Got the following e-mail:
The following events have been Accepted for Consideration. After Gen Con reviews your event you will only be notified if we cannot schedule your event.RPG00176 Barroom Blitz IV: The Musical Interlude
RPG00177 Barroom Blitz IV: The Musical Interlude
RPG00178 Barroom Blitz IV: The Musical Interlude
Sweet.
Wow... talk about getting busy...
Friday
Friday morning, as I was helping George get ready to run his session of last year's Barroom Blitz scenario, we discovered something horrific -- it wasn't scheduled to be run "8 a.m. Friday" as we both thought, but instead was supposed to run at "9 p.m. Thursday". Which was, of course, slightly problematic to discover Friday morning. Very uncool, and if you're one of the folks who got screwed by that mishap, I apologize profusely. Stop me next year (at a Blitz III session, fate willing) and I'll apologize in person and try to make it up to you somehow.
08:00 - 12:00 - Diplomacy Tournament Qualifier
I had registered for the Intro to Diplomacy event, which was essentially a non-qualifying event... it's designed for "newbs", but also people who have something scheduled for the finals round often play in the "Intro". However, the qualifier round was short a couple players to make the numbers work, so I was one of the people they asked (since I was a previous Diplomacy Tournament veteran) to step up into the big game.
I drew Russia. I got caught in the worst situation -- a Turkey, Austria-Hungary, Germany alliance, bent on destroying Russia and Italy. With a strong alliance there that couldn't be broken, I was definitely on the short end of the stick. I take pride, though, in my ability to survive through the entire 5-year run of the qualifier round, including a surprise snatching of life from death's jaws when Italy and a (now-backstabbed) Germany helped my only surviving unit obtain a supply-center-in-exile in Munich.
12:00 noon - 4:00 p.m. - An event that shall remain nameless
OK, now that I'm a repeat veteran of GenCon DMing, I've got some pointers for potential DMs:
9:00 p.m. - 1:00 a.m. - Barroom Blitz II
More to come on this, it deserves its own entry covering all three runs.
Saturday
8:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon - Barroom Blitz I
Since this was going to be George's first run through the Blitz I scenario as a DM, I figured I'd tag along, give him a hand with it, and act as a resource since I've done it a number of times now. It went pretty well. It was extremely short-handed (9 out of 16 players), but it still went pretty well.
afternoon
I spent the afternoon really going over the retail floor yesterday. I wasn't feeling too hot (I've been picking up something of a sore throat this weekend) so I blew off my six-hour afternoon slot for a more casual stroll around the floor, looking at some of the new products out there (and being sure to stop by every software vendor I saw to give him shit if they didn't have a Mac version -- they don't know we're out there wanting the stuff if you don't tell them).
9:00 p.m. - 1:00 a.m. - Barroom Blitz II
Like before, I'll give this it's own entry.
Sunday
10:00 a.m. - 1:45 p.m. - World Series of GenCon
The "last chance for a trip to Vegas" turned out to be a bust of sorts. Sundays being Sundays at GenCon, turnout for the event was horrible. A minimum of 75 people needed to show up for there to be a trip awarded, but it didn't happen. Instead, they gave everyone one of several options: Everyone could do a couple up-front rebuys to bring the "total buy-in" to the amount needed to make the event sanctioned, we could accept lesser prizes for first place (options were given on a poker table or a case of the limited edition WSOG poker-chips the tournament was using), or they would offer up refunds.
Since the first option was never going to happen (you couldn't get everyone to agree to pay more money, especially on the last day of the 'con after everyone's been spending money all week), some people took refunds, and the remaining 40 of us competed for the lesser prizes.
At my first table, the guy two seats to my left was a definite fish. He thought he was good, but .. seriously here.... there's four to the nut-straight on the table, and you've got two pair, do you:
Yeah, he had four outs (two actually, considering cards it was later revealed had been mucked) but seriously, that doesn't seem to me to be smart play. After blowing through his third rebuy, he was trying to buy generic tickets from players at the table to get the five he needed for a rebuy, but he only had $6.50 instead of the needed $7.50... I happily chipped in the missing buck for him. "Nothing person, but for as fast as we're all collecting your chips tonight, I'll happily help you put chips into our stacks."
At my first two tables, I was doing really well, got some really nice flops, and doubled-up on several full-houses and straights, and was doing pretty well. At my third table, though, my luck disappeared and I couldn't catch a hand to save my life. As the blinds went up, my ability to survive definitely seemed to be in doubt. However, they broke our table up and moved us all up to the final table before the blinds got me totally hosed.
