GaryCon IX Report - part 1

My 2017 GaryCon IX adventure began a day early. I had decided to accept the open invitation of Frank Mentzer to come to Frankenparty, the huge gathering at his Wisconsin home the night before the con. It was a little adventurous just getting there from Chicagoland, as I missed a turn and got lost briefly right around the border, but I soon found my way there by another route.

A lot of people were already there by six o’clock, who all seemed to know each other, so I was feeling pretty shy and ready to hide in a corner when I got inside. Luckily, Carlos Lising was there and spent some time sitting with me and talking about comic books. With his encouragement, I hung around Frank Mentzer’s office, listened to him tell stories, and got to touch Gary Gygax’s desk. I completely botched the treasure hunt, though, even with several people offering me help. Frank and Debbie were such gracious hosts that I would definitely like to go back next year.

The next day was Day 1 of GaryCon.  That morning, I left again from Chicagoland, this time bound for Lake Geneva. A wrong turn took me to Grayslake and I thought I would miss my first event at 10 am, but I made excellent time through Wisconsin thanks to their speed limit of 70 and I made it to the Grand Geneva Resort just 10 minutes late. I did not even have time to pick up my tickets and name tag; I had to slip away in the middle of the session to go get those.

My first event was an AD&D (1st ed) adventure called “A Debt of Honor.” My friend Will Schumacher had recommended the DM and I thought he would be playing with me, but Will had dropped out the week before.  Right away, while looking at the characters available to play, Eli triggered one of my pet peeves --  too much house ruling. When I sign up to play a certain game at a convention, I expect to play that game as-is, not someone else’s modified version of it. But the halfling thief looked unaltered; I gladly accepted it even though, in my experience, thieves tend to be unimportant past low level.

The scenario was decent, though the back story was too hard to figure out.  I was glad for so many traps in it, since it kept my thief relevant. Some of the traps were ingenious, though the placement of them was repetitious. As is sometimes the case with these convention scenarios, it’s the fellow players at the table who made the game special. I graded the event with a B and left the table at 2, thinking this was an encouraging beginning, despite my frantic arrival.

Next, I had a ticket to observe Jim Ward's Celebrity Metamorphosis Alpha event (having failed to secure a player ticket). I explained to him in advance how my plan was to observe just the first half of the game before checking out the exhibit hall. This was my first time observing Jim game mastering and was struck by his natural charisma and charm. I picked up some good ideas from him, like letting the players pick any 10 items they want to carry, and shuffling index cards with players’ names on them instead of having people roll individual initiative.

All was going well after an hour (even for the players - only one character death by then), until I found I had some recycling to throw away. That led to a long quest to find a receptacle marked for recycling that ultimately ended in failure. Later, I was told that the bins with tan bags inside were for recycling, but since no one knew that I found they were always filled with mixed trash. Only in this way did the Grand Geneva Resort let me down all weekend.

Because I had wandered so far afield with an empty and unwanted water bottle, I had found myself too close to the exhibit hall. Now, in just a few hours of being out of service range, my phone was rapidly sucking it's battery dry. I was hoping my friend Carlos would have a compatible charging cord, and knew I would  find him in the hall. This would, surely, just be a brief diversion.

I stopped to say hi to Terry Pavlet - always a pleasure. I soon found Carlos again, sitting with his GaryCon companion, the artist known as Darlene. But Carlos had to leave to go pick up a pizza, and Darlene invited me to sit with her.

Now, I have been on the vendor side of a table before, but never at GaryCon, and never has a celebrity asked me to come sit with him or her anywhere. So I abandoned my stuff back in the boardroom with Jim Ward, just trusting my stuff was safer than the characters in Jim’s game, and stayed with Darlene. I told her my personal story of how I discovered Greyhawk and what gaming was like in my teen years. Then, fearing I was boring, I borrowed a story Terry had just told me a short while earlier (I did credit him with the story and didn't try to pass it off as my own). Luckily, Carlos was on the longest pizza run in world history, so I even got to stay and enjoy watching Darlene chat with other celebrities, like Allen Hammack.

She even left me in charge of the table once! Now, I had met and talked to Darlene 3-4 times by now, but she hardly knew me. I realized, though, that this confidence in me wasn't due to my own charisma. Darlene trusted me because Carlos trusted me, and that's how much she trusted Carlos.

Eventually, Carlos did return with the pizza, but then had to run off to help someone else. So now I got to stay and have pizza with Darlene in his stead. Incidentally, Carlos did not have a compatible charging cord, but I could scarcely care, as full as I was with generously shared pizza slices.

One remaining problem though, was that I lost all power on my phone and had no other timepiece on me, and I did not want to be late for my 6 o’clock game of Swords & Wizardry - so I gathered my things (which had been safe in the boardroom) and moved to my reserved table an hour early.

