Tag: washingcon

Reminder: WashingCon this weekend.

I’m going to be largely incommunicado Saturday and Sunday, and Friday I’m going to be busy throwing together the stuff for the two WashingCon games that I said that I’d run.  …Which I’m starting to wish I hadn’t volunteered for, or at least picked different game systems.  I could run In Nomine or GURPS in my sleep, after all.

Oh, well, at least I had the mother-wit to not go for overly convoluted. I have character sheets, I have dice, I have GM screens to hide behind, and I have the best advice possible for this kind of situation: “When in doubt, improvise.” After all, the goal here is not to break to my will a bunch of people I’ve never met before and probably won’t again. My job is to get a collaborative story going that people enjoy and that clocks in at just under four hours. I suppose that it’s good that it feels challenging; goodness knows I need more real-life stuff in my, erm, life.

 

I’m second-guessing my possible @WashingCon games again.

The Dragon Age RPG makes sense, given that it’s a world that I already know (having played the video games obsessively) and can easily improvise. And doing Timewatch is tempting, because I think that a convention is a perfect place to run a madcap, nigh-incoherent time-travel scenario. But now I’ve been thinking about a Day After Ragnarok dungeon crawl.  Seed: somehow the flagship Saks Fifth Avenue store survived the tsunami that wrecked the East Coast. At least parts of it did. The loot from that lost world could make the people who salvaged it rich, rich, rich.  Just mind the flooded parts. And the monsters. And the cannibals…

I can’t run three games, though. I may be too ambitious to run two. It’s a puzzler.

I may be scheduling some playtest sessions in August.

WashingCon is coming up, and it looks like I will be doing at least one game (the Dragon Age RPG), and quite possibly another (Timewatch) if I can talk myself into running myself doubly ragged. Which I may very well do, if only to get myself out of the house for the full weekend. Gotta think about it; but if I do run a couple of games I’m going to want to do an online playtest first, to make sure that it works in a four hour chunk.  I’ll remind folks about it as we get closer to September, but if you’re DC-area and want to get in on a game, well, WashingCon is also (and primarily) a highly impressive board game convention. Some of all y’all might be down with that.

Thinking of running a game at WashingCon again this year.

They seem interested enough, and I need to get out more.  As for the game; Green Ronin is a sponsor this year, and it turns out that they do the Dragon Age RPG.  I’m not committing to running a game in that, but I ordered the core book because I’ve been looking for an excuse to pick it up. But I could also run 7th Sea, Unknown Armies, or Delta Green. Or, shoot, GURPS or In Nomine. I can easily run adventures in those last two systems without any prep time at all. I will have to think about it.

All of this means, by the way, that if I do run a game for WashingCon I’m going to probably do an online playtest.

WashingCon (@washingcondc) is now selling tickets for 2017.

September 9th and 10th, over at the same Georgetown University Hotel and Conference Center.  They’re promising catering this year, which addresses what was easily the biggest problem that WashingCon had in 2016: the relative lack of open restaurants. As some of you folks may or may not remember, I ran a game there last year, and now I’m deciding whether to run one this year as well. I’m half tempted to try to get an In Nomine game going, except I don’t know if I’d get the players…

So, yeah, I give @Washingcon 10/10 for proper treatment of GMs.

I just found out something that makes me really interested in running a game at Washingcon next year, too. I wasn’t really expecting it, either, which is what made it even nicer.  All in all, I liked the way that they ran the con; the only problem I really had with it was the relative paucity of food choices, and that was something that turned out to not be entirely under their control. Certain vendors were inexplicably closed, and that was the long and the short of it.

So, hey, if you like board games and/or RPGs and you live somewhere near Dizzy City you should check Washingcon out next year.