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.
At one point Lister and I got into a discussion about the relative merits of Dungeons and Dragons (3.x, specifically) versus other systems. Now here’s the thing from my perspective: d20 is, from my experience, a remarkably average system. I don’t think it works as well as a universal system as people wish it did (Hero is better and now that I’m looking into GURPS it seems even superior to Hero, at least as a truly generic option) and I think a lot of the mechanics—like the absolute alignments and armor systems—are included too much for historical reasons and not adjusted for actual playability. Lister pointed out that when it comes to monsters and magic, it doesn’t get more complete than D&D and I agree with that.
But here’s my problem with D&D: I think that role-playing systems need to be designed to either be as universal as possible (GURPS, Hero, d20) or as specific to a particular setting as possible with the included rules designed specifically to create situations that match the aims of the setting. For example, Shadowrun’s system is in no way universal but it does implement its peculiarities for the reason of balancing the disparate aspects presented in the fictional world where magic and technology co-exist. Similar systems would be Warhammer FRP, Vampire: The Masquerade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Call of Cthulu, Paranoia, etc. These games don’t need to have universally applicable rules because their setting is specific and if there are no directly applicable rules to incorporate laser cannons into a WFRP campaign, that’s cool because they don’t really belong there.
Where I think D&D fails is that it provides neither a compelling built-in setting to explain its rules quirks nor does it adequately apply its rules across the board to accomodate any and all possible scenarios. I often wondered why so many D&D adventures were standard dungeon-crawls until I realized that the ideal setting for the rules of Dungeons and Dragons is in a dungeon with the dragon/beholder/lich on the bottom level and pit traps that your rogue better catch if you want to make it back to town with your loot and HP intact.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with dungeon crawls, mind you. They can certainly be a hoot and they’re a good way to go if you have a few players together now and you don’t want to spend forever getting everyone up to speed, especially if you don’t know when you can reconvene again. But I think D&D games end up being more board game than RPG because of this: Characters are often played to stereotypes because everyone is more worried about getting off that next fireball or performing the critical feat to kill the kobolds than wondering what their motivation is (and this is just my experience, I don’t mean to suggest that no one role-plays well in D&D). Maybe it has something to do with the alignment system since it’s fairly easy to fall into a static trap of Lawful Good characters being goody-two-shoes with no shades of grey and so on.
It was just an academic exercise until I started thinking about the merchandising tie-ins with Dungeons and Dragons, like the forthcoming D&D Online Multiplayer Online RPG and the Dungeons and Dragons movie. The problem with those is that I look at it and think, “So?” I mean, what is the tie-in with D&D? It’s not even like they’re doing Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms; it’s just run of the mill D&D. So the big twist is that it’s got… half-elves? I don’t play MMORPGs, but I’m guessing there is very little in DDO that hasn’t been available in Everquest since 1998, you know? They’re billing the game as having improved combat systems but when you have what is supposed to be this huge license and your big marketing point is no different than a wholly original game’s might be, I have to wonder what the “hook” for D&D actually is.
Back to the convention, I was a little disappointed in how little they had in the way of actual RPG materials available in the dealer’s room; I couldn’t even find volume 2 of the GURPS 4th edition books in there. Most of what was available was a wash of d20 supplements, one booth for Hero and a few assorted milk crates full of random discounted games. I had to stop at the comic and games store on the way home to find the book. Dumb.
So the whole thing was quite the success I think; even Nik said she had fun which I was a little worried she wouldn’t. I spent some time on Saturday checking out the armies in the WH40K RTT (which Lister and I decided back in November we weren’t going to do at this con) and decided that while I was pretty sure if this was how other people painted I wasn’t ever going to win any best in show awards, I still want to give the tourney thing a try. I’m planning on making a big push for miniatures for May’s KublaCon. Hopefully I’ll have plenty of time to paint up the rest of my Chaos army plus get the Warmaster guys done enough (I’ve actually made some decent progress on them so far) to try out and finish my other Blood Bowl team for the tournament that hopefully Strahd will resume after a DunDraCon absence. At some point I still have a Necromunda gang to buy, assemble and paint plus there’s a stack of Napoleonic Brits to get set up (maybe for next year’s Shield Con which I took a pass on this year) and I still need to get my Shadowrun adventure series (I’ve dropped the scale back from a full campaign) finished so I can run it. Oh, did I mention I have a new idea for a GURPS-based horror adventure? Plus Nik just got me Gang of Four and Mystery of the Abbey for Valentine’s Day so I’m going to be gamer-a-go-go here.
Except all I do is work and then collapse on the couch to watch stupid TV until I fall asleep. I need to get to work on that independently wealthy thing…
