New Purchases - Numenera

So let's have a decko at some of the stuff I've picked up in recent weeks in the game line.

Numenera, the new Monte Cook RPG.

Set in the Ninth Age, with eight previous world-spanning civilizations dead and buried, nanotech loose in the world and the people living in the period when civilization is just getting restarted. Sounded like a great idea (I'm a sucker for Dying Earth settings and this screams Dying Earth from the description, no?).

The rulebook is lavish. Full color, with lots of maps. Two major geographical areas are fairly well described, the Steadfast, where civilization has a toehold again and The Beyond which is a tad less organized.

Sadly, it all starts to get a bit mundane on further reading.

Firstly, the game system uses three stats to describe characters (which allows for a rather nice damage scheme) and has an inherently un-griddable tactical description model. The GM gets no dice at all, the players are the only people who roll. So they attack, then they defend against fixed values using a D20.

The GM sets a difficulty for any task (including combat) between 1 and 10. Various factors lower or raise this number but it is essentially arbitrary in that the original value is GM selected. The final number is multiplied by three to give the score that the players must equal or beat to succeed.

So not that radical really.

XP get earned the usual way but also for allowing GM intrusions into the story. The GM suggests an intrusion and everybody affected gets to decide if they want to have it. If so, two XP are handed out, one of which must be given to someone else. This whole process makes me cringe to be honest. If I wanted to play FATE I'd play FATE, which does not encumber itself with XP and leveling.

For yes, Numenera is a leveling game.

There are only three (as yet) character classes. This does not worry me because this what what we had in White Box D&D and EPT in the old days. We have Glaives (fighters), Nanos (Magic Users) and Jacks (Rogues). Why this was necessary as opposed to (say) a completely class-free advancement scheme is beyond me.

Perhaps the most disappointing part of the whole thing is that when all is said and done, this is really just another Bronze Age fantasy adventuring game with little of substance to separate it from Tekumel (which has a richer background) or Pathfinder (which has a mature game system and very few misprints).

The background has a lot of potential but there is so little meat on the bones when it comes to the state of Ninth Age civilisation that you could take the setting in almost any direction. Except that there are suppositions built into the published material - and these will also be in any expansions - that hint that the writers have a very definite idea on how it all fits together, they just aren't telling.

The character backgrounds offer three different ways that each character type could become the super post-humans they so obviously are and progress through the tiers (Numeneraspeak for levels). The issue is the overall Bronze Age level of the setting compared to the extremely sophisticated bionics suggested in the character progression.

Now I can get this to work, and do it in a satisfying way for me and,, I think, anyone playing a game. Like I said, I love Dying Earth settings and Empire of the Petal Throne had the same centuries lost tech-as-magic mcguffin and that is my all-time favorite world to adventure in). But when I play in someone else's Numenera game that structure won't be there and that will be a pain in everyone's ass.

Maybe I just take this sort of thing too seriously.

The game was crowdsourced, and it kind of shows because there are some really nifty misprints. One of my favorites is the missing special term in the Glaive and Nano character sections. Each section wants to talk about feats, but also needs to change the name so we aren't playing D&D or Pathfinder, right? Only thing is, the author obviously hadn't decided on a term yet and so just left it blank. The result is a sentence that paraphrases as "as you progress you gain inherent abilities called ." It can all be figured out, but it shows that the proofreading was probably limited to people familiar with the material which is the worst way to approach the task.

And, surprisingly for such a mature worker in the field, the writing is not great. The color story at the start of the book is execrably bad, toothache-inducing. For the second edition this should be erased and a replacement farmed out to an established fantasy author.

I'm actually keen to try this out and will be doing so in a couple of weeks. The setting has lots and lots of potential and the game system could be a winner despite everyone's fear of the unknown (many reviewers of the game were obviously expecting a D&D clone).

I'll post more on this later when I have time and am more read in the material.

Resources:

Numenera Web Site

Islands of Ignorance - TheThird Call of Cthulhu Companion

I kickstarted into this project about six months or so ago.

