The Soft Landing: Pax East Highlights

I’m baaaack! Did you see that new banner?  Isn’t it awesome?  My friend Eric Maziade redesigned it using the best elements of past banners, making it fit with the color scheme of the blog’s new home.  Thanks man!

Here’s a quick recap, Pros/Cons style.

Pros

Thursday Night Paradise

Our arrival at Boston was made of incredible.  We discovered an awesome Burger Pub, where I promptly managed to spill a beer on myself… twice. And yet, at the same time, I managed to strangely endear myself to the very cute waitress (“Hey, I like drunk you”).

The meet-up and play event we organized in the Sheraton lobby (there was this big ass glass table big enough for 4 board games) was one of the highlights of the con.  A bunch of strangers instantly connecting and having fun is what makes gaming so damn cool.

Pandemic, Battlestar Galactica, Bang, Fluxx and other many others were played.

As the evening wore on and my friends retired for bed at 11ish (a mistake they swore never to repeat), I was pointed out to by a kind reader that Wil Wheaton was having dinner with a small group at the bar near our gaming area.  Transgressing a few rules of social etiquette, I approached him gently, crouched so we’d be eye to eye (I hate having people look up when we first meet ) and introduced myself.

Some very friendly banter occurred for the next few minutes about my blog (we both like each other’s writing, yay!), D&D and D&D geeks. He even introduced his wife and a couple of his friends. I was trying very hard to keep it together while at the same time totally relating to the guy (we’re the same age).  He was a complete class act and even laughed at my dumb Phil jokes (my friends know what that means).

Wil, I apologize for crashing your dinner and thanks for being such a good sport about it. Next time I’ll air high-five you from a safe distance. 🙂 Ohhh and that keynote… dude, made of awesome.  I can assure you that the relative calm of the audience in the middle was not because of any drag, it was pure trance-like attention.  You told us our own stories in ways most, if not all of us couldn’t have expressed so eloquently.  Thanks man.

D&D with the Boys

On Friday night, I got to DM my Challenge adventure to my friends Dave: The Game and E (you know from here and here) and the Wizards of the Coast D&D crowd.  Chief among them were Chris (The guy in charge of organized play),  Trevor (Community Manager), Greg (Editor and Designer) and Logan (freelance designer and writer).  We had an awesome roleplaying intro with many improv moments and played out the first 2 encounters, a trapped door/skill challenge and a combat. I got great feedback from it that I used in the DM challenge the next day.

The DM Challenge

With a table-full of 6 players featuring 4 Chatty DM readers, we had a LOT of fun.  The adventure was complex and the second encounter (the temple’s entry guardians) was BRUTAL.  We had so many funny roleplaying/exploration/combat elements in this adventure that I plan to write a short series of game reports featuring what I recall from both groups playing through it.

But here’s a quick bullet point rundown:

Game 1

• PCs intimidate insane Gnome Bling-Wizard to perform CSI analysis of corrupted water sample in his laboratory.
• Ardant PC passing as a Doomdreamer cause elementalist scholar to fawn like a fanboi, giving quest away sans skill roll.
• Shardmind Psion blows Arcane Lock/Glyph of Warding skill challenge and gets sucked in a room full of Icy Spray Wraiths (and a Ghostskull)… and survives.

Game 2

• Shardmind broadcasting telepathic ‘request info about elementalists’ announcements causes panic in college plaza.
• Shardmind, when asked to identify himself, telepathically data dumps his entire life since birth in one long string.
• Mort the Ghostskull/Brain in a Jar trying to use loop holes in his ‘eternal undead guardian curse’ to have PCs free him.
• PCs fumbling the religion check needed to free Mort from the clutches of the Elder Elemental Eye while he’s slowly dissolving in a pool of acid… then dropping ritual book in said acid pool…
• As it dissolves, Mort’s undead brain tries to take over Shardmind only to realize: “Where the F..K is the brain?” before being absorbed back into the shard’s thought matrix.
• Spurt the Silvered Bulette… with crazy skill challenge.

Chatty DM (Going on and on about how cool and dangerous the bulette is): Hmm, am I overdoing it?

Players: Yes Chatty, we know how badass your Bulette is.

Chatty DM: Come on guys! This monster is SO badass that it eats Space and Time and craps black holes!

Good times.

