Thoughts on events, music, books and the whole enchilada of my human experience

  Since I was a wee geek of eight years of age, one of my goals in life was to attend GenCon, a gigantic gaming convention (30K+ people, by all estimates). This last weekend, I fulfilled that goal, staying for the whole enjoyable//grueling four days of games, gamers, celebrities, half-celebrities, enthusiastic retailers and outrageous costumes.

Needless to say, I had a blast.

I see fellow blogger Andy has done a good job of general comments, so I'll stick to specific moments that stick out in my mind.

* I attended not one, but two, events centered around Bablyon 5 stars Richard Biggs (Dr. Stephen Franklin) and Jason Carter (Marcus Cole). The first was this Q+A session with about 30 attendees, meaning I was about twenty feet from them even sitting in one of the back rows. They were absolutely hilarious, alternately making fun of each other and thems with regards to careers, fans, characters on B5, penis size and other matters of varying taste. The second function was described to me as an improv comedy event, but turned out to be an actor's studio in which the two guys goodnaturedly critiqued participiants' acting abilities. Since I'm just watching the show for the first time now (approaching the end of Season 4), both events were a real treat, and a highlight of the whole con.

* Worst t-shirt: all black, with this in white: "Carpe DM".

* Best RPG session for me was "Omega: Assimilate", an adventure for Decipher's Star Trek system, run by one of the game's gurus, Don Mappin. The TNG-era plotline involved a expedition into an abandoned Romulan science lab. We managed to choose the most useless positions available for this mission (I was the Flight Officer, and the others were Ship's Counselor, Chief Medical Officer and Security Officer) and still pulled off the mission successfully. It reaffirmed for me that small groups (<5 players) are ideal for RPG'ing.

* Worst game session, by far, was an All Flesh Must Be Eaten session. The hopeless and incomprehensible "plot" involved a virus let loose in the city that causes people to become zombies when they die. We played a group of civilians (I was the video store clerk) who were given weapons by a U.S. soldier and told to fight against the zombies. Then followed three and a half hours of rolling dice against "Guns (Handgun)" and "Dodge" skill. There was only one type of enemy, the "zombies" (that was all the description we received), and nothing in the way of problem solving or roleplaying. While the session was miserable, I had a great time ripping apart the session afterwards with follow participant Andy. See the blog entry below for more details.

* I tried out a whole bunch of board and card games that were new to me: "Killer Bunnies", "Monkeys on the Moon" and "Atlanteon". I enjoyed all three of them

* Best song: "Chainmail Woman", to the tune of "Pretty Woman".

There's a lot more I could say, but I think these snippets should give sense of the thing.

Highly recommended to those with an "Inner Geek".

posted by Jon at 9:54 AM

  I have a general GenCon blog written, but I wanted to post this first. This is an e-mail I wrote to the coordinator of Eden Studio events at GenCon:


Derek,

You replied to a post I put on rpg.net (under the name Sherlock) expressing frustration with the AFMBE session I played in at GenCon. I would like to explain in more detail.

First off, before becoming negative, I would like say that the Friday night session of Terra Primate I played in (by Charles, I think -- forget his last name, maybe Strauss or some such, sorry) was fantastic. The GM, who said he hadn't run any games in ten years, did a wonderful job of including all the players and filling in all the little details. He was running the adventure in the back of the book, with the pre-generated characters, and I can say I would consider picking up this game after this experience.

The Saturday session, "Tower of Flesh", was a completely different matter. I got a strange vibe when I sat at the table, as the GM wasn't very friendly or talkative. Then, someone with a generic ticket came up and asked what the game was about. The GM then EXPLAINED IN DETAIL the entire adventure (including how it ends) while the rest of us sat there. That player left.

The adventure itself (written by the GM) was incredibly poor. Every scene was a battle between the PC's and "zombies". Now, I was expecting an AFMBE session to go into a little more detail about zombies than "there are 5 zombies here". It would seem to me that a system with such a specific focus would allow the players to learn a little bit more about zombies in general. We received no description whatsoever. In fact, I tried a zombie lore roll and received in response "Maybe you can shoot him in the head". That's it.

Beyond that skill use, and one other player's single use of Hacking, the only skills we used were Gun and Dodge. Again, that's it. Every scene was us pulling up to a location and receiving "There are 11 zombies moving around here. They turn and attack." Then we would fight them and move on. Sort of like an RPG version of Double Dragon or Mario Brothers -- move from left to right, kill things, keep moving right. The final "boss" in the session, a mad scientist with a tommy gun (?!?), went down on the first shot by the first player firing.

Oh, and before I forget, if Gun and Dodge are going to be the only skills used in a session, why were we given the pregens from the book? Basically the Soldier and Police Officer did all the good fighting, while the rest of us Video Store Clerks and Hackers missed like crazy.

Oh, and there's even another thing -- in AFMBE as this GM interpreted it, every roll of 5 or below means you shoot another player. WTF? Even with a pretty good skill of 2, you're going to shoot another player 30% of the time, as opposed to the 40% the time you'll hit a zombie on 9+. Can that possibly be right?

There are a few other things that couldn't be foreseen (one cheating player reading the adventure as the GM turned pages -- though the adventure as written was just maps, and also the GM was losing his voice the whole session), but the bulk of my complaint would be with the scenario and the GM. Honestly, I can't say this session really showed off any strengths of the system or genre. It was probably the worst RPG session I've ever played in.

Now, I don't want to end on a negative note, so I'd like to say that what I saw of the Unisystem in action in the Terra Primate session, I liked a lot. We weren't shooting each other 1/3 of the time, and non-combat skills came up a lot. It was really a great session, and helped me to see that the AFMBE game was more the fault of the GM than Eden Studios. God help me if I hadn't had that preparation -- honestly, I probably would never pick up an Eden product, whereas right now I'm still on the fence about AFMBE and am pretty enthusiastic about TP.

Anyhow, thanks for letting me vent.

Jon

posted by Jon at 9:22 AM