In UTG+2, with only enough chips to pay for a small and big blind, I got dealt pocket bullets. There was not going to be a better chance than this, and even though the guy across from me (a pro dealer) later told me it was clear to him that I had them [Note to self: Must play more face-to-face tournies to improve the poker face], I got two callers. Unfortunately, though -- as so often happens in our home-game -- pocket aces simply couldn't cut it, and I was eliminated in 9th place.
I was pretty happy with the outcome, though. It was my first final-table at a tournament of any sort, and I think I played well the whole way throughout. If you don't catch cards, you don't catch cards, and the blinds crippled me along the way, simple as that. My game improved over my last tournament and I'm happy with that.
After the tournament, Chaz and I perused the retail floor, looking for bargains from people who don't want to bring stuff home, and eventually headed over to Steak-n-Shake for dinner, and then back to the room.
Now, it's 11:00, starting to wind down, getting ready to pack it in for the night, and head out on the road tomorrow morning back for New York.
As it turns out, GenCon'06 is earlier in the month next year, so we've already booked the reservations for next year's hotel. Surprisingly (and possibly because the Westin hasn't been told about the 'Con dates yet), the rate I reserved at for next year is $40/night cheaper than what I paid this year. All the other close hotels are already sold out, with only one or two exceptions, so I can't be the only one who thinks about this every year. (While at GenCon, reserve your room directly for the following year... screw the "lottery luck of the draw" of waiting to use the housing bureau, get the rooms up-front, maybe pay slightly higher, but have a better chance of getting something decent).
See you all next year.
8:00 am - 12:00 noon : Barroom Blitz II (as DM)
Ummm, I'm going to reserve comment on any of my Blitz sessions until Saturday evening, after I've run all three sessions, lest someone who is in the Friday night or Saturday night sessions read this and get spoilers they shouldn't have.
12:00 noon - 4:00 pm : Luckily Reds Breathe Fire
I'd been in Kent King's Demons in the Drink session (which is the prequel to this session) last year at GenCon 2004. I really enjoy Kent's DMing style and the stories he chooses to tell. Plus, I've had him as a player and he is clearly a class act. If you're looking for events in a GenCon catalog and you see his name, definitely grab it. You won't be sorry.
8:00 pm - well, sadly, 8:45 pm - World Series of GenCon 2005
I entered into the World Series of Gen Con poker tournament this evening. It was a $15.00 buy-in that bought you T$1000. The top three winners from the Thursday, Friday and Saturday night events, as well as one lucky person from the Sunday afternoon "Last Chance" event, will all be flown out - and have their expenses paid - to Vegas to compete at a "final table" for real prizes (although, because of quirks in the gambling laws, they obviously cannot tell us here what those prizes are, because that would make this a gambling event ... seriously, it's funny shit, if you think about it... instead because they don't offer "payouts", and because you CAN get in for free (just with a reduced chip-stack, and only if there are openings which there never are) it's a "Sweepstakes".
Anyhow, I couldn't catch cards to save my life. Well, that's not entirely true, my pocket nines formed a set early on that matured into a really nice nines-full-of-twos two cards later, allowing me to bust someone out, but pretty much beyond that point, I couldn't win a hand to save my life, and ended out severely short-stacked at about T$400, with the blinds at 50/100... I scored pocket 8s, went all-in, cuz that was pretty much as good as it was going to get at that point, and lost the coin-toss to two over-cards on the river. That's poker, though.
I'm entered into the Sunday tournament, though. The Sunday event has fewer "winners", but Sunday is always such a weak day for players and events that I expect turnout to be fairly low, so the reduced competition may help. Also, because of a change to the format, most of the marketing material says that the Sunday is an invitational only, so unless you see the new posters and go "Ah-HA!" you probably don't think you can attend the Sunday session anyway. Heh.
9:00 pm - 1:00 am : Illuminati [classic, not INWO]
This was probably the most interesting game of Illuminati I've played in years. I drew, early on, a card that would allow me to retroactively change any die roll to a 12 (a failure).
I had drawn the Discordian Society, so my goal was to collect five Weird groups. By my third turn I had already gathered three of them. During a fierce battle for the third, the guy sitting across from me, playing the Gnomes, had elected not to get involved (as everyone else at the table tried to prevent me from getting it). One of the rules is that if you haven't got a subordinate power in your control by the end of your third turn, you're immediately eliminated. When it came to be his turn (his third turn) he still had no groups. He declared a privileged attack, so nobody could interfere with the attack, and then went after a group, succeeding with ease.
