Big Bad Con 2024
Big bad con now feels like about a million years ago, though it was almost exactly a month since writing this.
It's the only game convention I go to - largely because it's local and I try to avoid flying these days - but it's a pretty good one. A lot of the games are a bit outside of the usual set of games I play, which I appreciate. It's a chance to play things I probably won't play for the rest of the year, and I try and push myself to try new things and, in particular, to play games I've never played before. So this post is mostly actually going to be a discussion of the games I played, in chronological order.
I played 8 games. My top 3 were City of Winter, Trophy Dark and Shinobigami in that order; of the playtest games I am especially excited by the potential of Gnostisystem.
Games on demand part 1
I played two 2-hour games, both playtests. One was a Starfinder adventure called Absalom Station Animal Control, about trying to catch escaped cats, where you can't hurt the cats but the cats can hurt you. It was one of the better examples I'd seen of trying to play a game without violence but using all of the mechanics of a "trad" RPG (I dislike the term "trad" in this context but I guess we're stuck with it.) It's not usually my first choice of genre but I had fun. It used a grid-based, initiative-based tactical game system to not kill things, and the increasingly difficult cats are easy to play as funny and cute. It was my first time playing Starfinder, my second time playing a Pathfinder-family game. It was also my second time playing a social media influencer in a sci fi game.
As a side note I'd like to see a wider range of tones in sci fi games, especially for more lightweight game systems. I feel like sci fi tends to be pretty grim, which is fun sometimes, but I think we could use more lightweight space shenanigans games as well.
Next was a playtest of a GM-less game called A Reason To Be about people in a society that is generally pretty good trying to solve minor problems in their lives. The game had an index card based system where you shuffled and drew index cards and each time the same index card came up you progressed your character's story arc a bit more. You also collaboratively create the community, which I enjoyed. It's a nice game for telling a quick and self-contained story. Though after playing through it I feel like I would do a much better job of playing it a second time.
OD&D and Jennell Jaquays
This was my first time playing OD&D. Despite doing a lot of stuff on kind of the "NSR" side of things, I have very little experience playing actual retroclones, although I had played modern rewritings of some classic adventures (White Plume Mountain in particular). We actually played the Fantastic Medieval Campaigns version.
In a lot of ways we played this in what I imagine was a relatively traditional way. We even had a shot-caller, though the way it was implemented actually made a lot more sense than how I heard people sometimes used it - the position was rotated every half-hour, and their responsibility was just to make a final decision after we'd all talked about what to do next.
In many ways it felt surprisingly modern, though. The game was not incredibly deadly (one person died during the final confrontation) and mostly felt pretty fair. We had meaningful choices to make, solved most problems without violence, a lot of the encounters were primarily social, and just exploring the dungeon and piecing together what was going on was a lot of fun. It felt more like a modern "NSR" game than how I imagined actual old school games to be. I wouldn't play this type of game every time, but I'd definitely enjoy playing it now and again.
I have generally been aware that early D&D was in fact played in a lot of different ways, not just what people think of as OSR. This game left me curious about whether there is a notable difference in, say, adventures descended from Gygax's work vs Jaquays'.
Trophy Dark
Finally, got to play Trophy Dark! I'd previously tried and failed during Games On Demand.
The game was set in a convent in Northern California shortly after Vatican 2. The premise is that we are all new nuns heading to the convent, where strange things are happening - strange creatures seen in the woods, followed by a mysterious illness.
I'm not sure how typical a Trophy Dark game it was. While we were all doomed from fairly early on, we managed to have what I think was a rather touching story under tragic circumstances, choosing to defy the lovecraftinan Dog-Man despite certain death. We also I think were all a bit too cautious and so our Ruin never got all that high. I also think we had a really good group for this - I thought everyone played their characters in a really compelling way.
I played a down-to-earth daughter of a farmer who insisted for as long as possible that there was a reasonable explanation for everything going on. Unfortunately I didn't manage to incorporate my secret lesbian past until the epilogue.
(I ended up going to a panel later about playing games set in the real world - I think it would have helped me play with more confidence if I knew more about Catholicism.)