My Swords & Wizardry game was “Jungle Ruins of Madaro-Shanti”, which I had written for Mythmere Games and was published through Frog God Games when they merged. I had seven players, including a couple who dropped in to play because the guy remembered enjoying my OD&D version of “The Invasion of Arun’Kid” last year. One player was Ryan Thompson, who writes his own S&W material and gifted me a copy. Speaking of copies, Michael Badalato stopped by to drop off copies of S&W Light for everyone. Although I’m sure he meant well, this led to some confusion later, as I was running S&W Complete, but my players kept referring to the S&W Light pamphlets in front of them.

Other than that confusion, the game went great. SPOILERS MAY FOLLOW!  The noise level in the room actually helped me (actually, it was mainly from the rowdy bunch playing Keep on the Borderlands next to us) for a change, because they could not overhear each other’s rumors. This party decided to go with most of the expeditionary force of NPCs the town offers them, and it became a running gag for half the session, putting the jungle guide in danger. We got bogged down a little at the gatehouse because they thought it was important to win the fight with the borsin tribe, though most groups figure out to just run from them. They did succeed in finding all the treasure in the gatehouse, though, which most groups don’t do. They completely ignored the well (most groups at least examine it, but no one has ever figured out the whole well complex). Like everyone else, they always assume there must be something good in the temple ruins -- I should really write a supplement someday for the temple ruins instead of just saying it’s empty or making up something.

The druid spent a little too much time scouting alone in animal form for my liking, leaving the rest of the players waiting, but I understand how it was strategically sound to do so -- it even let them avoid some really dangerous giant spider encounters when they finally got to the palace. By the time we finally got to the palace, they went down into the dungeon right away and were really rushing through that first level, as we were running out of time. We stopped after four hours, with two-thirds of the first dungeon level cleared out, and the players seemed to be very happy.

After that, it was time for me to head home. I needed a good night’s sleep back in Chicagoland before the next day’s exciting adventures!

CodConXXII Report

It had been years since I last tried CodCon, but this year I decided to give it a go. Getting there was super easy, since the College of DuPage campus is about a 30-minute drive from my house. I did park at the wrong end of the building, but that only afforded me the chance to walk past the LARP area and artist booths that I wouldn't have time to get back to the rest of the day.  There was a little mix-up when I arrived because I was being told the game I was running was in the next room over, when my table was in fact two doors down. But I luckily ran into my two signed up players before they gave up trying to find me.

The reason I had stopped attending CodCon because there was such a small number of Old School players who show up there. Having only two people signed up to play Swords & Wizardry (the OD&D retroclone) only reinforced that nothing had changed. My players were a father and son pair and it was going to just be us until the father went over and recruited a board gamer who was sitting all alone.

I was running my Frog God Games module Jungle Ruins of Madaro-Shanti, which would have been challenging with five players -- but for three players? They spent a lot of time running from any encounter tougher than giant centipedes, while trying to piece together the source of the magical curse plaguing the land from safe distances. The father renamed the borsin (a S&W monster) "gorillalopes" -- a name I much prefer. They didn't figure out the well at all (they didn't go down), but spent a good deal of time around the palace.

I had a great time with this other S&W monster called ghoul monkeys. I allowed Speak with Animals to work on them (ghoul monkeys don't seem to be fully undead) and the players seemed intimidated by the monkeys' ghoulish talk ("We are dead!  We are dead!").  After that, the players ran from the ghoul monkeys every time, unaware that their fighter could sweep attack these little guys. All this running away only ended after they figured out they had a Pipe of the Sewers with them -- after that, they went into every battle with an army of giant rats.

After four hours that I thought went very well -- all things considered -- we wrapped up and I explained to them that they had actually stumbled onto a room under the palace one room away from the monster responsible for the curse, but couldn't figure out how to get through the door to that room.

The best part of the game, though, if not the whole day, was learning who the father was -- this guy, Steve, once worked with my mother!  She had told us about each other years ago, but this was our first time actually meeting and gaming together.

After that, I bought lunch from the con food vendor while enjoying a concert from Dan the Bard. I even bought my second CD from him (Bard Camp) and got it signed.  That was the second best part of the day.

After that, I played in round one of a two-round Munchkin tournament. The con staffer who was supposed to judge this tournament made us all wait for nearly a half-hour for him to show up, and then he still didn't have the playing cards organized and shuffled for us!  I volunteered to help, as did some others, so we could finally get playing. Unlike S&W, we had enough players for Munchkin for two tables.

My table had a nice group of players who played much as I do -- go easy on each other until level 6 and then start going after each other. Almost the whole table was tied at level 9 at the end. We just went around the table blocking each other until we ran out of cards to stop someone, just before my next turn. It was pretty epic.

