Monday, August 26, 2013

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