The Way You Pay for Games You Play
My weekend was spent largely devoted to gaming. As I recap this event, I should warn the non-gamers out there that there will be precious little in this post to keep your attention. I’m about to “geek out,” if you will. If you don’t know (or care) what an NPC is, what a twenty-sided dice could be useful for or you can’t fathom why somone would stay up until 4:00 am after having gotten out of bed at that same time 24 hours prior pretending to be a Klingon, move along.
Everyone gone? I figured as much. Still, I am prone to talking to myself and I do so love the dulcet tones of my fingers clacking against a keyboard, so onward and upward.
Friday night Nik and I checked in and met up with Lister and Whimsy for some Pasta Pomadoro as we waited for the lottery-style games to be announced. The registration process at DunDraCon works like this: For each session (there are several per day except on Friday where there is only one) you can put in a request card with up to three registered game codes written on it: Your first, second and third choices. The all-powerful Con masters then organize the games based on priority and some degree of chance to fill up as many of the registered events as possible. Lister and I put down a GURPS 4th Edition Star Trek game (“Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold”) and our first choice, a Necromunda mini-campaign as second and a boardgame session Lister was interested in third.
Truthfully I would have probably preferred to put the Necromunda game as the first choice and put GURPS as second, but Lister was very excited about the game, I still don’t have a Necromunda gang of my own and DunDraCon is more of a role-playing convention than a miniatures one, so I figured I should at least get one good RPG in while I was there. We got into the GURPS game after all and in the end I’m very glad I did. Aside from The One Guy who is present in all RPGs involving mixed company of strangers who has some sort of serious Issue (in this case it was a propensity at untimely rules-lawyering and some questionable personal space standards—although his skill at rapidly tabulating the results of a large die roll was impressive), the game was quite enjoyable.
I was impressed by GURPS (perhaps more so than Hero, which I played last year, although the two are quite similar) and its ability to handle the Star Trek world with what seemed like effortless grace. Part of it was helped by the fine work of Mike, our GM, who was not only meticulously prepared but (almost frighteningly) knowledgable about Star Trek lore and Klingon trivia. I did find it interesting that he used the IQ attribute check frequently and often allowing successes to reveal information “known” by the character but not the player. He also had a very clever system for managing space travel (long distance travel is a tricky thing to GM through) using a simple but effective grid-based map and while I felt he went to the well too often for ship operation skill check rolls (the result of which was—by virtue of probability—my Communications Officer character managed to botch one of the transmissions rather badly, but after 46 die rolls it was bound to happen eventually) overall the flow of the game was nicely paced and smooth.
He even transitioned from straight role-playing to minis-and-maps based combat movement seamlessly with well-prepared ship schematics (hex-based, of course) and a cantina setting done with a Chessex wipe-off drop cloth. The story may have been a bit ambitious for a (relatively) short eight-hour adventure, but it was effective and engaging anyway. At the end of the game Lister won the GM-supplied prize of a Klingon-branded mug for best Role-Playing (I certainly don’t want to detract from Lister’s play because he was indeed phenomenal, but he was practically born to play that character). A nervous-looking but well-mannered young couple was originally supposed to be awarded the con-supplied prize which was a copy of the 4th Edition GURPS Characters book (a generous $40 value) and I thought they deserved it, but they already owned the book so it went to me instead and I was more than happy to take it. Free stuff is almost always awesome, but free stuff you’d probably buy anyway… well.
After collapsing into bed for a few hours Nik and I dragged ourselves up and joined Whimsy/Lister and Vext for some breakfast at the hotel buffet before hitting the Dealer’s Room. I must have made two dozen circuits around the room during the con but in the end I only came home with some cheap (but nice looking) pre-made terrain and some assorted dice. Nik, on the other hand, went crazy at one of the game booths nabbing Gloom, a dark, clever card game with transparent plastic cards; Lunch Money, another even darker card game; and The Nacho Incident, a silly game with some strangely backwards strategies. I also stopped by the Flea Market room and got a full squad of Termagaunts, already assembled and primed, plus a stack of Tyranid sprues and a blister of a Chaos Space Marine with Lascannon, all for $6.00.
We played a game that Necroid made up called Ninja Dice: It was pretty awesome, and attracted a lot of attention from passer-by. We tried the Nacho Incident, Gloom, Lunch Money, Blink (all good) and Sneeze (meh) while we waited around for more players. Eventually we settled on Wings of War with Lister manning the AA guns, Vext and I playing the Allies and fwaaa and Necroid manning the German zeppelins. Vext and I won in the end, but it was a great time.
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