The next round wasn't so much fun. Two-thirds of the players who advanced all knew each other and were more interested in attacking each other right off the bat than letting the game move forward. When I saw Steve was trying to start up a game, but didn't have enough players, I dropped out of Munchkin and joined his two players.

Steve was running Dungeon Crawl Classics, which I'd never played before. We were playing higher-level characters, so I didn't try the "character funnel" approach at 1st level. It was a puzzle-heavy scenario I like to think I was doing pretty well at ... but I had promised my family I would be home by 8:30, so after an hour I knew he was going to have to kill my character or I was going to have to suicide run him. Actually, the way I was playing my thief, it made perfect sense for him to drop his defenses around the succubus, so it all worked out.

Will I go again next year?  Possibly. It's certainly worth it for the money. I hope I can get more Old School gamers to attend next year, though.

Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day

For those who pay attention to such things, the Swords & Wizardry “retroclone” rules is the system on which my superhero roleplaying game, Hideouts & Hoodlums, game is built. Why? Well, that leads to my Appreciation Day contribution…

The top 4 reasons why Swords & Wizardry was perfect for Hideouts & Hoodlums

1. OD&D Compatibility. At the time, the White Box edition of S&W was the closest thing to the Original Dungeons & Dragons rules being published. It has some serious competition for that title nowadays, but it is still a close fit.

2. Movement is just a number. In D&D, a character’s movement rate was expressed in a number of inches a miniature representing that character could be moved across a table (itself representing the battlefield) in one combat round/turn. This was kept for years and years as a hanger-on from the game’s roots in miniatures-based wargaming. In S&W, your movement rate may be just 12. 12 what? If you’re not using miniatures, it doesn’t matter. 12 is now just a relative number, higher than 9 and lower than 15. Combat is a swifter thing when movement is simply relative. “Your move is 9 and mine is 12, so you can’t catch me” is a logical resolution to a chase sequence that doesn’t even need a referee’s intervention.

Now, I didn’t keep these number values in H&H because I, perhaps foolishly, wanted those numbers to mean something and I wanted to be able to convert them into MPH. But I now see that S&W may have had it right all along. As long as all movement is relative, I don’t need to know MPH (except for long-distance travel, which is really a non-combat concern and doesn’t usually need mechanics). I could even eliminate numbers and replace them with slow, average, fast, very fast, and so on. Which I might. See if I’m not tempted.

3. Easier saving throws. Nothing, game mechanics-wise, sets the bar for how dangerous the world is for the characters in it than the saving throw mechanic. Once you taste poison, get hit with a spell, or spring a trap, how difficult it is to make the saving throw determines how likely it is your character is now dead. High saving throw numbers mean the world is a deadly place. And the challenge of that can be fun sometimes. But it is difficult to be the hero in a setting where most of what you accomplish is just surviving. That’s why it’s important to have low saving throw numbers. Your characters can still face deadly opponents, even supervillains, but they are aberrations in a world that isn’t trying that hard to kill your characters. This more accurately reflects the world most superheroes live in.

4. Splitting up the experience point bonus. For a long time, I disliked the inherent unfairness of the XP bonus for high ability scores. Maybe that comes from me being unlucky with dice and seldom having characters with high ability scores, but it seemed an unfair additional advantage for someone who was already getting a game mechanic bonus for the high ability score to then also get to advance in level faster. And that was true – in later editions of D&D where power inflation kept adding more bonuses but also giving the xp bonus. What I was failing to see was, originally, the XP bonus was the game mechanic bonus. Because, in OD&D, what is going up in level other than a +1 hit die bonus, maybe a +1 to hit, and maybe a +1 to saving throws (depending on which level you are gaining)?

Still, the XP bonus was awfully easy for many characters to get. If you were making a Fighter and you had just one high ability score roll (assuming you were allowed to assign your rolls), you would obviously choose to place it in Strength, your Prime Requisite score, and – tada! – you got a 10% bonus. The rest of your ability scores hardly mattered at that point.

What S&W does differently is it makes you work for that bonus a little. If your Prime Requisite is high, that gives you +5%. But it also ties an additional +5% to your Wisdom and Charisma scores each as well. Besides giving you a chance at an even bigger total XP bonus, and giving you a reason to put high scores in WIS and CHA when they otherwise gave you no or little game mechanic bonus, it also says something about what it should take to do well as a hero. Now it’s not just about a Fighter being strong anymore. He has to have the Wisdom to use his strength wisely, and the Charisma to get people to follow his lead while he’s doing it. And that says a lot about what being a comic book superhero means to me, despite being such a small game mechanic.