Gencon Oz: Friday

First of all, my congratulations to the Gencon Oz team. They managed to bring a huge crowd (certainly larger than I could have predicted given their overall lack of advertising to the Sydney gaming community) on the first day. It got even bigger as the con went on.

Finding the con was actually a little difficult. The Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre has four halls, and three different expos on at the same time. Naturally, Gencon was in the two halls furthest from the main entrance, and there was no signage indicating where to find Gencon either on the outside of the building, or in the exterior corridors.

As indicated by the poor experience with pre-registration, badge collection was not as smooth as it should have been. Queue management was less than stellar, and the signs at the head of the queues were not as self-explanatory as they could have been. There isn’t a whole lot of difference between “Customer Service”, “Event Registration”, and “Badge Collection”. Staff wasted a whole lot of time explaining to people that they were in the wrong line. I would have labeled the queues “General Enquiries”, “Event Registration”, and “Internet Pre-orders”.

Once I’d found the right line and collected my stuff, I then had to check that I had all my tickets, and that they matched what I had ordered. I guess you’re expected to remember this sort of thing. But seriously, given how many events you can attend at a convention like this, and given that I’d registered six weeks ago, and that I’d come from interstate, did they really expect me to rattle off my schedule by rote?

Fortunately, I am somewhat more organised than others and had printed up my own schedule. Naturally, the ticket for my first seminar was missing. So I had to go stand in the Customer Service line to get that sorted out. Anyway, administrative problems sorted, I entered the con knowing I wouldn’t have to deal with that nonsense again.

My first two events were seminars, and were a little disappointing. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t know what to expect, but the presenters didn’t feel very well prepared.

The first, Philosophies of Game Design, featured Robin Laws, Peter Adkison and Steve Darlington. They had some interesting insights into game design, but it felt a bit as though the audience wanted to pick the brains of industry insiders on how to catch their first big break. I’d come across that advice before when examining the chances of becoming a full-time novelist (Rule #1: Don’t give up your day job, etc).

Some nuggets of wisdom did come out, though:

• Design your game mechanic around the goal of your game. Naturally, this requires that you consider your goals before you do anything else.
• As a corollary to the above, don’t pick one central mechanic that you practice variations on each time you design a new game. A family-oriented party game is not going to require the same level of simulation that a six-hour game of space conquest is.
• Board games are coming back in a big way. Peter Adkison reflected that this might have something to do with the fact that the first generations of gamers (including himself) are getting older and preferring less crunchy games.
• While you can design for a target market, you should be pitching at your market, not simply excluding everybody else. Just because Magic the Gathering was market to young males, doesn’t mean that there wasn’t an even gender balance in the art, and the use of gender-neutral pronouns in documentation was quite deliberate. It was noted that most RPGs target specifically at female gamers came across as very condescending and sank very quickly. Apparently, girls like killing things too 😉
• Successful designers are aware of the whole business of selling games, from mechanics to art, from conception to packaging and marketing. All business functions need to be understood to be truly desirable as an employee in a gaming company.

The second panel, Nasty, Brutish, and Short was presented by David Carroll, Kyla Ward, and Stephen Dedman. This started on topic, and had the potential to be quite an interesting treatment of horror in RPGs, but quickly devolved into a bunch of unconnected gaming anecdotes that didn’t go very far towards explaining their relevance to the subject of the seminar. I confess I spent at least forty minutes looking for an easy exit and not paying attention.

Finally, after a hasty lunch at the moderately well-priced canteen, I got my first dose of game. Mark Sommers’ Open Road was a fantastic fourth edition Shadowrun module. I haven’t played a game in the cyberpunk genre in so long I’d forgotten the joy of planning my mission before I got to the site of the action. The characters were really well created, and worked well together as a group.

We played with some more experienced Shadowrun players and concocted a plan that involved no violence, plenty of comical subterfuge (P does ditzy white trash so well), and made much use of my decker/rigger. Including everybody in the plan really makes for a better game.

We followed that up with the freeform, Der Golden Sterne, set in an alternate universe where Berlin had been nuked in WWII and technology had stopped working reliably. The idea behind the game was ambitious and fairly creative, but the execution fell short of satisfactory (at least from where I stood).

A good quarter of the room only touched on the central plots in very peripheral ways with not enough character knowledge to play on them properly. That was certainly true of my character, whose main goal was to obtain an object central to one of the plots but had no way of knowing who had it or how to get it off them. Others had even less attachment to events.

On top of that, I’m not sure a character like mine could be handed out to just anyone who put their hand up to play the game. I certainly wasn’t up to the challenge, but maybe I’m weak; judge for yourself (spoiler alert):

Lord Jonathan Spencer is psychopathic sadist. He is obsessed with no more than money, power and status. His career began in school when he killed a fellow student in his sleep, then poisoned his father to inherit early, and pushed his mother down the stairs when she objected to a decision he made as head of the household. More recently, he raped a maid, kept his wife drugged and chained to a bed for a year, after which he presented the child conceived with the maid as his wife’s (telling his wife that he’d had to keep her sedated during the pregnancy because it had made her suicidal).

All that before the start of the game. And the wife is another player character. I couldn’t set aside enough of my own humanity to look another person in the eye and act as though I had done all that to them. So I spent pretty much the whole game separated from one of the characters I knew lest I either break character or play it to the hilt and feel disgusted with myself afterwards. Also, if I played him as the highly-strung psychopath he was, then I would have died very early in the game.

Anyway, the plot was good, except that many characters had to watch it from the dress circle and only occasionally got to venture on stage. Only one GM was available to handle thirty players, which is a difficult ask. Apparently, other sessions of the game had more GMs, which certainly would have made things different.

That concludes my first day at Gencon. Not bad, and things only really get better from there.