I happen to be acquainted in a small way with the project leader, Oscar Rios, and was very excited to see what he was planning, and so reversed my "never again" policy as far as game kickstarters go.

I'm ambivalent about Kickstarter and it's imitators. Crowd-sourcing is a very oughties touchy-feely-web-2.0-ey thing that sometimes gives me stomach ache when I see it "abused" by people who have avenues of funding and support that means they don't need to use crowd-sourcing.

However, Rios is Old School Call of Cthulhu enough that I couldn't resist helping out and helping myself to a first edition into the bargain. Besides, I have the other two companions, one of which was the second published accessory to Call of Cthulhu and such a high quality item it (along with Shadows of Yog Sothoth) changed my feelings about after-market publications for RPGs completely.

You'll find me in the backer's list in the publication, when it becomes available, under my web moniker "Roxysteve" (a name chosen during my AOL years when I found my first and last names were an unbelievably common combination in the western world).

If you are in there, shout out.

Visionaries should stick together.

FATE Intervenes In My Life Again

The Dresden Files RPG game I ran a couple of years ago was a bit different to all my other prefered games in that the DFRPG character generation system incorporates that tooth-achingly awful part of a GM's life, player backstories, and so the group needs to meet just to get that sorted out¹ but there is also a touchy-feely phase where the players get to decide what the world should look like. I see the point but my players then decided they wouldn't share the load of administering it which was counter to the DFRPG rulebook guidelines and a bugger for me to manage due to the information load that had to be acquired just to run the game.

So I came to distrust the FATE system on the basis of what I had experienced. While I believe that FATE can deliver a rich experience for everyone, and that DFRPG in particular may do so in a robust fashion under challenging ground rules³, I never did understand the so-called Fate Point Economy and neither did anyone who tried to explain it to me⁴.

Fate points are a way in which the GM can intervene in the PC's lives, and by which the players can intervene in the NPCs machinations and intentions. There are various problems for me in this system, chiefly that the way wounds work hinges on players spending Fate Points to make the wounds hurt, and what happens when the players have inflicted grevious wounds on a Bad Guy but have spent all their Fate Points to make that happen? It is now down to my sense of fair play to make a crippling wound actually cripple the antagonist because according to the strict letter of the rules the players cannot switch on the hurty wounds because they lack the coin.

There's an actual example of the set-up to this situation in the DFRPG rulebook, taken from the Dresden Files fiction, in which an insanely powerful Black Court Vampire has been wounded and rendered "extra crispy" (Fate games are powered by adjectives). The example stops there, but should have gone on to discuss the most likely scenario in an actual game in which making the Vampire "extra crispy" had drained the players' Fate Point bank of its last red cent. I should add that every player would get one and only one free "tag" of the "extra crispy" Aspect⁵ to make the Vampire slow down, limp, go "argh" etc., but once that one round is over Mr V. Ampire straightens up and strides from the room as if unwounded. It's all very counter-intuitive for me, having cut my teeth on systems that have wound management as part of the wounded character's liabilities.


Now obviously I wouldn't allow the baddie to just ignore his crippling wounds like that on a normal day, I'd role play the singédness to the hilt, but what if I'm feeling mean on account of player intransigence and not in the mood to throw them a bone? What if they've been dbleeping around all game and I'm not their friend right now? Where is my incentive to screw with the rules of the game and give 'em a freebie when they've unwisely spent all their Fate Points before the Job Is Done?

Normally I'd just walk away from something for which I have such a demonstrably poor connect, but the thing is I can see how powerful the DFRPG system is (and by extension the FATE system from which it was carved). I want to understand DFRPG's engine, and the people who claim they do are not able to explain it in the context of the rules in the book - which leaves me wondering if they understand it any better than I do. I can just wing it like anyone can, but I don't want to do that because, speaking personally, I like to understand what an author was getting at with a given rule before I toss it⁶, and this has me going back to the well probably too often. Sometimes you should just walk away.

But then again.

One of the least useful bits of "advice" I've been given with respect to DFRPG has been to "study the FATE core rules"⁷, which are free to download, or were last time I checked and downloaded them⁸ just before I read DFRPG. DFRPG may have started as a FATE system, but the various mechanics used to mung physics in Dresden Land bear little resemblance to the parent material. I usually throw anyone who says this into the "parroting Everyone Knows™ but doesn't own or play the game" box.

