DexCon 2007, Part Two

After my second GURPS session, I tried to find out where the poker tournament was being held and whether or not there was room for me to play. I eventually tracked it down, and in fact there was room for me, so I signed up, barely getting in. While I've played a lot of poker against automated opponents, this was only the fourth time I've played against human beings.



I did well enough overall, finishing in about the middle of the pack. Not bad for a newbie. As it turns out, I was at a particularly dangerous table to start. We were down from nine players to four relatively quickly, since most of the other tables had only eliminated one or two players in the same time frame. Our surviving four players were merged with the three remaining from the other especially dangerous table. All three of those players had a fair sized chip stack, which I wasn't happy to see since my own pile was relatively low by that point. I eventually went out on a bad beat, going all in with the Ace and Jack of clubs, while my opponent had Ace/Three, off suit. The flop came up King, Three, Three, and I was done, barring a miracle that never came.



Most of the table was playing far more loosely than I ever would, which threw me for a loop initially. I only actually played about a dozen hands, winning three or four of them, and my only bluff was successful. I suspect that if I'm going to improve my results, I'm going to have to play more hands and take calculated risks more often. It was a good start, and I'm more than willing to try it again next year. Steve Edelman threatened to tie me to a chair and force me to join the poker game at the next MEPACon I attend. I don't think that'll actually be necessary, since I now know I can play poker publicly without completely embarrassing myself.



And so ended Saturday. I'd hoped to get up early to play in Mike Miller's Sunday morning game, but that clearly wasn't going to happen with me getting to bed at about 3 AM. I did manage some dealers' room time before having lunch with Michele Mishko, and located a copy of a game called Family Business. My friend John Lach had introduced this one at the local game night before he moved, and it had gone over big, but I hadn't been able to find a copy for myself until now. For the most part, I wasn't especially impressed with the dealers' room, but in all fairness to the dealers, I wasn't much in the market for anything right now, since I'm picky about bringing more stuff into the house at this time.



My Sunday In Nomine session didn't happen. Lowell was signed up, and asked if it'd be okay if he played it again. I would've been okay with that if his playing would've made the difference as to whether or not the event happened, but there was really only one other player contemplating joining us, and that was that.



So I joined Andrew Morris' Unistat session. I'd heard Andrew's prior Unistat sessions getting noisy at previous cons, which is always a good sign that the players are having a good time, and I'd had him as a player in my own sessions before, so I knew he could be entertaining at the table. I didn't know the other players (apart from Lowell, who'd also joined this game), though I think I'd seen at least two of them around at conventions before. For this particular session, there was no advance preparation whatsoever. The game started with the players deciding what would be fun to play and creating appropriate characters for it. We ultimately ended up with three rival mad scientists (including myself) competing for status and trying to fight off an invasion of pterodactyl people with ray guns and a zeppelin as a launching platform in 1960's London. The other two player characters were the robot I'd built (which, unknown to me, had just achieved sentience) called PS3 and the innocent niece of one of the others. Some of the more prominent NPCs were Kip, a genetically modified four-armed and four-legged monkey that worked for one of the others as a lab assistant, and Shepp, a large ape clone of the body the other mad scientist had put his own brain into (Shepp himself wasn't very bright). In the end, the three mad scientists reluctantly cooperated to save the day (though we continued to jockey for credit), the niece ended up transformed into a dragon/human hybrid in order to save her life, and the robot was destroyed, though not before he convinced me to recognize the fact of his sentience, and that that sentience was a valuable thing worth trying to replicate.



The system itself is dirt simple. Everybody except the GM starts out with the same number of sides of dice, and chooses which dice they're going to use. The GM starts with as many dice as everybody else combined. In a conflict, each party to it decides how many dice they're going to put in until all agree on exactly what is at stake in the conflict and how many dice they're willing to put into it, at which point the dice are rolled. The player with the highest number wins the conflict and decides what exactly happened, while the player putting in the largest number of dice earns the right to narrate the result as to how it happened. Sometimes this is the same player, and sometimes it isn't. The players then trade dice, meaning that the player who put the most dice into winning the conflict is effectively giving away a disproportionate amount of narrative power to the other player, which tends to keep control of the game relatively balanced among the players. What is the Unistat? It's one characteristic that makes your character distinct from the others, and you get an extra die from the GM to use in a conflict when your special characteristic comes up.



Unistat is similar conceptually to Fluid, but simpler. I'm going to have to think about this. Fluid may be unnecessary. One main difference is that Fluid characters are more fully fleshed out, which is probably better in a long term game. Unistat gives the players more input as to how important a conflict is to them, which is good, and the fact that the dice get passed around distributes narrative control. One of the other players questioned how viable a long term Unistat game would be, and I really don't know the answer to that. If I continue developing Fluid, it's likely to be influenced by Unistat in some way. I might get the effect I'm looking for by allowing players to add one permanent characteristic to their character each session (if they choose to do so) to flesh them out over time, and just use Unistat rules for the flow of play.



Overall, I had a good time at DexCon this year. Two of my three events went off and ran well. I got to spend some time with various friends. I played in a live poker tournament and did reasonably well in it. I found a game of interest in the dealers' room, and played a very enjoyable session of a system that may already do what I've been trying to achieve with Fluid. I plan to go back again next year, as I have the last several years.