RPG A Day 2015 - Day Nineteen

Favourite Supers RPG...

As I've said previously on this blog I've never felt that Superhero RPGs have really worked. Especially confused by this given the episodic nature of Superhero comic books.

If I had to choose one though? It'd probably be Golden Heroes or Savage Worlds : Necessary Evil.

Golden Heroes was the first Superhero RPG I played.  Published by Games Workshop back in the days before Warhammer existed they produced / printed RPGs and this was one of their own.

The game has a new following under the name of Squadron UK.

Savage Worlds : Necessary Evil is their superhero setting where the villains save the world from an alien invasion after the heroes are all killed.  I've never actually played in that setting, instead I've used the rules to run a number of one shot games.

An honourable mention has to go to the Brave New World RPG written by +Matt Forbeck I love the setting and the books are great to read. I just haven't got around to running it yet...

Ask me again in a couple of years and it might be Sentinels Of The Multiverse RPG.  I don't count Atomic Robo as a Superhero RPG as it's really more espionage with gadgets, power and weirdness than it is Superhero.

Atomic Robo RPG At Gen Con!

So as you may have gathered from previous posts I'm a bit of an Atomic Robo fanboy.

Perhaps you can imagine my fanboyness reaching exponential levels when +Liz Mackie and I played in a game of Atomic Robo run by +Mike Olson who only went and wrote the game!

Ok so I think I actually played it kinda cool and didn't have any fanboy moments but I'll let others judge me on that!

So the game - "Bring Me The Head Of Doctor Dinosaur" had the description of "Twelve years ago, a lunatic calling himself Dr. Dinosaur murdered everyone you know. And to make matters worse, he's your brother. Majestic 12 wants to study him. Tesladyne wants to bring him to justice. But you? You just want revenge."

I played Fang - An almost human with lizard abilities and the character sheet is below.

Our mission was simple enough and that was to find and kill Doctor Dinosaur.
This obviously wasn't that easy to achieve but along the way we encountered Robo, Jenkins, Majestic 12 and many other characters from the comic books which really helped to bring it to life. My companions in the game were
Ghost - A Lemur "ninja" with a thing for knives. Played by +Liz Mackie
Tank - A bipedal Triceratops who hit REALLY HARD.
Professor - An octopus who was supremely intelligent especially in relation to Chaos Theory.

Needless to say we managed to catch the crazy one and managed to put him in an early grave.

Afterwards Mike signed both Liz and I's copies of the game and we had a good chat about stuff.  Liz and Mike are looking to synchronise schedules to try and get something recorded for +NearlyEnoughDice too which would be awesome.

Funniest out of game moment was when Mike realised who we were - "Hey, wait you're David Wright!" and the girl next to me (name forgotten apologies but you were playing The Professor) turned and asked if I was famous.  I politely said No and explained how I'd got in touch with Mike prior to the convention.

Lots of fun had and now I need to start thinking about running it...

Gen Con - My Itinerary (The Friday)

Before I continue with the perfect guide to stalking me at Gen Con I need to reflect back on my post for the Wednesday.

One of the events that I planned to attend has been cancelled - Every School Should Have a Games Club.  This made me sad as I was really looking forward to learning stuff in this one around the overall promotion of the hobby.  The guy who was running isn't running any other seminars so unfortunately this looks like he's been unable to make it hence the cancellation.  These things happen and given the likely overlap with a couple of other seminars I should get plenty of content for the brain and blog.

So, Friday!  What excitement awaits me?

Gaming for Good: An Insider's Guide to Playing Games for Charity - Should be fairly clear why I want to go to this, especially if you've been reading this blog for a while...  I think this should also touch on ways in which to promote the benefits of what is a very social hobby.

Defiance in Phlan - It's D&D! (Ok so I did that last time...) Yep this is the likely first slot of D&D 5th Edition that I'll play unless I take part in the Thursday 11pm slot.

Bring Me The Head Of Dr Dinosaur - It's Atomic Robo! Run by game creator +Mike Olson! Plus +Liz Mackie is playing in this game too!

Sentinels Of The Multiverse : A Storyline Game - So this is interesting.  3 back to back games of SotM where the characters / villains are determined by a common story.  Very cool idea and brings another layer of roleplaying to one of my favourite games.  Plus +Greg Barr is playing in this one!

The last event on the Friday is more of a walk-in experience.