Harsh, me.

But I was at my LFGS on Sunday⁹ and spotted my good gaming buddy Will running a game in one of the rooms. Will runs FATE (amongst other indie-heavy game systems) and I saw a rather nice hardback FATE rulebook on the table. I have twice sat in on one of Will's FATE games; one "heist" scenario of his own devising and one DFRPG session, and both were enjoyable experiences (that did nothing to answer my questions, oddly.

Long story short, I picked up a copy of this new FATE rulebook myself. For $25 is was a bargain. Hard covers faced in a robust colored material with an almost rubbery feel to it. Glossy white pages with black printing. Large enough font to read with ease. All in a package about the size of a novel (smaller if you allow for marketing idiocy), about half the frontal form factor of your usual game book. It is rare to get such quality for such a low price these days. This is a book one could tote to games easily and expect it to last for years if you don't let clods who think greasy foods mix with paper products get their pizza-smeared fingers on it. Yes, you can probably still get free versions, but a wad of printed pdf pages does not have the robustness or gravitas of a proper bound book for me.
The contents purport to be a more streamlined version of previous editions.

 Maybe this time's the charm and I'll finally understand what the designers were getting at. Stranger things have happened. If not, well I can sell it or gift it or leave it on the shelf since it is a good-looking product.

If a highly improvisational RP game framework is what you are looking for, you should take a look yourself.

Resources:
Evil Hat Productions

1. Actually it doesn't. The whole thing can be done over e-mail if the players are adult about it but the one time I tried to get this done in a game in which I had the chance to sit on the other side of the equation I was subjected to whining from the GM who threatened to quit the game he wasn't yet running. I didn't feel that was fair to the others, so I quit, and was then bad-mouthed by this Big Girl's Blouse and another prospective player who has made a habit of bad-mouthing me when I'm not around to hear²↑
2. Because he dumped a game of mine without notice and didn't like that I flagged him for doing so in payment for us holding the game for an hour in case he showed up↑
3. Namely, that if a player does what Dresden does under the same conditions he does, the same result should be the most likely outcome↑
4. Explanations converged on "give out more Fate Points" which means the damned things are worthless rather than a resource that should be valuable, meaning challenge is ever, when you get down to it, challenging↑
5. Key FATE word there↑
6. Everyone Knows™ that D20 is a system that results in unkillable Godlike PCs, and that even a point blank shot to the head of even a minor character is not a guaranteed kill, except there are rules in the system that make both those things not true. It's just that most people turn those rules off without a second thought - only to start whining six months into their campaign about Godlike characters and ineffective pistols↑
7. Both FATE and DFRPG are Evil Hat products↑
8. Version 3↑
9. For the MM&L character generation session↑

Metal, Magic and Lore Changes My Game

I loathe character generation sessions and usually the games that require them. If you have to have the group meet and get all touchy-feely about the pusiness of generating a bloody character then chances are the game will feature everything I hate in RPGs: Unkillable characters, negotiable results of actions, whining¹.

As a GM I try not to put players into games in which they need to build a "team" in order to win the day. Not always possible, and anyway, I run games in which the players can find themselves outmatched and should, under those circumstances, retreat and gather new resources with which to win the day.

But this day was unique in that I was playing rather than GMing and the Metal, Magic and Lore game system is rather more involved than the systems I usually run and play.

I recommend that anyone looking for the "old school RPG" experience check out Metal, Magic and Lore.

The writers punt MM&L in this way: "If your idea of a perfect RPG is Pathfinder, don't buy MM&L because you'll hate it.

The game is refreshing in that it is unashamedly a Combat System with role playing bolted on. Too many RPG enthusiasts feel that it is somehow a bad thing in that a game has a combat system and that it works, but for me the absence of a feasiible combat system is an indication of sloppy thinking and bendy physics that will end up nerfing something else at the worst possible time. People howl that there is no point in a combat system in a game like Call of Cthulhu because, you know, Cthulhu, but what about the times when the PCs are up against human cultists?

