DexCon - Friday

Once again, I find myself reminded why I enjoy doing this so much.

DexCon was at a new location this year, which turned out to be an improvement in several respects. The hotel staff was especially friendly and helpful, and access to reasonably affordable and quickly available food was far easier than the previous location. However, the new location also had a lot more people from outside the convention wandering through the area, resulting in a fair amount of unintentional "freaking the mundanes". I could tell that some of the hotel staff was not previously acquainted with the gaming community by watching reactions to some of the costumes and unusual conversations going on around them. The former hotel staff had come to know us, and usually just reacted with smirks and the occasional eye roll, while some of the new hotel staff would sometimes actually turn and watch some of the more extreme costumes as the people wearing them passed by.

One of my favorite moments was when an argument broke out in a LARP in an area near the main lobby. I could immediately tell by some of the archaic language that it was coming from a LARP, so the sound was barely a blip on my personal radar, but then I saw two security guards rushing to the stairs to investigate, only then realizing that the two people involved were engaged in some kind of mock duel and not the real thing. I'm sure they were informed that something like that might happen, but you know they had to check the situation out to be sure in order to do their jobs, so I'm not making fun of them for doing so. It was just funny to see it happen.

I arrived in time to play in Andrew Morris' Pareidolix session, "Psychic Underground". Virtually everything except the initial setting description was collectively created on the fly, as usual for Pareidolix, and yet it all ultimately came together for a very satisfying story. There were five of us playing, and I was by far the oldest player at the table while playing the youngest character. My character concept was more of a follower than a protagonist from the outset, which was intentional on my part, but I think some of the others were concerned that the character would be too passive. The reason for my choice was that the first two players to describe their characters had chosen especially forceful personalities that were likely to come into conflict with each other, and I thought it would be more interesting to make myself a valuable bone of contention between them than to be another strong point of view, which turned out to be correct.

Andrew's Pareidolix system definitely influenced my own Fluid system, but seeing it again after having run some Fluid showed where he has solved some problems that I haven't, to be honest. Fluid may work better for a long term game, but Andrew said he has rules for Pareidolix for multi-session play, though I haven't seen them yet. I'll have to look at them, and if he does the job better, I may just give up on Fluid and use his system. Why reinvent the wheel when every session I've played of Andrew's has done what I set out to do?

My scheduled In Nomine session for Friday night folded for lack of players, attracting exactly zero. Unfortunately, the change in location also meant some shift in the composition of the player population, and in this case may have meant that it's going to take some work on my part to build up a new audience for In Nomine at DexCon.

And so I signed up for a Call of Cthulhu session, which I was quite looking forward to because this is a game I sometimes run, and only rarely get to play. I also know and like one of the other players already signed up for it, and trusted her taste in games, so I thought it was likely to be good. From what I was able to gather, this particular scenario was written by someone who does it at least semi-professionally, but I was seriously unimpressed by both the scenario itself and the GM. There was nothing especially creepy or engaging about the story or characters apart from a disturbing creature turning up in the last half hour of play, and no real zip to the GM's presentation. Meh. The best parts for me were interacting with two of the other players, including the one I knew.

My midnight Sorcerer game (Clerks 1 1/2) had two players, which was still enough to run it, and they chose to play Jay and Silent Bob. One of the most pleasant surprises about the Clerks sessions has been the consistent quality of the players. The performances for all three of the Clerks sessions (playtest plus the two DexCon sessions) have been good to great across the board, without a weak player in the bunch, and the endings have felt right for the source material every time. Very encouraging. I had to do some tweaking because the idea is that Randall will probably be the first character to get a demon, but it all worked out well enough. It's interesting to note that players in general prefer to play Jay and Silent Bob (particularly Silent Bob) to Randall and Dante. In spite of the late hour, both of the players hung around for an extended and very interesting conversation afterward about the Askewniverse and storytelling in general, which then drifted into storytelling style in anime. I'm no expert on anime, but have absorbed enough from my wife by talking to her about it to keep up with the conversation.