Dungeons & Dragons: Tyranny Of Dragons Launch Party - This is an all day event with the real focus from 7pm to 11pm. I'm in the SotM from 6pm to 9pm so will miss some of this but as I say it's more of a walk-in experience rather than something you sit down to participate in after all it's taking place outside of the Convention Centre on Georgia Street. The real buzz for 5th Edition I think will be on the Saturday night but that's for the next post...

I also intend to use the timegaps I have on the Friday (not many but some) to browse a bit more and demo some games.  I've tried to be careful and not block my diary out completely (as hard as that can be to avoid) as I want to balance events with experiencing the con.  Right now I think my schedule is fine but I fully expect that might change!!!

Gen Con 2014 - Event Booking

Given the experience of booking accommodation that we had for Gen Con I felt I should do one on the Event Booking.

This was a multi step process -

What To Do?

The event catalogue is a monstrous spreadsheet (that could do with some data refinement but that's me being picky) with at this time almost 10,000 events in it.

This was released on the 9th May and I spent something in the region of 14 hours looking at it over the first week, if not more...  actually I think it was more but I'm going to go with 14 hours...

14 hours?!?!  What's the problem?

Well... as you'll be aware from previous Gen Con posts one of my motivations to go is to play / buy / experience Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition but from reviewing the event catalogue there are a LOT of other things I wanted to do to (unsurprisingly!).

Wednesday wise there are a whole host Trade Related events.  Some are specifically aimed at retailers but others are aimed at other aspects of the trade business.  Now normally this wouldn't be open to non-Trade people but thanks to the wizardry of the internet I have been granted Press access which is awesome!

Thursday through to Sunday there were too many options.  TOO MANY!!!  However I managed to narrow it down to around 30 events that I would be putting on my wish list.

Wish List?

Oh yeah, the system for getting into games involves the submission of a wish list at a specific time and then waiting for the website to come and tell you what you actually got.

Sounds fairly straight forward but when there are TOO MANY things to choose from it becomes very difficult to shorten that list and then assign a priority to events.

To help with this I arranged to meet up with my partners in Gen Con and we went through the event list.  This was additionally supported by the excellent fan website http://gencon.eventdb.us/ which was regularly updated every 6 hours to reflect changes in the catalogue.

Submitting Wish List!

This was the bit where I think things conspired against me...

Wish Lists were to be submitted at 5pm UK Time on Sunday 18th May.
I was co-running the 2nd East Neuk Tabletop Games meetup from 2pm to 5pm that same day.
Given the problems with the hotel system I expected the web access to be a nightmare.
I was reliant upon the pub across from the ENT venue to have a decent internet speed.

Ultimately at 4:45 I left ENT to head for the pub.
At 5:00 (and maybe 1 second) I clicked SUBMIT!
The planets must've been aligned or something as I (and +Greg Barr as I was submitting his at the same time) got pretty much the priority events that we wanted.
Given that they're expecting upwards of 50,000 attendees this year I find it amazing that the website didn't crash.  Indeed it didn't even seem to get slow.

Huge praise for the Gen Con web team on that front!

Since then there's been some tweaking of the event list by the team but everything seemed to be settled.

So that's that then?

Well no, more events have been uploaded since the initial launch and indeed tonight (8th June) had another 1,000+ events being listed and I've stayed up late (I get up for work at 5:15am) to see what new games are listed.  There were a couple of things I knew would be listed but there was only 1 sure fire event I really wanted to make sure I got in to.

Bring Me the Head of Dr. Dinosaur - An Atomic Robo RPG event run by Mike Olson (who created the RPG).

And I GOT IN!  Woohoo! For Science!

Atomic Robo RPG!!!!!

I HAVE IT!

-ahem- I have it in PDF that is as the printed version isn't out til June but I decided to be spontaneous and make sure I have it sooner than later by pre-ordering it via Leisure Games in London.

So why do I have the PDF now?  Intelligent publisher / retailer relationships.

A number of years ago a service called Bits & Mortar was set up to enable stores to provide PDF copies of RPGs to customers when they pre-ordered (or indeed bought) the physical product.  To me this is a no brainer service for a retailer to embrace as simply put IT COSTS NOTHING and PROVIDES EXTRA VALUE TO THE CONSUMER.

Sorry for the CAPS but I'm feeling both ranty and excited right now...

Anyway!  I have the Atomic Robo RPG!!!!! Time to read!