PoliCon

For those who don't already know what it is, PoliCon is a nifty idea. It started out as a birthday gift from one friend (Don Corcoran) to another (Joe Poli, thus PoliCon), and has become an annual event. It's been a little different every year, but essentially what happens is that Don contacts the best GMs and roleplayers he knows and puts them all in one place for a couple of days. Because it's invitational, the quality of GMing and playing tends to be a higher level than most conventions, and everybody wants to bring their best to the party. There are no bad GMs or players, because if there are, they probably won't be there next year. Tastes tend toward indie games, but there are no hard and fast rules about what the GMs can bring to the table.

I usually offer In Nomine (though last year it was GURPS Dimension Travel), and that's what I brought again this year. Unfortunately for me, the con was smaller than usual this year, which meant that more events failed to run, and mine was one of them. I'll probably shake things up next year and bring "Dance of Pairs" for Sorcerer. I suspect choosing In Nomine was part of the problem, in that I've run a lot of angels vs. demons scenarios for many of these same players before. It's not that they don't enjoy them; it's that something new has more appeal than something they've played before, even if they think it's likely to be good.

And so, I had the chance to try out Michael S. Miller's game in development, "By the Stars". I don't want to give too much detail here since the game is, after all, still being changed as playtesting progresses. In short, the most interesting thing about "By the Stars" is that there's no room in the game for wallflowers. If you try to sit on the sidelines, somebody is gonna grab you and pull you in. There's just no getting around it. One common problem with roleplaying games is what some people refer to as the "ten minutes of fun packed into four hours" problem. That is, in most RPGs, you spend a lot of time waiting for the good parts to happen. In "By the Stars", it's mostly good parts. The resolution mechanic is still a little rough (this is a game in development, after all), and when playing an RPG, I personally like to know more about what the other characters are doing than you can in "By the Stars". This is not a criticism of the game; it's simply a characteristic. It's almost more like a LARP than a conventional RPG. I look forward to trying it again some time.

In the last slot, I signed up for Liz Teichman's "Shadow of Yesterday" event. This is one of those indie systems that I've heard good things about, but never get to try because it's not being run a lot in the first place, and I'm usually GMing something else when someone is running it. Unfortunately, she started out by committing one of my cardinal sins of GMing, which is to have the players create their characters at the table. Unless character generation is ridiculously easy and a key part of the system you're playing, I strongly dislike when GMs do this. Anyway, after a slow start to the scenario itself as well, Liz brought her usual horror elements into the picture and things suddenly got a lot more interesting. I particularly enjoyed the ending, where each of the players had a tough choice to make for their character. Only one of the three who made the dangerous choice survived it, which is a Good Thing. It's not credibly dangerous if everybody survives it. As for the system itself, I don't think it brought anything of particular interest to the scenario. It could have been run with any decent system. It wouldn't be fair for me to comment on the setting itself, as I understand that Liz was bringing a lot of her own spin to the setting, so I can't give an informed opinion of what was the official setting and what was Liz' version of it.

I'd planned to do more playing this year than in past years, so in spite of being disappointed in not having the opportunity to run my own game, I can say that PoliCon was an appropriate start to my convention year in the sense that I did fulfill that part of my plan, and had a good time doing it. And naturally, it's giving me the itch to GM again. :-)