of the ticket, however that gets divided up).
Scott liked it better - he played two games of it, neither one the scenario I was in. He's got a copy. It's alllll his.
Monday, August 23
Out of the hotel early and off to the airport. Everything went pretty smoothly from there, really - I've already posted about the luggage, and they got it to us, and I still think we came out ahead. Nothing exciting there that I have not already mentioned.
It was a good con. I want the next one, please.
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(and for those of you that understand THAC0, forgive my ignorance)
Aside from that, the Fireborn game sounds very cool so far. If you would summarize it sometime when you get a chance, I'd love to hear about it.