Oh and incidentally, our very own Dave won the challenge. Congrats friend, I shall have my revenge and I will NOT advertise my presence so publicly next time.  I bow down to your skill in grace and humility… even if you used cheap parlour tricks like plunking an awesome Dwarven Forge set for the final encounter. 🙂

I love you man.

Burning Luke and his Wheel of Awesome

On Saturday, while running around like a headless hen trying to fight windmills, I bumped into Luke Crane (creator of the Burning Wheel Roleplaying game) which I like to consider is a good gamer friend.  I couldn’t chat with him much but asked him if he’d run a demo for my friends at an unspecified time to which he graciously acquiesced.

We managed to catch up on Sunday and played a 60 minute session of Burning Wheel’s “‘The Sword” where 4 shady characters with the moral fiber of recycled toilet paper fight over the ownership of an enchanted sword found at the bottom of a dungeon.  It was phenomenally fun and Luke remains one of the few paragons of GMing I’ve met, representing the next level of standards and skills I aim for (another blog post or two just there).

(Yeah, I’m a D&D 4e blogger/freelance designer AND a Crane/BW fan AND an Old School gamer… Call it Full-Spectrum gaming, the best of all worlds if you ask me, you should try it).

Microsoft Surface D&D 4e Demo

Just too cool for words. Way more intuitive than the You Tube demo makes it out to be (I was manipulating the thing like Tom Cruise in Minority Report within minutes), fun and fast.

Unstable a bit… but then again, it is Microsoft-based. 🙂

The Tauntaun Sleeping Bag

My dearest E brought me a most amazing Tauntaun sleeping bag to give to my kids. While it was somewhat of a pain to carry around, it got me a TON of thumbs up and ‘man this is so cool’ comments. Gamer geeks are the best.  Thanks sis, they love it!

Cons

The Participants to Events Ratio

At 30 000 participants per day and only a few score events everyday, it became very hard to participate in planned events at the con.  On Saturday, I felt that all I did was wait, walk, wait some more and eat.  Fortunately, things always livened up at night.  Getting people organized to do things on a specific schedule is like trying to draw water with a pasta sieve. So much so that my inner leader/investigator was brought close to the breaking point a few times when shit didn’t happen fast enough around me.

That could have cost me dearly if my close entourage didn’t know me so well. Thanks guys.

The DM Challenge

(Fair warning, I switched brain-sides when I wrote that part)

This is a tad bit more touchy because I do NOT want to raise a stink. An organizational snafu happened with the DM Challenge when they announced, a few weeks ago, that people could register to play with a specific DM.  Given my status as the ChattyDM and the advertising I did on the blog and on Twitter, I landed 4 readers who asked to play with me (out of a total of 6).  The Wizards people realized (as I did) that this was a huge conflict of interest.

I had hoped that something was planned to deal with that but that wasn’t the case.  Upon realization of the situation, the event organizer had to make a snap decision and he offered me 2 choices: I could take the players and forfeit any claim to the challenge or the players could be sent to other tables and I’d be able to run the challenge as intended.

I was really torn (and disappointed, in a day that had had its shares of frustrations). First because I had worked very hard at creating this adventure and I was looking forward to the actual competition.  Second, especially because my frustration was mostly based on having spent a large part the day not being able to do what I planned to, I knew how disappointed those 4 guys would be if they didn’t get to play with me.

I finally went for playing with the players, following deeper instincts than my emotional state. Wil said that gaming creates lasting friendships and this very game may lead to just that, based on the awesome legendary stories we shared together…

I mean, come on, a data dumping shardmind? A Silvered Bulette that poops black holes?  A brain that melts in a pool of acid because of a roll of 1 on an untrained religion check? That’s freaking priceless!

In the end, I was rewarded with an awesome game, great feedback and a lot of unexpected swag.  Dave was a prince among men by sharing part of the prize packet with me (Hammerfast FTW) and the event organizer gave me a copy of the new Three-Dragon Ante and some more goodies!

And it makes me sound all badass when I tell people that I got disqualified from a D&D DMing contest.

So, what of next year?  Well, Tycho says that it will be better and sleeker and more awesome.  I’ve learned what Pax is and next year I shall be there, with friends, old and new, sitting in the queue room, playing Jungle Speed.

I shall learn to be the willow to the gales of awesomeness blowing out of that place.  I have one year starting now.