Fiasco playset: GenCon

After I recovered from the sleep deprivation and mild insanity that always results from attending GenCon, it occured to me that GenCon would make a perfect playset. Think about it, tons of nerds with no sleep, lots of booze and/or caffeine, and easily-provoked nerd rage are just a fiasco waiting to happen. So here for your Fiasco enjoyment is GenCon: The Worst Four Days In Gaming.

Big thanks to Travis Farber and Nick Frankenhauser for helping me playtest it. And thanks to Jason Morningstar for giving me excellent advice that helped me make this as terrible and awful as it could possibly be.

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GenCon 2008 Wrap-Up

A couple things, and then I'll stop posting about GenCon and start posting about current projects and concerns.

1) FINAL NUMBERS: Thou Art But A Warrior sold 24 solo copies and 7 copies as part of the package with Polaris for an astounding THIRTY ONE copies. I had suspicions that I could sell that many, but the fact that I actually accomplished it despite overall booth numbers being low makes me really, really happy.

2) OTHER COOL THINGS. There are a couple things that deserve mention here, but since I've already discussed them elsewhere I'll just post links to the relevant threads.

Danielle's amazing game of Kagematsu was fantastic, and is one of the things that I'm excited to see next year. Ron started a thread in the Playtesting forum on the Forge, which you can find over here.

Tony LB is posting actual plays of all seven (SEVEN!) of the games of Misery Bubblegum that he ran at GenCon. I'm even more excited about Misery Bubblegum than I am about Kagematsu. Hopefully some time within the next little while, he'll have gotten to posting AP of the game that I played in. That thread is also in the Playtesting forum, and can be found here.

A lot of people talked about their GenCon experience in this thread over on Story Games.

Steve Segedy started a GenCon post-mortem discussion in the Conventions forum on the Forge, and there's been some good conversation already.

3) FUTURE PROJECTS. One of the reasons I went to GenCon, besides engaging in dirty dirty capitalism and hanging out with new friends, is to do some networking and get my name out there for future projects. This aspect of GenCon was much more successful than last year, as I have a few definite things lined up. As of yet, it's too early to talk about any of them. But I'm confident that I'll be able to talk about them more in the future.

The art in Thou Art But A Warrior was really well received, and I have hopes that it will generate interest in future illustration work.

4) BLACK OPS ANGEL GAME. I saw a lot of neat games that handled character creation in rather unorthodox ways, which helped to shake loose a lot of ideas for how to deal with this problem in the game that I'm working on now. I have every hope that by the end of the year I'll have an alpha version of the game finished and ready to start mutilating playtesting.

I've thought a lot about how I want to plan things, and I decided that taking two years to develop Thou Art But A Warrior was a sensible move on my part, considering that I have so many other projects on the go. I might shoot for having an ashcan available for next GenCon, but for now I'll just concentrate on trying to finish an alpha version of the game.

Thoughts on GenCon 2008

1) Zombie Cinema is amazing. It really took a lot of people by storm, and I hope that Eero sold the crap out of it. Every time I looked, I saw him running demos, which bodes well for sales.

Also, listening to Eero talk about his game is super entertaining, because Zombie Cinema with a Finnish accent comes out sounding like “Chombie Kinema”. The rest of the Forge/IPR booth people were enthralled, and there was much talk of “chombies” throughout the con.

I told pretty much everyone that I talked to at GenCon for longer than 60 seconds that they needed to play this game. So hopefully Eero will do well.

2) I suck at visualizing people on the internet. I thought Graham would be large and bulky, so imagine my surprise when he was… well… small. Also, Josh Roby was way taller than I thought he’d be. The funny thing is that I never really know how I picture people until I meet them and am then surprised.

3) Tony LB is working on a card/roleplaying game that simulates shoujo anime hauntingly well – Misery Bubblegum. It’s short, maybe an hour and a half, and he ran about a million games at the con. He had people who didn’t even like shoujo sold on the game. I can only apply the term “gut punching emo porn” to this game in the most positive way imaginable.

I knew nothing about this game going in, other than having heard Lenny (one of the Evil Hat guys) rant about how amazing Misery Bubblegum was. The group of people I played with were, by and large, pretty tired. But we played the crap out of it and wound up with a heart-wrenchingly sad tale with a pretty heartwarming end.

This is far and away the game that I am most excited about for next year. It warms the cockles of my little heart, and I told Tony that I would have given him money right there and then if he had had decks to sell.

I also have fanart of Misery Bubblegum which I will post later, I just haven’t had a chance to scan it yet.

4) Flow charts and diagrams were my obsession of the con. I discovered that making sarcastic flow charts is quite fun.

5) Thou Art But A Warrior, as mentioned previously, sold very well. I ran a crap-ton of demos of it, which was good. Sadly, I discovered that my demo is much stabbier than I thought it would be – owing the fact that I often had to stab NPCs to make people state that they wanted a conflict, despite stating up front that they could declare a conflict whenever.

Lenny enjoyed my demo far too much, as the stabbing made his eyes light up.

6) Speaking of Lenny, one of the Evil Hat guys described him as a rabid ferret. I found that a very accurate description. He’s a very cool guy to talk to and game with, but holy shit. You could use him to power a lap top.

7) Graham ran Poison’d for myself, Vincent, Joshua Newman, and Danielle Lewon, and it was officially the best roleplaying game I have ever played. EVER. At one point, Graham said the following to Vincent, of course in his adorable British accent: “the crew would like to tie you to the mast, if that’s not too much trouble”. I laughed so hard that I cried at many points.

I played an utterly reprehensible human being named Bloody Harry, and was kind of relieved at the end when he got a chisel through the eye socket. Also, I kind of traumatized Vincent, which still amuses me to no end because Vincent was the one who pulled this out of his brain in the first place.

8) Seeing Graham surrounded by women for most of the con was pretty amusing. It must be the accent.

9) I only bought three games, which kind of surprised me given how many new games there are this year. I demoed a lot of them, and plan on keeping on eye on them while I make up my mind if I want them or not.

I think I’m just tired of buying games that I know I won’t ever play.

More later, I’m sure, as I think of more amusing things to share