NTRPG 2024 (Part 1)
The journey of a thousand miles, starts from beneath your feet.
Hello all, it’s been a while. “Where have you been?” I can hear you all asking, well the title has probably given it away, but I was just at the North Texas RPG Convention. I’ve just gotten home and unpacked after most of a week of intensive gaming, socialization, and the joys of dystopian American airline travel.
If someone had asked me in 2022 if I would have never expected to enjoy going to a convention I would have simply and bluntly told them that they would be out of their mind. I have some pretty gnarly sensory and social anxiety issues that make loud crowds very unpleasant, and from images I’d seen of PAX, GenCon, and their like pretty much told me that I was never going to go to something like that without it resulting in a major panic attack. However, last year my brother-in-law convinced me to come along with him and my nephew down to Texas for an OSR gaming convention that was a bit different. I wasn’t a stranger to the OSR at that point, I’d played in several OSE games, was actively running a weekly DCC campaign, and had some familiarity with the original TSR era products that were slightly before my time.
Well, they were completely right. North Texas was different. The focus was clearly on gaming and not fighting through large crowds of people being milked for access to celebrities. It was all about the tabletop roleplaying games that I was there for, but even more so I could sense that it was more of a community of gamers that were closer to a family getting together to catch up with each other and celebrate their successes and commemorate those whom they had lost.
This year was no different, even though the con had sold out all 500 tickets, there was still plenty of room for tables and dozens of games going on at all hours. This time there were some familiar faces among the guests there, and I had intended to leave a bit more time to try to socialize. However, nerves are still what they are, and I’m always hesitant to walk up and insert myself in an existing conversation or interrupt someone else who might be on their way to another game or activity. Plus I’m clinically incapable of leaving spare time in my gaming schedule and over the span of 4.5 days, I think I put 12 games on the books.
Wednesday Welcome to Texas
On Wednesday our early morning flight from Seattle to Dallas included a surprising number of empty seats leading to me enjoying an entire row to myself for the four hour flight as did my brother-in-law and nephew. After making our way through the airport, and a bit of a wait on the car rental, we picked up some lunch, hit up a grocery store for provisions and made our way to the Westin (for them at least, I’m a peasant that stayed at the Quality Inn next door with a sketchy elevator, but working fire alarm system) to get set up for a weekend of debauched gaming excess.
We started off our first game of the con with my nephew’s Exterminate! Galactic Marines playtest. He had worked on building something for Chaosium’s BRP design contest earlier in the year and is still pretty early on in the design process for something I’d describe in a single sentence of Sci-Fi Action Horror via Starship Troopers meets the Alien / Blade Runner franchise. Obviously he’d have a much better description / pitch, but that’s my take on it.
The group was great and in high energy as we were kicking off the pre-con and getting the dice flowing. The group managed to win survive a no-win scenario against overwhelming odds in a way that wasn’t previously considered and great feedback was obtained for him to continue working on the concept further. I commend our guests at that game for their willingness to try out something new and experimental.
A Tremulous Thursday
I’m gonna set aside discussing my first game of Thursday morning until the end, it might even be something I do in a second post afterward depending on how long the rest of this goes. The main thing here is how something small and relatively unimportant can be a premonition for things to come. The short version is a player’s expectation of the paladin’s sense evil ability was not in agreement with the rules of the system being played. A simple mistake, easily corrected, but led to continual contentious comments about it throughout the rest of the game.
My next game was a playtest of Delve RPG with Stephen Radney-MacFarland. While describing the system to us two of the players got up and left. However, the two of us that were still at the table carried on and had a great run. The system wasn’t overly complex, and the run fit neatly into the very short two hour slot budgeted for. It also had a unique approach to initiative allowing players to spend one of their three actions each round to go first before the monsters leading to a decision weighing if it is worth going first with two actions or waiting to have three actions is more beneficial based on the current tactical circumstances.
Next up was a game with a group I was really looking forward to play with that was very inspirational to my brother-in-law and nephew last year. I was interested in tagging in this year and getting a chance to experience the Forlorn Shores hexcrawling hype myself. I’ve been in the Discord for the past year or so, but never really finding times that worked with my work and existing gaming schedules, so getting in at the con was gonna be my first chance to crawl those hexes. The group was fantastic and had great rapport, but the session wrapped up nearly two hours early for dinner. I definitely still want to try to get in to a regular online muster at some point as I think my disappointment here was the truncated session felt like we’d just gotten into the grove when it was time to run back to the boat and wrap up.
Finally I had a fourth game scheduled on Thursday night. This was probably a mistake. This was definitely a mistake. It was another playtest of a system in the works, but I do not recall its name. It was tactically interesting and definitely has a lot of heart in it, but perhaps I was tired or reeling from the weight of the previous games this day and when midnight came around and we hadn’t wrapped up as scheduled I had to head out. I’d agreed to drive our group to Waffle House for a late night meal, and was so completely drained. By the time I got back to the hotel afterward, it was mere minutes before I was down for the count.
Fantastic Friday
Runnin’ on about six hours of sleep I started off Friday with a Barrowmaze game run by Dr. Greg Gillespie. Getting back to some OSR basics with a run at an old temple in the rundown swamp against a cult of evil druids and their guards. Efficiently run and adjudicated, I could feel my mojo returning as the game went on and the coffee kicked in. Our group emerged victorious from certain death inside the old ruins with only one casualty.
After lunch my nephew and I headed off to Kara-Tur to play in a game run by David “Zeb” Cook. For anyone familiar with my gaming history, it should come as no surprise just how influential he has been in my early gaming experiences. Getting to share a table with someone who has given me so much already at the RPG table and beyond with PC gaming contributions as well was really just an awesome and humbling experience. Definitely a session I’ll remain thankful for as long as I’ve got left in the tank.
One brief bowl of noodles hastily consumed in my hotel room later I’m shifting gears into the DCC portion of the convention and from here on out that’s pretty much what I’m here to do. Friday night I had a slot in Long Con Matt Gullett’s DCC (Umerica) tournament game and it was an absolute riot like every DCC con game I’ve ever played. Over the top action, hilarious funnel fragile characters with crazy super tech and a Murderball showdown finale to close out the tournament. The use of luck tokens which could be shared among players led to some truly epic moments such as the Peacemaker of ~50 damage in one use and a suit of delightfully overpowered power armor cruelly taken from yours truly before its time.
After the tournament wrapped up I tried to hang out some and socialize, but it was just a bit too loud and unstructured for me, so when the rest of my party came down we ended up headin’ back and calling it a night without going too late.
I’ve run out of writing time today, but hopefully I’ll remember to come back to it tomorrow and write up the final two days of the con. Saturday and Sunday were definitely both great, although in entirely different ways. Either way, let’s see if I can remember how to post these again now.