MM&L features believable combat that is leathally dangerous and results in believable wounds when things go wrong. The human body has over thirty hit locations in this system.

But the joy of the system lies in that all the complicated stuff happens during character generation, when simple arithmetic is required and the process can seem intimidatingly long, but really isn't any longer than a D20 build. Once the information is in the character sheet, using it in combat is relatively easy and fast in play. A combat system that results in believable combat that can be played fast enough to enjoy the process. Colour me impressed.

The skill use is a variation on the test against a difficulty mechanic, but one that works by adding four numbers, one of which might be negative and another which may be zero. If you can add you can play this system. The combat works by using the same mechanic to figure out attack and defense values, and the magic system² uses the same mechanic to cast spells. One mechanic to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.

And it uses the case system throughout the rulebook.

I found the game as a new discovery at RetCon IV, though it has been around since 2007. There is a large community of players worldwide, larger than might be thought for a game that proudly advertises its richness and complexity in a world where gamers shy from games as simple as Kingmaker. It warms my heart that there are still people who don't fear Arithmetic in the gaming world, and that most of them are younger than me.

And I wanted to play it, as opposed to run it.

So how could I resist when Vito, one of he authors of the game, decided to try and run a campaign of MM&L at the Legendary Realms, my local friendly game store? A day after I answered the RSVP I was eagerly reading my nice hardback rulebook and building a backstory in my head. I uncovered a puzzling oversight³ in that there was no information on the longevity of the various races with the exception of Elves in the basic rulebook. Vito said that no-one had ever questioned him on that before, (probably because no-one ever wanted to play a middle-aged Dwarf before).

And that was how I happened to spend a few hours with a bunch of other people in a character generation session, and actually enjoyed the experience.

Now I just need to write my backstory.

1. Though chances are you'll get lots of this anyway↑
2. Actually, three different types of magic↑
3. Vito and I disagree over the designation "oversight"↑

RetCon IV

Over the weekend I attended RetCon IV, a small but slowly growing game convention run each August for the last four years on Long Island.

The focus of the convention is squarely on pen-and-paper¹ RPGs, but this year there were many board gamers filling out the ranks too. For my part I had signed up to run three games: one on Saturday afternoon, one on Saturday evening and one on Sunday afternoon. An equitable arrangement; by agreeing to run three games I got a three day pass to the con.

I picked these slots from experience at RetCon and RetCon II (I missed RetCon III due to a family obligation, but would have been there if I could) regarding attendee count and liveliness, and the fact that I am getting on in years and can no longer belt around like a racehorse all day and still greet the dawn with a smile.

I decided to simplify my data load and my equipment needs by running only games using the Savage Worlds engine, a system that has proved popular in other venues and in previous years, and one that is easy to assimilate and teach. It emphasizes cinematic fun and pace over realism so a firm hand must be kept on the throttle lest the game slip into farce too easily (the occasional slip into farce works well as a comedic break in most (but not all) settings, and usually to the detriment of the Bad Guys so it is all good as the saying goes. Some serious GMs feel that Savage Worlds contains mechanisms that produce a "cartoon"-like atmosphere, but I don't see things that way, most of the time anyway.

I picked my settings from those published by PEG² for two reasons: they would be settings people could look up on the internet if they so wished and they were all available for the asking from my LFGS³, who were in attendance in the Dealer Room. My LFGS does me a service by providing space for me to convene my games at no cost and an audience from which to draw players of those games. Call it payback, quid pro quo for the heat and light and ambiance. I had a third reason for each which I will discuss in a bit.

Convention attendance was mediocre on the Friday night, when I dropped in to pick up my pass maybe a 50% capacity turnout by the time I left which was decent numbers for the time and day. I had intended to nip in, grab my pass, shoot the breeze a little and get gone, but got dragooned into playing Deadlands:Reloaded run by Francesco, a gaming buddy from the LFGS. In all honesty he didn't have to twist my arm much as I love the game. I had to leave at around 10:30 pm before it closed because I was still getting my own stuff together and wanted to make the first game of the Saturday session, which was set in the Serenity universe and was something I'd wanted to try out for years.

