Another SydCon has come and gone, and a lot of fun was had by all. Or at least by me.
I played three games this convention:
New X-Men – Marvel Heroic Roleplay
A Fist Full of Ghost Rock – Deadlands Reloaded
Lights Out – Paranoia
New X-Men was fun, it was my second time playing this system and I’m starting to like it. the dice pool system is quite intuitive, although it did get quite bogged down when the big combats started. the story was quite good, with the main x-men being captured and the younger members having to free them. although i was a bit disappointed that we didn’t get to play the big name characters. we managed devised a truly horrible punishment for Sebastien Shaw by paralyzing him and forcing him to mentally do his taxes (without using the number 7), while we dealt with some weird clones of combined X-Men. my only complaint about the game was that our GM was quite uptight, i don’t think he was used running convention games and needed to chill out a bit. he was definitely put out when the players started to go running in different directions doing wacky silly stuff like con players normally do, and a Con GM needs to be okay with that.
The second game was Deadlands Reloaded. I’d picked up the explorers edition of this a while back but never got around to playing it, and it was a ridiculous amount of fun. it could almost work as a straight western if you wanted it to , but the wackiness did come around and it lends itself well to a convention game. players like to do big ridiculous things in con games and there was plenty of opportunity to do so.
Paranoia was… Paranoia. Like those old TV adverts for The Matrix, you cannot be told what Paranoia is, you have to experience it for yourself. The really stand out thing about this game was that there was nowhere near enough death! not a single player used all their clones. i think the GM was trying to run a more straight and serious version, that i think left a few people disappointed. Mel particularly wanted to play, as she is normally the one running Paranoia, and ended up being disappointed when her every attempt to get her character killed was thwarted by the GM.
the highlight of the con was running Star Wars with Mel. We decided to break from the mold of her last few Star Wars games and put players right in the middle of the original movie, playing the main characters. hilarity ensues. We hadn’t tried to co-GM before, and it worked out really well. Mel took all the scripted stuff and ran combat, while i did all the Improvised storyline when the players went off the script, and most of the Talking NPCs (Mel wanted to do Vader 🙂 )
we were really glad how willing people were to go off script and try their own thing. Darth Vader was kill several times, most often by capitol ship weaponry, and Yoda was brought in very early in one game. the highlight was probably Luke going to the dark side, but the other players had already sabotaged the Death Star’s hyperdrive so it exploded with Luke and Vader onboard.
so there goes another Con, now the waiting game begins…
Never Stop Gaming
Steve