Saturday had me manning the booth all day, with little to no visitors, and one evening game. Having a table in the side room was a mixed blessing. I didn't really expect to have a lot of sales anyway, so getting to chill and listen to some stories from the early days of TSR was quite the way to spend the day.
My evening game was a DCC game being run by Doug Kovacs. It was an odd fast & loose game that was just "OK". Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a bad game, just not what I was expecting. During one of the breaks I headed back to the Tavern's side room and walked in on a FASA Star Trek game at one table and Roll For Initiative pod-casting at the other. I had my camera on me and hadn't taken too many photos, so I tried to get a casual picture of the podcast-in-progress. Even though I was really trying to just observe, I guess I intruded enough to get roped in for some extremely light discussion. If you listen to the podcast I hope it was obvious I wasn't trying to get "on" the podcast, but Erik, Vince, and Richard sucked me in for a moment anyway.
After that was done and I needed to get back to my table, Richard LeBlanc Jr. asked if I could help him prep for the next day's random d30 game. Evidently he had all these ideas and trying to figure out how to exercise them in the weeks leading up to the con was resulting in a lot of last-minute prep...essentially everything still had to be done. I could relate since that is me at home pretty much every night (and by "pretty much" I really mean "every time") leading up to a con and often right up until the event. I was a bad, bad gamer and bowed out of the game I was in to help Richard.
Normally I wouldn't have done this, but the original table of 6-8 players had more like 15, I was a bit "meh" on a game session I think I'd have been totally down for with a different frame of mind, and I saw this as a great learning opportunity.
While undoubtedly Mr. LeBlanc would beg to differ, I didn't do too much other than to act as a soundboard and help define some much-needed constraints on the game session planning. If anything I might have just had a bit of a calming effect on what probably was (would be for me) prime freak-out time the night before a never-tried-before game.
Sunday I had to check out of my room, grab a quick bite, and get settled in for my last game, which was a DCC playtest. Since it was a playtest there were some new rules and I got to play a character that was interesting to me....and only had 4 hp at 1st level. My character was brought back from the dead (negative hp) so many times during that game it seemed more natural to think I was just having blackouts during battle. Allegedly we got much, much further than any group had before and some of that was due to luck. I basically had the in-game alternative of a sack of molotov cocktails and at one point about broke them all at the worst possible time (made sense in-character, but not out) but managed to save most for what should have been a brutal boss-fight (or mini-boss, not sure). In the end not only did we all survive, we almost completed the adventure, which wasn't expected for an adventure of this type.
After the game I said my good-byes and waited for an old buddy to come get me so I could spend the evening catching up on that last 16 years.
Tomorrow I hope to post some pictures, talk about what I managed to pick up, and remark a bit about the convention overall.
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