PoliCon

I had the pleasure of attending PoliCon yesterday, which was very enjoyable as usual. Don did his usual good job of organizing the show, and I'll tip my hat as well to our host Matt, who supplied the house where we played.

I was finally able to try Prime Time Adventures in the Firefly TV series setting for the first lost of the convention, and was even able to play the Mal Reynolds character. Good stuff. I'd like to be able to try PTA in a season format to really get the full effect.

I was a GM for the second slot, running a four player game of Sorcerer. I hadn't run a playtest for this one, and unfortunately it showed. I definitely have some work to do on this scenario before running it again. It didn't help that it's been a little too long since I've run Sorcerer, so I was a little rusty, and none of the players were familiar with the system. On the plus side, three of the four players had a very good time, and even the fourth seemed to enjoy himself well enough. It was good to identify some rough spots so I can improve the scenario for DexCon.

In the third slot, I was able to try an indie game called Shock. I hadn't heard of it prior to this past week, but it seemed the most interesting of the games offered in that slot and I was definitely not disappointed. The game begins with the players setting up a big change in the world (not surprisingly called the shock) and issues associated with that change. Each player then creates a protagonist based on one of the issues and an antagonist for someone else's protagonist. Then you play out a series of scenes for each protagonist, rotating through each in turn. The best science fiction is written around a really interesting idea. This game sets out to duplicate that and does quite a good job of it. I'll have to buy this game when I get a chance, most likely at DexCon.