Origins 2008

[jl8e]

This was my first Origins ever where I wasn't running anything. It was weird having the opportunity to plan my schedule in advance. (Not that I did, but it's the principle of the thing.)

I think this may have been more tiring, but also more fun.



Wednesday:

Fly to Columbus, with ebartley, drcpunk, and mnemex on the same flight. Check into the hotel, get my badge, eat, and play "figure out what I want to play", followed by "wait on line", and "find out half the events I was hoping to play are full". Preregistering might have been a good plan.

Thursday

The first time I ever played D&D, we played Keep on the Borderlands. I was eight. We were slaughtered by lizardmen. It was great.

So, when I saw that somebody was running a 4th edition conversion, I had to try to sign up. It was full, so I tried to generic in. Not likely this early in the con, but 9 AM games always offer hope.

Alas, no such luck. This left me free to look for events in the board game room and hit the dealer's hall.

I played in a session of Ra, which is a game I really need to track down a copy of. I was winning when the game had to be called due to the other players' schedules.

I then searched the dealers' hall, which seemed to be very quiet, and the unused area at the back was bigger than it's been in years past.

Then it was back to the boardgame room to try Out of the Box's Letterroll, a fun word game in the Boggle family. I tried to buy it later, but they've got production problems, so it's not yet available. (Do not confuse Letterroll with Letterflip, a different Out of the Box word game on which I'll have something to say later.)

Then I had an early-evening game of Dread, "One Small Step." Dread's a horror RPG with a weird resolution mechanism: when you need to do something significant, you make a pull from a Jenga tower. If the tower falls, you die. This is a gimmick, but it's an effective gimmick -- there's an escalating sense of foreboding and tension as the tower gets more and more delicate, and everybody's (usually) trying to keep it as stable as possible, while making sure they're not the one to go.

The character/scenario creation is also interesting, involving a set of prepared questionaires providing a framework that allows a lot of free-form creation, while still giving the GM some idea of what's going to be going on. Everybody also had some fun questions that reshaped their characters partway through the form. In my case, I was answering as a young, very good but overconfident pilot, then I flipped to the second page and was confronted with "How long have they been talking to you, telling you going to the moon is your destiny?"

The GM knew how to run a game, if not always how to run a game about a moon trip without straining my suspension of disbelief.

Friday

I'd signed up for the Call of Cthulhu game "A Lovely Beachfront Property", which turned out to be a mistake. The GM had clearly researched his setting, but that's about it. He didn't keep focus, he'd managed to create a set of characters that he outright admitted were defective, blamed his tools for it, and was inconsistent in telling people to fix things when they brought up problems. (It is not inconceivable that the first person to say "I should have weapon skills, and I don't" got blown off because she's female. It's also possible the second guy was just more assertive.) The group was too large for him (eight people, and he had an extra character, so one of us had two), and it looked to me like it was going nowhere, so I bailed out. I know one of the other players did at the same time. I would be surprised if nobody else followed our lead.

Later, I showed up for the Shadowfist Comrades in Arms tournament. It started late because it was following a draft, so we only had time for two rounds, in which the latest version of Diamondhead (The Evil deck) was stomped and then stomped, which ended up being enough to get me into a tie for first. (I think -- I ran off to eat and make my next event before the other table was done. I know I scratched.)

Next was Unknown Armies, "A Hole in the World". It was enjoyable, if a bit scattered from my perspective. (It didn't help that I managed to arrange for my character to be elsewhere for what turned out to be the main confrontation with the bad guy) I think the group was too big, but that may just be me.

Saturday

I didn't have anything until noon, so I could get up later than I did the other days. I browsed the auction store, where I found a copy of Bridges of Shangri-La cheap. (I also bought other things then and later, but that was my happy find. I'd played the game while I was in Pittsburgh in April, and hadn't heard of it before or since.)

Then it was time for the Icehouse World Championships. Two years ago, I stomped through the qualifying rounds and won the whole thing. Last year, I didn't win a single game. I intended to improve on that this year, and I did -- I tied for the win in one game. :-/. (It is not a soft field by any means.)

I spent the late afternoon hanging out, and did what packing I could, because I'd signed up for a 10 PM game: Marvel Saga, "The Great Con Game".

We ended up playing a different scenario, because ione of the players had already played it. I enjoyed myself, but the game was too big for me. It didn't have the lack-of-attention problem that my Friday CoC game did, but I think it would've been a better experience with a smaller group.


Sunday

I decided to generic into a short, Fudge-based humorous supers game, Unstrung Heroes. Since it was Sunday morning, I expected no problem doing so, and my presence ended up doubling the number of players. I created The Mixer, the man with the power of concrete. (Presumably he fell into a vat of radioactive comcrete, or was bitten by a radioactive cement truck.)

Together with ebartley's character, a teenaged teleporter who uses her powers not only to fight crime, but also to hold down a bunch of part-time food delivery jobs, we saved the city bank from the Cod God, whose fish control powers are slightly more impressive than they sound.

Then I tried out the Out of the Box game Letterflip. This is not a good game., as the only thing the box gets you over pencil and paper is the preprinted cards containing words. The strategy is pretty much covered by remembering "etaoin shrdlu".

While I was playing Letterflip, I found out that our flight had been canceled, and we had to reschedule to either 5:15 or 6:15 the next morning. That wasn't a hard choice, so we made it out to the airport at a slightly more frenzied pace than planned, and the sat around waiting on rain delays at Newark.

And in case anybody cares, it is entirely possible for two people to play Set on an airplane, even if it is a bit awkward.

Comments

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

I really like "bitten by a radioactive cement truck". I still need a comic book icon.

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

Signing up in advance is useful. Of course, I tend to be narrow in terms of what I want to play.

I see that the CoC game you walked out on was one of Rogue Cthulhu's events (as opposed to shoggoth.net, the other big CoC sponsor). It was in the room where the lights were kept low, correct?

[jl8e]

Yeah, it was Rogue Cthulhu

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

I've played 2 games under their auspices. The first wasn't bad, but had pacing problems. The second had a slow start, due to infodumping, but the characters weren't broken, and the finale was gloriously chaotic and satisfying. It did run over, though.

I read in addicted_2_rpgs's journal that she played in the Mature Content scenario, AC/DC, last year, and had a blast -- and it ran from 11 am to 6 pm. I sense a pattern here.