Favorite Convention Purchase
#RPGaDAY2023 - August 14, 2023
Good evening faithful readers. We’re gonna jump right in to tonight’s topic for #RPGaDay2023, my favorite convention purpose. I’ll start off by saying that I’d probably consider myself a second wave grognard, probably closer to third having grown up in the 80s and not beginning to play with others until the 90s. Fans of basic math would calculate my age as somewhere in my early 40s now.
In those 40+ years I have been to exactly one tabletop gaming convention*. Just the one, and it wasn’t until this very summer in North Texas. You see, I’m supposedly what the cool kids these days call neurodivergent, which is to say I have extreme auditory and light sensitivity and find being in crowds to be the most unsettling experiences possible. These symptoms got worse in my early 20s and I found myself as mostly a shut in aside from the required tasks to go out and work, and my one social release of tabletop role-playing games.
*Ok, full disclosure I think my dad took me to a Star Trek convention once in my early teens, and I recall him getting a box set of that FASA Star Trek RPG for me. But honestly only one gaming convention ever.
Last year my nephew had caught the OSR bug hard. His dad mentioned that he was looking at this convention in Texas of all places to go to in June. Texas in June!? What madness was this? What sane person would go to Texas in summer to sweat with a bunch of fat stinky nerds (I am merely projecting myself here, the rest of you all are wonderful people) in an enclosed place. It sounded like an assault to all of my senses, and I knew that if it was something that would be awful for me, then it was likely to be far more stressful for my nephew. I grudgingly told them that I’d come with for moral support and if it didn’t work out and we were stuck in Texas for a week we could at least make something of the trip on our own. I thought nothing more of it and figured that I’d made a simple gesture, and that the trip would be dropped as something else came up to catch their attention.
That didn’t happen though, so come this January I got a message from my brother talking about flights and stuff and wanting to see if I was still planning to come along. I made a non-committal response that I’d have to wait until after tax refund time to book a flight and room and then I got an email with flight info. That bastard had reserved a seat on the flight with him and his son. Now I was committed, no escape for me either. I’m not sure if he was doing it as a gift, an anchor to prevent me from weaseling out, or a punishment for disappointing them somehow. The only reason I say punishment here is that they are two very large men and having the three of us in one peasant class row on a commercial flight was absolutely a punishment. I made the arrangements to pay back the ticket, got a cheap hotel room across the street (and survived) and smoothed things over with my wife who suddenly discovered that we’d be spending a week apart after having spent the past fifteen years together without more than a day or two apart during that time.
So here I was, on May 31st, getting on a plane… for the first time since I flew back from Korea in 2001… to go to what I was certain was going to be a massive swarm of people (like the pictures I’ve seen of Gencon this year) and every possible worst case scenario kept running through my head.
And then a few hours later I was on the ground at DFW, a short trip to the car rental place, a stop at an Aldi to get some con snacks and baggies to portion them out like the world’s worst drug dealer. The time was finally here. I’d pulled what I figured would be the smartest move possible. I booked as many games as possible thinking that as long as I was engaged with a game that it would be less awkward than wandering around and socializing. I also tried to sync up with my brother and nephew so we’d have a shared 2 hour gap for us to go out and find meals each day. This schedule was loaded.
We came and got checked in and I had my first con game on Wednesday night. I knew right away that all of my fears had been wrong. My brother and I had honestly picked Alan’s Wed night 5th edition D&D game because the options had been somewhat thin and I figured 5e was an easy familiar game for me. The moment the rest of the players had sat down at the table and we’d gone through our pregens everything just clicked into place and I was in one of the most competent and focused groups I’ve ever played in. With random strangers. I really appreciated some of the techniques I saw him use for trackign and displaying individual initative and loved the work he’d gone into assembling our pregen character packets.
The next day I was in one of Ryan Howard’s Nighthaven sessions with Alan and one of the other players from last night’s game as well. Then an amazing session of MCC with Skeeter Green, two games with Judge Stefan Surratt, a playtest of Horde Crawl Classics with a brutal orcish warband and the best hag I’ve ever heard. A session of Dwarrowdeep run by the man himself, and on and on. I’ve never had a more focused week of top tier gaming before in my life. My concerns about the noise and crowds were unfounded. Sure I still needed my headphones to move around from session to session, and wasn’t able to participate in some of the more social after-hours events, but overall it was a truly transformative experience.
I don’t want to compare something like going to a con to a religious pilgrimage, but for someone like me that’s probably not too far off the mark. It was absolutely unreal being able to associate names and faces I’d seen online or in some of my favorite gaming books with actual people standing in the room with me. It was like I was connecting to a larger network of folks that were at least, if not more interested in the rituals of sharing a table and rolling some dice together. Truly I cannot overstate how significant this trip has been for me.
After returning home, my brother and nephew jumped right into a group hexcrawl project using the AD&D 1st edition rules. We rushed forward into trying to get an open table setup going that would support multiple DMs available throughout the week and have run into several issues along the way due to our enthusiasm. Growing our little project has been an interesting experience delving into a ruleset that is bafflingly opaque at times and trying to work with four different DMs to keep a unified ruleset across four different sessions has been a major challenge. But one thing that remains, even through the challenges is a deep love for tabletop gaming and my family. Even if it doesn’t always come through during one of our debates.
Oh yeah, I kinda ran off on a tangent her about the con and our current campaign. Here’s a pic I took at the con to show off some of my purchases to the people back home.
The definite winner for me out of my con purchases was my physical Weird Frontiers book. That said, it’s so large and heavy that it made more sense (and cost about $10 less) for me to mail my dirty clothes back to myself and pack my RPG books in my carry-on for the flight home.
That’s gonna do it for tonight. Tomorrow will be my favorite con module / one-shot. I’m gonna have to do some thinking and research for that, but hopefully it should be a good one. Good night for now, and get out there and play some games with your friends before its too late.
Sounds like you had a great time at the convention, I'm normally running games at the one I regularly go to so I don't tend to get to play much but your post does make me want to get out there and play more. You'll have to let me know what Weird Frontiers is like I've heard of it but was hesitant to buy due to the size of the book.