Saturday's attendance was way up, with (at a guess) around 60-70 rpg gamers in the main room and perhaps another 40 or so board gamers in the other game room, and at any one time a dozen or so in the dealer room. I don't think the dealers were doing gangbusters, but they admitted to doing okay that day when I asked. I couldn't get in on the Serenity game, which was over-subscribed by 9 am, but there was other stuff to do.

Sunday was deadly quiet, and we could have used two to three times the attendance to get things humming. Many of the games scheduled for that day, including mine either consolidated with others or were cancelled outright.

Even so, what with games and panels and demos there was plenty to do and everyone who did attend was having a good time.

My own games had coalesced more or less nicely over the previous month. I had decided to write and run a Solomon Kane adventure for the Saturday afternoon session, which is probably the best slot of the Convention in terms of filling a table with players.

Solomon Kane is a game that is talked-up by gamers every time I mention it, and is one I enjoy myself, so I had high hopes of a good turnout. The scenario was set in England, in 1612, and involved the 4-8 player characters it was designed to accommodate setting off for the dark and mysterious North of England in order to bring a troublesome Witchfinder of inconvenient zeal to task and return him to London to face the King's ire. It had playtested well, and I had refined the pacing and flow using that test to offer up the best encounter-driven RPG experience I could manage.

I also came up with what I think was an innovative method of allowing players to customize the pregenerated characters I had made that did not involve me teaching them how to make a character from scratch (easy) or waiting while they tried to second-guess what Edges and Hindrances they should take in order to be the most awesome without becoming the most marginalized (a tedious and largely pointless exercise which can be never-ending in some cases). In short, I was feeling clever even though I had failed to track down suitable card miniatures (which are offered for just about every other PEG Savage Worlds game so boo hiss to PEG for not getting that obvious problem sorted out) and had not had time to paint the very few plastic minis I had come across that would do in a pinch⁴, so would be falling back on my old and faithful Big Box o' Zombies⁵, a well-known play aid to those familiar with my games.

It attracted two players.

I have to admit that I was not surprised. Solomon Kane is much talked-about but I've tried to convene one-off games a number of times at the old LFGS to almost-solid walls of cricket noise, so a low turn-out was not all that shocking, but it was disappointing given the buzz. The players seemed to have fun with it but a game with two players is only half as stimulating as one with three, when the ideas and interplay really fly, and I had calculated a sweet spot of five or six. Imaginary head-count for the combat scenes was not a problem - a great strength of the Savage Worlds system is the easy way in which a GM can provide gangs of player-controlled cannon-fodder for the bad guys to show how mean they can be without seriously wounding the PCs⁶ - but a large point of any RPG is the inter-player exchange of ideas which is much less a factor with two than three. There is also the danger of a serious disagreement having no player-arrived-at resolution, forcing the GM to enter normally forbidden territory to get things going again.

The game was, I think, still a success in that the players did solve the problems they faced with inventiveness, using force when needed in an intelligent way and finessing the rest with aplomb. It simply wasn't as rich an experience for them as was planned.

The evening session was a Deadlands:Reloaded game for which I had gone to considerable trouble and extra expense. I had conceived the notion of having the PCs be the Bad Guys for once rather than nominally the good guys. They would be on the run, rich from the spoils of a previous out-of-game robbery and would be planning on laying low in Sweetwater, when someone would have the idea that the Sweetwater Bank looked ripe for the taking, and it would be game on!

I had had the idea, around two weeks before the con, of upping the awesome by foregoing the usual black-pen-on-Chessex-Megamat town plan in favor of a cardstock model village approach, and thus put myself in line for much effort, some of it fun, and a not inconsiderable cashmoney expense, not to mention a fierce case of carpal tunnel numbness in my good hand for an unknown amount of payoff. I don't recommend this unless you are a perfection-seeking idiot with money to burn.