Except that I stopped play, and asked him how much it was worth to him for me not to play my "You rolled a 12, dipshit" card. I knew he had a stack, and he started out by offering 10MB. I countered with 30MB. In the end, we haggled for a few and settled out at 18MB. I was nice to him because he had been nice to me, and because (out of game) I'd have felt sorta shitty knocking a player out that early into the game. Yeah, we were playing at an "all-experts" table, and it would have totally been the right play from a strictly-rules sense, but there's also "fun" aspects to be concerned with, too.
However, the fact that I neither (a) played the card, nor (b) completley bankrupted him, earned him and I the attention of the rest of the board for the rest of the evening, him moreso than me. He was, as I said, playing the Gnomes. His job is to hoard money. He was being very cheap, which is his role. Although, he got a little too cheap, and ended up painting a bullseye on his head. (Every player competes against each other, but there's also a lot of cooperative "Yeah, but we can't let HIM get any closer or we all lose." types of moments in Illuminati).
For the next dozen turns, the Gnomes were basically crushed. Any time they accumulated any money whatsoever they were beaten down, forced to spend it. Then their power structure was attacked, and -- now poor -- they were unable to defend it. Eventually they were down to only two groups, and no cash except the income they earned from that particular turn.
Then came the most stunning event of the night. There were three camps of players really: (a) me and the Gnomes, who were on the shitlist (although my name was in very small letters after they'd eliminated one or two of the groups I controlled, because I hadn't pissed them off lately, and with only 1 Weird group I was no threat)... (b) the four players to my right who were really annoyed and pushed over the edge when the Gnomes wouldn't spend 5MB out of their 50MB stash to help prevent a critical move from happening earlier, and (c) a guy to my left who was playing The Network, who seemed to be really good at playing the game and had managed to stay completely neutral in everything.
After getting crushed one too many times, the Gnomes did something completely stunning. They captured (with some resistance, but not enough) another group. Then -- looking straight at the four players who were all approaching their own victory conditions on the next turn or so -- he transferred a chunk of his power structure to The Network, giving him the victory at least two turns before he could ever have gotten it.
There then followed some heated discussion about "throwing the game". I came to the Gnomes' defense, pointing out that you can't throw a game you can't win, and it was clear they couldn't win. Further, part of Illuminati is the whole intrigue, backstabbing, deception, etc., and thus (as a corollary to that) is the concept that if you piss someone off enough, they might very well decide that if they can't win, well then by the gods, neither can you, and ensure that you don't get the victory.
Luckily, after the "heated discussion", the conversation turned to more amenable topics, and everyone ended up sitting around bullshitting for an hour, before I decided to head back up to the room, write this summary for those who care, and head off to bed.
Little George is running the original Barroom Blitz scenario tomorrow morning at 8:00 a.m. ... this'll probably be the first time George's gotten up for anything at 8:00 in his entire life. :-) [just kidding, G!]
So after this week, I've got my "plans for next year":
So I ran the final session of the Blitz this afternoon. It was a dismal showing. Of the sold-out 16 slots, only six people showed up. I went around the area canvassing for players, and couldn't find any additional people. Anyone who has played the Blitz knows that six people is extremely light. I really never conceived of a figure less than 10-11 for participation. After explaining the situation, that I could either arrange refunds, or give it a shot with a significantly reduced player-load (because unlike most scenarios, I can't just pair up each player with two characters, there's far too much interaction and surprise involved)
But, they wanted to give it a shot, and I tried to cherry pick six characters who would at least have SOME conflict involved. It went pretty well, but was nowhere near it's normal fun-level. Two people died and I quickly handed them off other characters who could come in without prolonged story line expositions.
Brian was there, and he seemed to enjoy himself, so I guess it turned out OK after all. Now it's time to start packing the small suitcase (the one I brought with me empty) with all the crap I bought this week...
Second session of the 'Blitz ran this evening...
"In all the years I've been coming to GenCon, I have not had as much fun as I had here tonight doing this."
Now, I know I didn't come up with the idea for the Brawl, but hearing that still makes me feel pretty damned spiffy.
Now I just wish the Westin had a better late-night room-service menu. Ah, well, I don't get to order from Papa Johns in New York anyway.
Walter Koenig is staying in the Westin as well. I bumped into him as he was coming across the skybridge from his autograph session. Nice guy. :-)
The first event this morning for me was Holy Smackdown with about a dozen people playing demigods trying to take on some minor deities. Scarily enough, it worked out pretty well for everyone concerned. I died twice (but it's tough to kill a demigod) and finally managed to be the guy who laid down the "killing blow" such as it was.
