Worldcon day 5, Gen Con day 3
Aug. 2nd, 2020 12:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petrea_mitchellThis was the big gaming day. First up was a game of DungeonQuest, a boardgame from 1985. When I was paging through the event listings for Gen Con, the fact that it was from 1985 caught my eye. I pointed it out the SO, who immediately looked it up on BoardGameGeek, found a bunch of reviews talking about how this game usually ends in death for all characters, and started doing dramatic readings of the especially entertaining ones. Which convinced me that I absolutely needed to experience this game for myself.
DungeonQuest is a ton of fun if your sense of fun is sufficiently warped, because yes, your character is almost certainly going to die, and the suspense is more about how interesting their death will be. There are a lot of options for surprise permadeath in this game, including: monsters that only some characters are equipped to handle, traps, dead ends, monsters that no characters are really equipped to handle, and the Doomshadow, which is what got me. It follows you around, forcing you to roll a d12 every turn, and if you ever roll a 1, that's it.
The GM remarked that he has run this game several times for cons now, and I was the first player to make it as far as the big treasure chamber at the center of the board. Alas, I did not make it back out again. The person who did win got stuck near the outer wall with a jammed door, then decided to stay near the wall, frantically searching for any treasure at all, finally finding some on the next-to-last turn and then teleporting out just in time.
The GM ran the entire thing with a camera pointed at a physical copy of the board and players telling him what moves we wanted to make, and rolling dice on Discord. This worked out much better than I thought it would.
Then it was time for the Pathfinder Society multi-table special kicking off season 2. I'll leave my thoughts about the scenario itself for the next adventure log, but I will note here that it ended an hour early, which I saw a couple Gen Con veterans attributing to the fact that everyone could actually hear each other. One big advantage for online play there over packing everyone into a ballroom or two.
Pie of the day: a second roast lamb one. Soda of the day: Root beer, the last different flavor to try. A rather disappointing one, too much sweetness and not enough rooty taste.
The early end of the PFS game freed me up to see "The History of the Book", which is my new favorite talk from Worldcon. If anyone reading this still has access to the option to rewatch panels, definitely catch this one. Lots of information that was new to me, the most shocking part being that when you see a parchment-era book being destroyed in a TV show, it's too expensive to make replica ones, so that is an actual historical artifact being destroyed.
I later tuned in to "In Space No One Can See You Hide the Evidence: Crimes in Space", but also needed to make dinner during that hour, so I was only able to listen with half an ear and didn't pick up much from it.
The last panel of Worldcon for me was, appropriately, "Virtual Conventions and Conferences", which revealed a disaster that nearly halted Worldcon before it started. No, not the virus, an error on Zoom's part. Worldcon got a package deal that was supposed to be in effect for a two-week period that included the convention dates. It was set up on July 12, and someone at Zoom entered the 12th as the first day, causing all the webinar rooms to vanish the day before the start of the con. It took nine hours to get it straightened out because Zoom's tech support only operates on Pacific time.
A lot of information was shared and compared about the specific platforms that various cons have used over the last few months. I would have liked to see some discussion about how easy it is now for people to run coattail events, but it wound up focusing on mostly technology.
That was not quite it for Worldcon, though...
DungeonQuest is a ton of fun if your sense of fun is sufficiently warped, because yes, your character is almost certainly going to die, and the suspense is more about how interesting their death will be. There are a lot of options for surprise permadeath in this game, including: monsters that only some characters are equipped to handle, traps, dead ends, monsters that no characters are really equipped to handle, and the Doomshadow, which is what got me. It follows you around, forcing you to roll a d12 every turn, and if you ever roll a 1, that's it.
The GM remarked that he has run this game several times for cons now, and I was the first player to make it as far as the big treasure chamber at the center of the board. Alas, I did not make it back out again. The person who did win got stuck near the outer wall with a jammed door, then decided to stay near the wall, frantically searching for any treasure at all, finally finding some on the next-to-last turn and then teleporting out just in time.
The GM ran the entire thing with a camera pointed at a physical copy of the board and players telling him what moves we wanted to make, and rolling dice on Discord. This worked out much better than I thought it would.
Then it was time for the Pathfinder Society multi-table special kicking off season 2. I'll leave my thoughts about the scenario itself for the next adventure log, but I will note here that it ended an hour early, which I saw a couple Gen Con veterans attributing to the fact that everyone could actually hear each other. One big advantage for online play there over packing everyone into a ballroom or two.
Pie of the day: a second roast lamb one. Soda of the day: Root beer, the last different flavor to try. A rather disappointing one, too much sweetness and not enough rooty taste.
The early end of the PFS game freed me up to see "The History of the Book", which is my new favorite talk from Worldcon. If anyone reading this still has access to the option to rewatch panels, definitely catch this one. Lots of information that was new to me, the most shocking part being that when you see a parchment-era book being destroyed in a TV show, it's too expensive to make replica ones, so that is an actual historical artifact being destroyed.
I later tuned in to "In Space No One Can See You Hide the Evidence: Crimes in Space", but also needed to make dinner during that hour, so I was only able to listen with half an ear and didn't pick up much from it.
The last panel of Worldcon for me was, appropriately, "Virtual Conventions and Conferences", which revealed a disaster that nearly halted Worldcon before it started. No, not the virus, an error on Zoom's part. Worldcon got a package deal that was supposed to be in effect for a two-week period that included the convention dates. It was set up on July 12, and someone at Zoom entered the 12th as the first day, causing all the webinar rooms to vanish the day before the start of the con. It took nine hours to get it straightened out because Zoom's tech support only operates on Pacific time.
A lot of information was shared and compared about the specific platforms that various cons have used over the last few months. I would have liked to see some discussion about how easy it is now for people to run coattail events, but it wound up focusing on mostly technology.
That was not quite it for Worldcon, though...
