Day of Games
A Day of Games
Despite the recent lull in blogging things have been pretty busy on the geeking front, not least of which was my desicion to run a small, one day RPG con a couple of months ago. The reasons for this were two fold.
- There are heaps of fantastic small print games out there that I wanted to have an oppertunity to play.
- I thought that the Wellington gaming scene would respond well to an event mid year.
So I stole an idea from New Zealand’s biggest RPG con, KapCon (which is held every January), and based my Day of Games on the Games on Demand room. The deal here is that there are a group of facilitators who each agree to run certain games that they’re really excited about and then people come, vote on which games seem cool and go play. Sounds easy right?
Well as I found out this supposidly easy concept needs (not surprisingly) more organisation that I thought it would. Choosing a date in mid-May which was roughly half way between KapCon and the one of the other main RPG events in Wellington, ConFusion which is held in August was easy. As was picking the old faithful, Turnbull House for a venue. I pimped my idea on the NZRag boards to get people to come and run games and even made fliers to go into the FLGS. I kind of forgot to set up a Facebook event until a few days before but dispite that lapse the day arrived an we had a pretty good turn out, even a guy who was from the US and travelling around NZ. After some discussion I decided to do a slightly different time table. Rather than the traditional 3 hour slot I split the day into two 4 hour slots and four 2 hour slots. This way if you wanted to play in a game that required more set up you’d still get time to play.
This was kind of where my grand idea fell down a little. I had a big white board and session times/lengths all worked out, but I felt there was too much standing around waiting and discussing what would happen next. Also a number of the GMs didn’t get to play in games that they wanted to due to having to run games. So I’ve been thinking about how to smooth out those waits and give everyone the oppertunity to play if they wanted to. So here is what I’m going to do next year, assuming there is interest:
- Get a clear list of games from each GM so other GMs can indicate what they’d also like to play in.
- Set up the whole day’s timetable to begin with so if people finish their session they know where to go next and time isn’t eaten up in the short sessions with arranging things.
In terms of my own Day of Games experience it was good. I ran an awesome game of 3: 16 for three Americans who really got into their roles as Space Marines. Then I “ran” an utterly terrible session of Capes (a game I’d never read, played in or even come across before) which I thought would be an easy supers pick game but confused me and all of the players with it’s unusual conflict mechanic. However I did really like the way characters were generated. Finally I brought out Hot War and actually got to run through game creation. This was my most satisfying game of the day and made me want to play in a multi-session game of this even more.
All in all it was a good day and the comments from others made me think that it could continue to grow in the furture. So I’m thinking that Day of Games will be around for another year yet.
Things to look forward to in ‘09
With January almost done 2009 is well under way so I thought I’d jot down a list of the things I’m looking forward to this year.
- Receiving, reading and playing Mouse Guard. An RPG of the graphic novels by David Petersen it has had a number of great reviews and as a gaming friend said to me:
“It is one of the most playable RPGs I have come across.”
- Pulling off Day of Games on May 16th. A small one day event here in Wellington with games being offered on the day and people voting for an choosing the game they feel like playing most. More info once I re-do the blog.
- As Nick mentioned in a previous post Green Ronin have announced that A Song of Ice and Fire rpg has been approved and is on it’s way to the printers. I ran through the quick-start adventure back in July’08 and really liked what they had done. The core book is due out in March so I’ll be doing a write up once I get my hands on it.
- Writing my Buffy: the Vampire Slayer RPG scenario series, The Slayer Chronicals.
- Playing in my new Buffy game (there seems to be a theme), Fall. It’s a great group of people and I think will be heaps of fun. I’ll do a write up on our first mini-session soon.
- Dollhouse starting on TV in the US.
I think that’s it for now. I’ll be back at certain points to see how these things all pan out.