In the afternoon, I went to a Battletech Boot Camp, which is designed to be either (a) an introduction to the game for newbies, or (b) a cheap refresher course to refresh someone's memory on how to play the game. It's been a while since I played BattleTech, but I figured since I'm scheduled for a real BattleTech session tomorrow, I ought to familiarize myself with the rules again.
But then again, considering my record for making it to my 8 a.m. sessions (1-for-3, and the "1" was the first day when I hadn't been out all night), I think it may not even become a factor.
Tomorrow at noon is the last running of the Blitz. Brian is coming down from ... ah, wherever the hell in Corn Land it is that he lives, and will be participating in the afternoon session. Should be fun.
OK, time to relax, watch some TV, and wait for the 'za to show up.
A sign seen on a GenCon vendor's booth:
We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone (Specifically people who haven't showered)
Overheard at the GenCon gift shop:
Deluxe badge holder... 8 dollars
Commemorative T-Shirt... 35 dollars
Using the soap the hotel provided you free of charge... priceless
For a group of people who can be amazingly anal about the craziest stuff (what number is facing upward on their idle dice, who gets to touch their dice, the condition of their pristinely-stored books, etc.), gamers seem to have an amazing number of people who are not similarly anal about applying liberal amounts of soap and deodorant to themselves on a daily basis.
Can anyone explain that apparent contradiction?
I'm freakin' exhausted.
There were three no-shows tonight for the Barroom Blitz. That's about what I expected, really, it's about average for something that size. What I didn't expect was that there would be people standing around before the session was even close to starting so as to "be first in line" to get into the event with generics. That's how popular it appears to have been.
When we playtested it at home, it ran the full four hours and was actually a bit tight. Tonight, I misremembered the schedule and thought, at midnight, at that we were at the wrapping up point, when actually we were only three hours into the session. That bodes really well for future sessions (since running late was one of my biggest fears, especially Sunday when there's no time to do so since it's the last event of the entire Con).
I am mentally and physically drained from it, but it was so, so, so worth it, and I'm looking forward to more of the same tomorrow night.
This is the first time I've really come up for air since yesterday morning.
Thursday, 8am... I was in Kent King's My Mother! My Wife! scenario, where we played a band of merry females off to help the Prince (who has a habit of fainting and being basically useless) by rescuing his mother (the Queen) and his bride from a mean nasty bad man. It was pretty good, and I was really impressed with Kent's DMing. I also found out Kent will be in my Saturday night Barroom Blitz session, so I'll get to turn the tables on him a little bit.
After that, I skipped out on my afternoon session because I decided I wanted to hit the retail floor. Let me just say now how convenient it is to be in the Westin, attached to the convention center, in the room that is the closest possible room to the skybridge to the convention center (out door, across hall, down one flight of stairs, turn left onto skybridge). Between the things "I wanted" and the various and sundries which my gamers back home have been demanding, I've been warming up the MasterCard quite a bit. Luckily, almost none of what I've spent money on is mine, so I'll get that money back (and make some frequent flier miles in the process *grin*).
After that, George and I headed over to the 30th Anniversary Party, where there were plenty of goodies to be had. I had already eaten, as had George, so we didn't stick around too long, just long enough to get the free stuff and leave (it had been open for about 10 minutes and was already packed to the rafters, sticking around in a rock-concert-like crowd was just not worth it without someone like Megadeth up on stage).
For the final event of Thursday evening, George got his first-ever experience playing Illuminati. We managed to squeeze in two games (with, for those who care, The Bavarian Illuminati winning the first, and a surprising win for George in the second game playing The Discordian Society). Given that the question he asked as we went back to the room (at 2-freaking-a.m.!!) was "Do you have that game??", I have a vision of that seeing some play sessions back home now.
I totally slept through my Friday morning Diplomacy session (get to room at 2:15, get to sleep by 2:45,... be ready to get up by 7:15 to be out the door by 7:55? ugh, I'm old). George and I patrolled the floor this morning picking up (still more) stuff that the locals had asked for.
Afterwards, I went to Demons In The Drink by, surprisingly, Kent King again. It was an odd mix of D&D and space aliens (who are demons, as far as we can tell), but it was quite entertaining. But, after watching Kent use these 3x5 cards to keep track of initiative stats on, I was hooked, and proceeded to steal some of his blanks, so that I could make up similar cards for the 'Blitz this evening. It's hard enough keeping track of eight players, let alone sixteen, and those would be really useful.