The buildings themselves were very reasonable in terms of what I paid and what I got for it. By means of Google, gorblessem, I found a source of card Wild West buildings of excellent quality and value, which I recommend to anyone needing a Western Township who is a bit handy with their hands. They came as sets of PDF art which I had to print and mount on card, my printer not being able to handle printing directly on the card itself, which would have been less labor intensive and much cheaper given that I wanted a good bond and went with industrial strength spray adhesive.

The results were impressive, but the fallout was quite impressive too and I cannot recommend the process if one has any other option. For one thing each can added $20 to the final cost and I went through almost two cans. For another the aerosol must be kept out of the lungs and off anything one cares about, which is damn near impossible unless one works outside, which brings its own set of challenges to the task. And forget about what it does to your clothes. I'm thinking after the fact that a Kinko's print-to-order option might have been a better bet.

There were a number of mis-steps, including slicing my hand with a brand new #11 blade, leaving three of the largest, most complex and time-intensive to construct, and indispensable to the plan buildings on a train and having to build another set, discovering that the reprints had a prominent set of bizarre printer artifacts on them that required covering with yet another reprint and so on. I gradually developed a facial tick and a laissez-faire attitude to the final results. Fate was not being kind to me, and as a result I was less-than faithful to the designer's vision of what the structures would look like.

By the time the con rolled around I had around a dozen major structures that epitomized your typical western burg - Assay office, Newspaper print shop, Livery Stable (impressive and easy to make) , Blacksmith and so on. I had discovered early on that there was no House of Easy Virtue but remedied that by using the Pioneer Hotel. For that I apologize to the people of British Columbia where the original used for the model apparently stood. I'm sure no such shenanigans went on in the real thing. It was only on the Thursday morning that it occurred to me that I had no Undertaker's and nothing I could press into service as one.
Bugger. Never mind, I'd fix it in the mix even if I had to revert to pen outlines on the Megamat for that one.

Bah.

I used the hour between the end of Solomon Kane and the start of Deadlands, time set aside for eating by everyone else, to erect a trestle table that would give me the width I'd need for the town. The fact that the tables supplied by the hotel would be too narrow was fairly late in dawning on me, naturally, but I had a couple of options that I cleared with the convention owner, one of which was my supplying my own folding table bought years ago for just such times. Unfortunately my table was a half-inch lower than those supplied by the hotel. Never Mind.

I also used the nosh time to arrange no less than three Chessex Megamats to cover the tables as best I could, which was when I discovered the "Factory Second" I use as the mainstay of any multi-mat set-up since its grid is printed to the mat edge was only seemingly perfect. When used lengthwise it was a near-perfect match-up with the good-quality mats I had, and this was how I'd used them for years with no trouble to make eight-foot long, three foot wide tactical grids for all sorts of games at the LFGS.

When used widthwise however, as I intended to do this night, there was a glaringly obvious barrel-distortion n the grid that made matching the grids on the other two mats impossible. Never Mind. I'd run the fault in some creative, out of sight way that would not be available for movement or range checking.

Then there was the fact that the two "good" mats had a non-gridded border of about an inch all around their perimeters. Never Mind. I'd use the border as a sidewalk or something.

Once I had the mats arranged and taped together with masking tape I began using the floorplan tiles that come with the buildings to make the town. Once they were taped to the mat I dropped the relevant buildings over them and there was the town of Sweetwater made manifest! It actually looked good despite the fact that fate had attempted one last bit of sabotage: the heat of my car had caused every single structure to warp across opposite corners and in one case banana a very long, tall wall. NEVER MIND. I just mashed them back into shape with brute force and swear words.

The idea was the players could actually see the town their characters were inhabiting, and when they wanted to explore a building all I had to do was lift it to reveal the floor plan. I had cardboard miniatures to represent their characters so it was all set for a fun time with maximum connect between described events and scenes and the players' own internal model of what it all looked like.

No-one showed up.

