Just an interesting thought before I begin (feel free to skip this paragraph if you want to get down to business): I think this must be the first week since Gen Con 2011 ended that many of us have had the opportunity to reflect. Shawn Merwin posted his thoughts today, focusing on some of the ups and downs of conventions from a personal perspective. DNAPhil from Gnome Stew posted his Gen Con 2011 report this morning, too, figuring he was the last one to do so. That post was followed almost immediately by a tweet from @DavetheGame noting that he hadn’t put his up either.
The Highlights
Rather than give you a long narrative of the Best Four Days in Gaming, let me offer some overall thoughts and observations:
- Gen Con 2011 was a huge success by all estimates. According to the official press release, attendance was up 20%. Events were up by 26%, and sanctioned D&D events such as D&D Game Day, Living Forgotten Realms, Ashes of Athas, and the D&D Championship were up by 18%.
- Gaming friends are the best friends. This year, I got to hang with a ton of old friends from exotic places like Wisconsin and Georgia, plus some relatively new local friends. We drank beer, played D&D, drank beer, talked gaming, drank beer…
- The newly-expanded Indianapolis Convention Center rocks. Vendor floor space increased, allowing more room in the aisles. I think the only real traffic jam I experienced was at about 3 PM on Saturday near the Wizards of the Coast booth.
- Lair Assault is going to make players run out of game stores screaming in terror. I ran a Lair Assault preview for WotC on Trade Day (Wednesday) for game store owners. Can’t say much more about it yet, but just know that I can’t see even the most optimized party getting through this thing in less than two or three attempts.
- Erik Scott de Bie is a tremendously talented game designer. Along with Ari Marmell and Matt Sernett, Erik wrote the Neverwinter Campaign Setting. Erik also did the D&D Game Day adventure, Gates of Neverdeath, which I ran three times on Saturday. Every group I ran had a blast, and I love the fact that the adventure dovetails with this season of Encounters.
- Playing D&D with kids is hella fun. At my mid-day Saturday Gates of Neverdeath slot, I had a couple of families play. There were three kids between the ages of 10 and 13, plus three adults. My favorite moment of the entire weekend happened during this game (see below for the story).
- Old School can be a blast. On Thursday night, I played Basic D&D run by my old friend John. John was my first DM way back in 1983. He ran us through a portion of B2: Keep on the Borderlands. In a six-hour period, we made characters, had five or six combats, did tons of exploration, made friends with and then betrayed a tribe of hobgoblins, had two characters die and two turned to stone. It was like I was 12 again.
- There are some damn fine Old School style products out there. I also picked up Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Grindhouse Edition after having heard it mentioned a few months back on the official D&D podcast. This thing is cool: it’s essentially Basic D&D rules with some smart improvements (Thieves are called “specialists,” and their skill system is much streamlined; attack resolution uses positive AC and to hit bonuses rather than charts or THAC0. Clerical turning is a spell). The flavor of the setting rocks, with what James Raggi dubs “Weird Fantasy.” I’ll post more about LotFP in the coming days; just know that it’s pretty sweet.
A “What If?” moment
I backed way off my D&D blog back in 2008. I put energy into other pursuits, most of which paid off for me in terms of my business. I don’t regret that.
However, I did have a “what if” moment this year at Gen Con. The other D&D bloggers I was running with at the time – Chatty DM, Dave and Danny at Critical Hits, and others – are all doing very well for themselves. These guys are the Rock Stars of the convention. Chatty is blogging for Critical Hits, and CH just won a Gold Ennie this year. Dave just had his first DDI article published, and they’ve all got tons of projects in the works (Congrats, by the way, guys!) Other bloggers that I was just starting to connect with (like the guys at Gnome Stew) are doing well, too.
My freelance writing business has taken me a different direction, and it’s definitely been a good thing, but I am forced to wonder how things might be different if it hadn’t.
The Pimp Hat
So, like I mentioned, I ran a slot of Gates of Neverdeath for a family with three kids. At the end of the first encounter, the party captured one of the villains. The 10 year-old boy stepped up and said, “Does he have a hat?”
“Sure, why not,” I replied. Not sure where he’s going with this…
“I take his hat and put it on!” The boy was rather enthusiastic now. Kid likes hats, I guess.
“All right,” I said. “You have a hat.”
“What does it look like?” This kid is going to be a fun DM when he grows up, I think.
“It’s purple and fuzzy. It has a long feather sticking out of it.”
His mother turns toward me with an astonished look on her face. “Did you just give my son a pimp hat?”
We all burst out laughing. This is why gaming with kids is so fun: they’re inquisitive. They’re curious. They don’t know that you’re supposed to ignore hats on villains yet. They’re not cold and jaded and calculated. They’re just there to let their imagination run wild.
And that’s what gaming is all about, isn’t it?
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I enjoyed your observation about the kid and the hat. Taking it to a parallel thought, I suspect that many DMs out there wish from time to time that they had a “D&D virgin” at the table; someone for whom the whole experience was new and cool.
One of the aspects of DMing that I suspect many DMs find, oh, I don’t know, frustrating, old, pick your adjective, is that most of our players have been around the game so long that there’s not much you can throw at them that they don’t see coming a mile away. My group of players are the sort that there’s a pretty good chance in any given session that we’re gonna have that “Holy metagaming, Batman!” moment that short-circuits the encounter.
Just wondering if you have any input on dealing with that sort of thing.
One of the coolest things to do at Gen Con is run the “Learn to Play” tables. You have complete newbies who are interested in the game, and you have 1-2 hours to get them hooked for life. It’s a rush.
As far as the other question I guess it depends on if you’re talking about keeping the story fresh or keeping combat challenging. I sense both in your comment. There are ways to handle both, but obviously very different ways…
What I’m mainly getting as is the idea that every player at the table “knows” that this critter is a rust monster, or making some other conclusion based on OOC intel.
Ah, gotcha.
This is super-easy with 3E. If it’s appropriate to the creature, add class levels or templates. Find creatures that aren’t as common. There were 5 monster manuals, a fiend folio, draconomicon, and plenty of other creatures in various setting and theme books. Make use of ‘em.
In 4E, you automatically have 3 or more versions of a creature right in the monster book. 4E also lends itself to reskinning – that is, taking the stat block of one monster and creating a different monster using that stat block.
Creature selection, in other words, is your ticket to making player knowledge irrelevant.
There are other ways to spice up encounters and make them more challenging, too. That deserves a blog post of it’s own, so I’ll put something together along those lines in the near future.
I think I get what you’re saying, I suppose from a tactical standpoint, there are also ways to make the setting work in your favor. Or add in a secondary challenge designed to be a force multiplier. In a recent encounter for my 6th-level group, I paired a magical trap which did Con damage with a group of wights whose schtick relies on Fort saves. Granted, it didn’t change the fact that everyone “knew” they were dealing with wights, but it did put enough english on the encounter to make it interesting.