BisbeeCon

[Jared A. Sorensen]

Just played some games (!) at BisbeeCon III (a friend's annual apartment convention). Here's the scoop:

I played InSpectres! Finally. :) I played Gus, the janitor in the building where the Boston franchise was located. Unfortunately, Gus had been accidentally embroiled in a (pre-game) mission and killed. So he was a zombie. Very funny. The "plot" involved a haunted ballpark (Fenway), clones of Ted Williams and a big-ass hot dog making machine.

Needless to say, Gus fell into it.

After that we played Werewolf (the card game...we just used ordinary playing cards). VERY fun game. Lots of laughs.

After that, I ran Monster Party with a couple adventurous folks. I can definitely see how lil' kids would love it (lots of drawing, yelling and taking Stuff). For us, it was a little lackluster...the rules need some tinkering. Overall, an okay effort.

The last game of the night was a VERY punchy and off-the-cuff game of Parsely (another game off my site). I was amazed at how much fun it was for everyone involved. The goal was "get off the spaceship before it blows up" and involved a lot of humerous frustration as the players attempted to get the shuttlecraft out the hanger bay. Nice.

This morning, a quick game of Dying Earth. Gender bending, surly sandestins and weird clockwork mechanisms. Very fun -- the best was the ending when we realized that our characters were stuck in a time loop -- we had to do something for one archmagi because we harrassed and annoyed him. Then while doing that task, we were tasked with returning to the first archmage to...yeah, harrass and annoy him. Fun!

It's damn nice to play games once in a while.

[Ron Edwards]

Hey Jared,

How many people were there?

I'm thinking that maybe a small-con website or feature of the Forge ought to keep track of these things and provide lots of user-input information about them. They really illustrate the basic goals of this site, in terms of creator ownership but also in terms of the larger goals, regarding enjoying role-playing per se.

Best,
Ron

[Jared A. Sorensen]

At its height there were 15 people there. I believe at any one time there were three games going on.

Here is a list of the games run/played:

TORG
Dying Earth
Star Wars (d20)
Inspectres (I played in this one)
Resident Evil (GM's d20 setting based on the video game)
Judge Dredd (d20)
Paranoia
Frankenstein 3000 (by Peter Seckler)
Marvel superheroes SAGA
Shadow Chasers (the GM's own Buffy-esque d20 setting)

I also tried out Monster Party with 4 people (inc. myself) and Parsely (the game started with three people and mushroomed to around six or seven!).

I'm pondering running a mini-con of my own in September...

[Buddha Nature]

I am really fascinated with this concept.  I have been thinking about running one of these with my gaming group (about 10 players) and maybe any Forge-ites in the Bay Area.  I have a fairly static group--they seem quite adverse to change--and I see these minicons as a perfect way to inject a whole new set of games.  A "Con-mentality" is quite different from normal gaming--you are completely open to playing tons of different (and new) games--you don't go into it expecting the same-old-same-old (not to say that isn't good, but it is the expected).

Does anyone have any planning suggestions or ideas about setting one of these up?  General guidelines?  Things to do/not do?

-Shane

[Jürgen Mayer]

Does anyone have any planning suggestions or ideas about setting one of these up?  General guidelines?  Things to do/not do?

This should be pretty obvious, but it's important, so I'll write it anyway: make sure, in advance, that you have enough gamemasters willing and prepared to run a game. It won't be much fun if you invite 20 people, of which 18 like the idea of trying a new game and only the other two come prepared to run something.