About a half-hour after the projected start I got one would-be player and managed to guilt-dragoon two more into playing. A fourth joined about twenty minutes into the action, or rather, inaction, since the players had decided the best plan was to hole up in the large hotel opposite the bank (as anticipated) but then sit in their rooms doing nothing. They convinced themselves this was a good idea and no amount of hinting or attempts to force matters would get them to go outside and explore my magnificent miniature metropolis in which many opportunities waited anxiously for them. After two hours of this I was climbing the walls. If they wouldn't go outside I couldn't start the events that would end with them realizing they were dead and in Hell, cursed to recapitulate the same bank raid over and over.

Never Mind.

It was all rather frustrating, and definitely one to grow on if I can work out what I did wrong. For the life of me I can't figure out why the characters wouldn't want to go out on the town and Rule It. The sheriff was out of the way chasing some other bad guys, leaving all sorts of people just begging for some killin' Wild West style. There were Nocturnal Nasties ready to scare the beejayzuz out of everyone before being seen off with Extreme Prejudice. There were weapons to be had for the asking. There was Dynamite to be had for the asking. I expected large swaths of real estate to be blown off the map, but the only time that came close to happening was when one of the players rolled his dice into the back of the Dry Goods store and shunted it a few inches off its foundation.

Never Mind.

Seldom have I run such a lackluster game. The bad guys refused to be all that bad. They did rob the bank but in all honesty it was not the Cassidy & Sundance/Alias Smith and Jones afair I envisaged as I carved the cardboard into houses and sheds and saloons.

Never Mind.

Sunday's Slipstream game a sort of Flash Gordonesque thing, was cancelled due to lack of potential customers, so I went to a panel on Indie Publishing instead, and tried a demo of one of the games. More on that in another post.

What this post is coming to in a roundabout way is the problem of picking a game for a small con that will attract sign-ups.

The way I see it is that people attend gaming cons to play two kinds of games: Games that have some sort of uber-campaign continuity reward like Pathfinder Society and D&D Encounters, and games they don't get a chance to play normally. Games that have an intriguing premise will have an additional draw power.

Absent advance game sign-ups, something RetCon is too small to have really, there is no way of knowing for sure what people want to play.

I'm not interested in the Uber Campaign games, so that leaves me trying to pitch games in a very wide field.
I know from experience, some of it mentioned here, that "buzz" is no indicator of a game's actual drawing power.

I know that time of day is crucial to include in the calculus of what setting to run: Call of Cthulhu will get more bites in an evening slot than in the morning as experiment shows.

I am not oblivious to the notion that it might be me and my style of presentation that was problematical this time, but I'm thinking that the majority of people there didn't know me and hadn't had the dubious pleasure of playing a game I've mediated before, and that makes the "not him no matter what game" factor very small (though not zero).

Novelty in the system is a big draw. People want to play new game mechanics to see how they work and how they feel. Three years ago Savage Worlds would draw people to any setting. Two years ago, the same. Last year I wasn't in a position to monitor that, but this year the audience for Savage Worlds for its own sake was demonstrably smaller than in previous years. Now my games were not the only Savage Worlds games to be had, but some of them were abandoned due to low draw.

Setting is always important. Super Heroes seem to be a constantly popular theme. Supers fill tables. But not this year. Worse, one of the Supers games that was called due to low subscription was to be run using Savage Worlds. Double whammy there. Cthulhu Mythos is a much less popular draw than it was ten years ago; people have confessed to "Cthulhu Burnout" when I've aked them why. Call of Cthulhu used to be unique. Now Cthulhu is printed on coffee mugs. Ho-hum. Zombies are usually a no-brainer⁷, but not this year. Star Wars was popular, as was Serenity. Paranoia - another game that has enormous buzz - was not.

I tell you, I was bewildered. Nothing seemed to be predictably popular.

Next year I may switch to presenting GM-led board games like Mansions of Madness and Fury of Dracula, if only because there is almost zero pre-con load.

1. I call 'em face-to-face, tabletop and Trad RPGs too, pretty much interchangeably so watch for the jargon shifts↑
2. Pinnacle Entertainment Group↑
3. Local Friendly Game Store↑
4. Pike and Shotte↑
5. Pound for pound the cheapest source of mook minis on the face of the Earth↑
6. The industry term for such walk-on meat shields is "Redshirt"↑
7. Ahahahahaha↑