Ken was the only other person that went with me that has been before (both of my previous trips.) If you have any love of games at all, you can't beat this convention. It is about 20,000 people playing non-stop games for four straight days. Just incredible.
First let's start with something silly:
Ha ha and all that. That is Ken punching Brian inside a fake TV.
Now on to the story: We fly into Indianapolis on Wednesday night. Ken, Brian and I were staying in a Marriot. If you read about Marriot, they claim to be smoke free. So we show up in the hotel and promptly get shoved into a room that was, of course, smoking. Not only that, but the entire floor the room was on was a smoking floor. I go up to the front desk after Ken has checked us in and throw a fit. They give us a non-smoking room.
Why in the hell do hotels allow anyone to smoke in their rooms? No one wants to be in a smoking room, not even smokers. And then they have the gaul to try to cram all the crappy rooms down everyone's throat. I just can't stand it. Marriot will NOT be getting my return business.
Anyway, we get in to town and settle in. Sarah, the pregnant wife of Chris gets to pick the place to eat since she is by far the pickiest eater among us. My only rule was that we had to go to somewhere we couldn't go in Houston. She ends up picking a great place! It's a steak house that specializes in shrimp cocktails. And not because of the shrimp, but because of horseradish sauce they put on them. Every time I took a bite of my shrimp, I would wince because I knew my nostrils were going to get steam cleaned. If you ordered a steak, you got a choice between two sides: a bowl of navy bean soup -or- get this, a glass of tomato juice. The story we got from our waiter was that tomato juice was invented in Indianapolis. I ate a shrimp cocktail, 10oz of rare filet and a glass of tomato juice.
So the next day I get up with Chris, Woody and Ken at 7:30 to catch the 8am Barroom Blitz game.
This is a picture of the miniature's map that we were playing on with 8 other people. The idea is pretty simple; you are in a bar and are pissed off about something. It is your job to start a fight and resolve whatever it is that you are mad about. I played a bouncer that got dragged into the bar on his day off, so he is just pissed in general. Woody played a law officer looking for a particular criminal in the establishment. Chris played a death-metal bard that wanted to make tons of money. And Ken played a peace-lovin' monk. His job was to keep everyone from fighting.
That's me on the left. Next is one of the more fun players we played with. He was in charge of a drunken dwarf cleric (think Friar Tuck). His goal was to save all the beer. I think he made it. The next guy (tall one) is my buddy Woody. The short guy after him played a thief. He was trying to rob the drunk cleric when I almost killed him. The cleric played it cool, healed the thief and then enlisted him in his cause. By the end of the game Woody, the dwarf and the thief were all in cahoots with one another. The last guy was the cook. He didn't do anything in the fight for the longest time. He ended up fleeing the burning bar at the end and stood outside the exit door killing people that ran out for safety. I respected that.
Where was I, you ask? Dead. This is the second time I have played this game and it is the second time that I ended up being the first player dead. It kind of sucked. But I guess them's the breaks when you are the person that starts the violence. I almost killed the thief, but I missed him due to being blind (it’s a long story -- Chris' fault, though). And then I got cleaved in half by the half-orc pimp. The guy playing the pimp came over and shook my hand afterwards saying that there were no hard feelings. Which, of course, there weren’t. I just wish I could have killed him instead.
After about 4 to 5 hours of that Ken, Woody and I met up with Brian and went to play a hack’n’slash game. This is a DnD game that is all about killing stuff. You don’t have to figure out any traps or talk to any people in the game. Heck, you don’t even have to talk to other players. You just have to fight stuff. Pretty simple really.
Brian and Woody are off the photo. You are looking at the DM on the far left and then three guys that knew each other and played role-playing games with each other. The guy next to the DM was quiet, but sneery. But other than that, he seemed pretty cool. The guy next to him was, I think, their DM. Every time I said something off color (surprise, surprise) he would laugh. His two buddies would just put their heads down in what appeared to be anguish. The last guy was also quiet. All three of them seemed to know what they were doing, playing-wise, they just were a bit unfamiliar with the rules.
This is the game where my half-orc barbarian (that is so rote, all barbarians in all the games I played were half-orc, bleh) got drained of 8 points of CON damage from two stirges when the DM rolled 2d8. I hate those things as a player. As a DM, I love ‘em though. We were never able to finish the dungeon because of time constraints. I hate leaving a game unfinished – it feels like I failed. But we had a 6pm timeslot for True Dungeon.
This event was a lot of fun, except we sucked at it. Basically you walk around a dungeon with a character placard on your chest. When you do something stupid (like step on a marker on the ground that defines a trap) you take damage. A room DM runs over and marks the damage on your placard with a dry erase marker. Basically, the game is like this: everyone goes into a room where there is a puzzle. If you solve the puzzle, you win stuff. If you don’t, you take damage. Eventually people start dying. It was unfortunate that our best puzzle man, Chris, was one of the first people to die. All in all, there were something like 7 puzzles and we solved one of them (well, we kinda solved another, but just not good enough). In the end, everyone died. Still it was a ton of fun.
I’ll try to blog the two other days of Gencon later this week.
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