Apparatchik
This was another playtest of what turned out to be a kind of interesting take on a "trad" game. Unfortunately at least one of the players was hoping for something a lot more in the realm of story games and was clearly not having a good time throughout.
But I thought it was pretty interesting - you play as bureaucrats assigning resources according to rules in an almost board-game-like way. In a sense this is to worker placement boardgames as D&D is to tactical miniature wargames. But it quickly becomes apparent that it is not actually possible to win. You don't have enough resources to save everyone, and the best you can do is mitigate the damage. Another point of frustration I think was that it wasn't clear to all the players that there was no way to win and they thought they were just playing badly or misunderstanding the rules. If you don't like complicated board games you probably wouldn't like this game.
You create characters that are in over their heads and assigned to this problem more or less due to losing some political battle. I played a naive and ambitious young bureaucrat who didn't realize that being appointed as the head of the committee by the others was not in fact doing me a favour. Like a lot of "trad" style games, the RP aspect is mostly improv and the rules are mostly around the mechanics of problem solving. This is the main thing which some of the players bounced off of - I actually don't mind "trad" games, I've mostly moved away from them due to being dissatisfied with the actual combat mechanics of the ones that are popular now. I think this would be a great game for players who mostly play D&D 5E or Pathfinder who want to branch out a bit, but not too much.
I feel like this is a game I'd have fun running, for the right group.
Panel: Playing Games in the Real World
This is the only panel I went to, it was a pretty good one. Some notes I took:
- A setting as your personal ethnography of a city
- A setting in the real world as your research of something you're interested in (including in the past)
- A setting in the real world about capturing a specific vibe
- A fantasy or folkloric setting that looks for the magic in the real world
- Players may automatically have familiarity with real-world settings. This both can be good and can be bad (if you have different perspectives)
- Real world history: watch out for anachronisms e.g. cell phones. But also be flexible (e.g. allow for player diversity)
- Instead of building from the ground up, you have to consider each element and whether or not to exclude it
- Can be easier to get players emotionally invested
- Easy to visualise, may have more resources to do so (e.g. Google Maps). It can be fun to play in a place and then later visit it IRL
- It is harder to populate a place that you don't have real-world familiarity with, especially if you want to be respectful.
- Actual real-world conflicts rooted in systemic oppression can come up. You may want to explore this, or it could be off-putting to people affected by it. And it can also be off-putting to have it be notably absent.
- Rather than avoid entire subjects, be able to recover from and grow from mistakes gracefully.
- Your responsibilities in a public game are higher than in a private game.
Small Press Vending
This went pretty well. I mostly sold Procedures to Discover the Path Ahead, I was a little disappointed that Friends, Liars and Troublemakers didn't sell that well, but I realized that actually maybe a zine full of stat-less NPCs is actually one of the more OSR-coded things that I sell, in a weird way. There were several people who had heard of Cairn and someone even bought my last Murky Bog pamphlet. Given that this convention is not totally the target audience for the games I make, I was pretty happy.
City of Winter
I got lucky with this one, there was a last-minute cancellation and I managed to swoop in.
I really liked this game and I want to imagine myself having the ability to do a long campaign of it. Unfortunately my current story game type group just established that the group as a whole doesn't like GM-less games, and also I feel like this is a game to be played IRL. It is such a gorgeous game.
It's about an extended family going on a long journey from their home because something terrible is happening. They have cards that represent their culture, and as they travel, they pick up cards from other cultures and may adopt those. It's a really good representation, I think, of the immigrant experience, as someone who myself has a mixed hand of cards.
Each culture is roughly represented by an animal, and the cards did a really good job of being interesting and ambiguous, and of creating areas both for conflict and for cultural exchange as we encountered different cultures. The structure of having a family that grows older over time was also really good - we had a lot of really touching moments throughout the game. Playing members of an intergenerational family (which also is growing older over time) was pretty cool, especially given that RPG games are more likely to be about a group of friends who are peers.
