What You Want From A Gaming Convention

Go Play Brisbane has been my baby for a long time, even when I left it in the (let me stress very) capable hands of John Reid for few years. It's always been about the play, about the fun. We've dabbled with workshops here and there, but we always return to that thing that's at the heart of a local gaming convention: playing tabletop games (new or old) with people (old friends or never met before). Special guests, seminars, workshops and the like have rarely been as popular as being able to just sit down and play.

It makes me think that what people want from these events is just play and community.

You can see this in the range of games. People want to play the new hotness. I remember Apocalypse World games taking the event one year. Last year was the GUMSHOE year, with Blades in the Dark attracting a crowd as well. But then people also want to play some old favourites too, in smaller amounts.

And people want their community. Between games, small groups huddle together and re-tell their adventures. People come and tell their stories to the registration people. Over meals and drinks, people tell their stories.

And that's what we'll keep doing because we love all that too.

Probabilities and Decision Points

One thing I've learned from Apocalypse World is that dice don't have to be complicated. It's a 2d6 system. More accurately, it's a 2d6 system with interesting results that point the players back to the fiction. When I first encountered small press games about five or six years ago, there seemed to be a trend of creating kooky rules for conflict resolution, combining dice with cards and the phase of the moon. The more esoteric, the better. Apocalypse World reminds us that the dice (and the rules in general, for that matter) should be as unobtrusive as possible.

It's little wonder, then, that I've felt the need to again streamline my rules for decision points in Siege. I've had a little fun working out the probabilities for the dice pools so that the player experience is simplified without affecting the probabilities significantly. In other words, you probably won't notice the difference between what the previous methods provided and this revised version.

Apocalypse World by The Walking Eye

I don't often listen to actual play recordings. Last week, though, I started plugging my way through the sessions of Apocalypse World recorded by The Walking Eye. I was just curious about how Apocalypse World plays out and my curiosity was rewarded with this.

Their holy water is burning and it's awesome and it's terrifying and it's bad.

I know it's possible to say this in just about every game, and say it in context, but it made so much sense right where it was. So maybe actual play recordings aren't all bad, and maybe Apocalypse World is good. I'll have to acquire it and play it to know for sure.