My late-afternoon session was a "room changed" session, except it appears that nobody knew except, I guess, the DM. There were three players at our table in the old room with "pre-registered" event tickets, but no DM. By the time I found out about the room change, it was 20 minutes into the game slot, so I convinced the Hall Captain to authorize a refund for me.
It was probably just as well, because then I went up to my room to do up my 3x5 cards for the characters in my session. As I was doing them I realized I'd made a horrible mistake and left out the Town Guard character sheets when I printed everything out back in New York. The guards don't play a pivotal role, but that may be necessary in some fashion to break things up if a particular character is going overboard in capability, or as a story-device to end the session as the time limit approaches.
Luckily, the business center let me download the PDFs I'd stashed on my web server (for just this sort of emergency!!) and print them out. It only cost me an arm, no leg, to use the computer and printer for two minutes (total cost about $5 for use of the printer and use of the computer for that long, I swear to god).
Anyhow, I'm now winding down a bit, getting ready to go get some grub and relax before tonight's GenCon debut of the 'Blitz. I'll post more when I can scrape together some more time.
It's 6:30 in the morning. I awoke about an hour before our 7 a.m. wakeup call, my body automatically waking after it's customary six hours of sleep.
The drive out here was long, taking about twelve and a half hours (damned construction), but we made it in one piece, which is all that counts.
It is literally, aside from going down one flight of stairs, four steps from our room to the skybridge to the convention center. Our room almost seems selected specifically for late-morning laziness avoiding having to get up early to get out, which is good because I know that after today, sleep is going to be a commodity item.
Time to hit the showers... the first day awaits.
It's that time of year again. Tomorrow, I start the drive to Indianapolis for four days of gaming.
Unlike past years, I'll be running an event a couple times this week. When I was a teenager, I attended a local D&D con, and played in a "consolation round" event that was basically a barroom brawl scenario. I tracked it down from the magazine it was printed in (nearly 20 years ago), updated it to 3.5 edition rules, et voila, Barroom Blitz was born. It's a 16-player melee with plenty of conflict guaranteed. Last I heard, of the 48 maximum spots, there was 1 available, in the Thursday night slot (and that must be a cancellation, because it originally was completely sold out for all three sessions). I'm looking forward to it.
The iPod is loaded with tunes, the bags are packed, and showtime begins tomorrow morning bright and early as I head out on the open road where (hopefully) it'll be somewhat decent weather and I can make good time. I'm not holding my breath, though, given the weather forecasts.
As I type this, George's wife is in enduced labor, so she can pop out her kid in time for him to accompany me on the trip. (Why he is willing to leave his wife and newborn child less than six hours after birth is a story for a completely different blog entry I suspect).
If you're going to be at GenCon, give me a shout!
For anyone attending GenCon '04 in Indianapolis this year, I'll be DM'ing three sessions of "Barroom Blitz".
RPG00252 08/18 21:00-01:00
RPG00253 08/19 21:00-01:00
RPG00254 08/20 12:00-16:00
It's based largely on Lew Pulsipher's "A Bar-Room Brawl - D&D Style" which was published roughly a lifetime ago in Issue #11 of White Dwarf magazine. Put it this way... the "Best of White Dwarf" compendium I found it in is dated 1980, so it's got to have been a year or two prior to that, so it's old.
I brought it up to date with current D&D rules, made a bunch of changes, and did the playtesting for it last weekend (as previously mentioned). There were only a couple of minor tweaks needed, and it's ready to go.
I'm really anxious now. I thought I was anxious last saturday as I was prepping for the playtesters, but now I'm just happily-stupid waiting for August to come around.
I only had one session scheduled for Sunday, and at two minutes to start-time, neither the GM nor any other player had showed up. Since this was also the last time-slot, I decided to ask George's GM to hold a spot in his game for me for a few minutes, in case mine was cancelled. He convinced me to just stick around and play and not worry about it. I'm glad I did.
12:30 p.m. - ABERN I: The Rescue of Duke David... - It was weird to play D&D without any dice rolls. It was complete story-telling, no "Random Chance" or luck of the dice. What the GM and the players wanted to happen happened. It was great.
Overall, GenCon was quite cool. It was a much nicer facility in Indy than the MECCA was in Wisconsin, although GenCon's staffing issues were horrendous. There were people waiting on line for three to four hours to register. That's just ludicrous. It's the same thing year after year so they obviously know "a metric fuckload of people are going to show up", so how can they not staff for it?
Ah, well, I'll be there next year, guaranteed.
Wow... I'm old. It's been a while since I tried to go more than one day in a row on less than four hours sleep, and it kicked me in the ass.
If you're not a D&D geek, feel free to ignore this.