There were two kids where it started out with one bullying the other, where with some help from the adults they ended up good friends and later, adoptive siblings. There was a romance between two characters who just happened to be traveling together at the start but later formally joined the family. I played a grandmother type who tried to keep everyone happy while protecting our traditions - there was an extended running joke of getting the more rowdy kid to carry on traditions involving loud and annoying musical instruments.
Also if I had a dollar for every time I played a game where it was ambiguous whether we are actual birds or metaphorical birds and we realized we were not on the same page halfway through the game, I would have two dollars.
Shinobigami
This was a Games on Demand game. This is a highly PvP story game where we play members of different ninja clans, scheming to end up with the McGuffin at the end.
It had some interesting mechanics - a grid of combat skills where you have some trained skills but can use other skills with a difficulty depending on how far it is from a trained skill, and a health system which wipes out columns of skills. Combat is heavily based around an initiative system which also determines your distance from each other as well as the actions you can take and effectively your HP, and involves secretly choosing an initiative, and was surprisingly tactical.
You also have an ultimate attack with a very long name which you of course have to dramatically say to activate. I really enjoyed getting to have over-the-top monologues as well.
But mostly the game was about relationships between the characters and trying to figure out each other's secrets. Everyone had a secret goal as well. There were a lot of great dramatic reveals and a satisfying ending.
I played a sneaky rogue who had rejected all ninja clans, and I started with the McGuffin, which I managed to hold onto until the very end when I was finally defeated. I had a tragic friendship with an opponent who I was also required to defeat as my secret goal. Despite being a very PvP game, I feel like we were also working together to generate drama and tragedy. This is a case where I can't tell if the game was really good or I just ended up with a really good set of players (or both).
Gnostisystem
I was going to do a LARP, which was then going to be Yazeba's B&B, and after both were cancelled I went back to Games On Demand.
It's very much still in development and I'm very excited about its potential.
It's a "trad" game where you draw an esoteric diagram according to some rules and that determines how combat works. So your character sheet is a cool drawing, made up of circles of three colours and connections between them. The colours correspond to attacks, defences and movement, and the lines between them allow you to have actions do more than one type of thing.
You fight other esoteric diagrams. The rules for the diagrams are pretty simple but have a surprising amount of depth to them. When we got to the final "boss fight" it was legitimately quite hard and we had to really think through the tactics of defeating it. It's also very satisfying to come up with interesting combinations and have those work out in a battle. It was the most engaged I had been in tactical combat in a game in quite a long time, and it has a much simpler set of rules than most other tactical combat oriented games, given the amount of emergent complexity in those rules.
It's about going to a strange spiritual realm and fighting strange entities to fuel some kind of religious obsession. Damage goes directly to your identity and sense of self and you heal yourself by picking up parts of these strange entities and grafting them to your soul. It's a dungeon crawler.
I'm hoping for more focus on polishing the out of combat stuff in the future - I think this entire concept has a ton of potential that is not totally yet realized. In particular, the implications on identity and character growth, as well as what exactly the nature of the spiritual entities you are fighting is, or what your end goal might be, could be fleshed out more. But if the author doesn't go that direction I could see myself just hacking the game a lot and making it into what I want it to be. I'm also hoping for a high-budget kickstarter with a lot of art, like usually I feel we have too many of these, but this is a concept that deserves cool art. I think overall this is my favourite take on a "trad" game in a long time. It's also totally unlike any other game I've seen.
Is it a good idea to play 8 games in one weekend
Usually, it is advised that you do the exact opposite of this. I was very tired afterwards. In between games I had zero social energy at all. But this is also for me my main opportunity to play many of these types of games. I also don't know a huge number of people in this particular scene and the ones I know I don't know that well, the rest of the year I'm mostly in a different corner of the TTRPG world, and in the past attempts to "network" mostly made me feel bad. If you're trying to grow a career, spending an entire convention playing games 12 hours a day is probably not the way to go, but for me it's worth it.
Half of the games I played were Games On Demand. A great thing about Games On Demand is you can ascertain your energy levels like 5 minutes before the games start.