Last weekend (2/17/2012 to 2/20/2012), I attended my first Californian gaming convention (having moved here over the summer): DunDraCon 36. DunDraCon as its name suggests was originally dedicated to the Dungeons and Dragons RPG. D&D is still played there quite a bit but it also hosts a large number of other games of various types.
The experience was a lot of fun and I got to meet a number of local gamers, play some new games, and purchase some new ones.
The Good
The convention was held in the San Ramon Marriott which was nice as I was able to stay in the hotel itself. The hotel itself is nicely laid out and the rooms seemed fairly well insulated, useful when you are sleeping near gamers. I remember many a night at GenCon where my sleep was disturbed by inconsiderate people next door, playing at 3 AM in the morning.The insulation is even better because all of the official RPGs are held in their own hotel room. So rather than sharing a hall with 6 to 9 other groups and trying to hear the Game Master (GM) over the din, you have a nice room for just that game with its own bathroom to boot. The result is a much more comfortable gaming situation in terms of space and sound.
The dealer’s hall was small but had a very good selection. Given that in most conventions the vendors consist of the one of four types (game store, t-shirt seller, gaming companies, and curios) a smaller selection is fine as long as the representatives have a diversity of products for sale. As I have little interest in curios (by which I mean sellers of swords, jewelry, dragon sculptures and so forth), I was mainly interested in the game vendors of which there were several well stocked examples. I was able to pick up a couple new games: Diaspora (hard sci-fi RPG using the FATE system) and Unknown Armies (modern day occult RPG), as well as some FATE dice.
There was also the Buyer Bazaar, where gamers could sell their own goods for a nominal fee and the Mike Nebeker Memorial Freecycle Table. I found the latter rather useful. The idea here is for attendees to donate gaming materials which are then free to all comers. I was able to ensure several of my old GURPS books found a home that way.
The games I ended up playing were rather fun with interesting GMs. The best was a game I crashed Friday night called Jailbreak which used the Unknown Armies game. Unknown Armies is a system and setting I have often heard mentioned but which I had never gotten to experience. The GMs (Joshua Clark and his co-GM John Castillo) ran a very atmospheric game of escaped convicts, their hostages and a strange couple living out in the woods. Things got tense, then they got weird, and in the end there was a bloody battle with Something That Should Not Be. And in the end, the day was saved by mob hit man with a knife. Even better the GMs and some of the players live nearby.
I also played in a very fun game called Oath of Fealty which used the 7th Sea system but set in a space opera universe . Run by the experienced Larry Lynch-Freshner, the game was a bit of a homebrew, using the swashbuckling 7th Sea mechanics and combining it with a spacefaring universe of lasers, blasters, and spaceships. While I don’t think I have yet gotten the proper mindset to excel in 7th Sea, the game was fun as we sought to aid Princess Persephone to save her kidnapped classmates. The game rewards daring and risk taking which runs counter to my usual tactical bent.
The other RPGs I played were a game of World of Darkness: Innocents called Song in My Heart and a GURPS game called Wild Weird West: Something Weird This Way Comes... Both were good but not quite as fun as the others (though the GURPS game had its moments).
The Bad
All was not perfect at the con however. The directors of the convention favor long session games (8 or more hours) over shorter more manageable periods. While this might seem like a great idea, it led (at least in my case) of either being forced to play in only one game a day or losing a lot of sleep. It is just barely possible to play a game as 8AM, get out at 2 or 4 PM and then jump into another game at 6 or 8 PM. Of course you then won’t get sleep until 2AM at the earliest. I saw a great many people crashing pretty hard by Sunday.Which brings me to another complaint, attendance. While I have crashed games in the past conventions, crashing is a way of life in DunDraCon. The system for putting in for games ensures that you will get into some games but not that you will get all your games. At GenCon or other cons I've attended before, you select your game (assuming there are any slots left) and then you are done. Victory goes to the quick. That obviously isn't perfect as people slow to sign up may end up with no games available. DunDraCon lets you choose several games for a time slot in order of preference. Your chance of getting into your games depends on the slots available and how often you have gotten into game prior in the Con. In theory it is fair and fine.
My issue with how it worked out was that even though many people were not able to get into their first or second choices using the system, they were usually able to get into them by crashing. It seems some people signed up online and apparently never arrived (which aided me on Friday), others crashed for lack of sleep (which happened quite a bit at the end of the weekend), and the rest of the time I just don’t know. But every game started 15 minutes late as we waited for the scheduled gamers to show up or as often happened fail to show up. Every game I was involved in had a few crashers taking the space of people who either never turned up or turned up 2 hours late.
The Eh
Other aspects of the con failed to merit either a good or bad opinion. The food at the convention was relatively cheap and tasty if unhealthy. There was a game library that seemed well stocked if lacking in anything interesting to me at the time.I can’t really talk about the anime room, the miniatures gaming, or the card gaming as I didn't attend any of those events. But they were there and well represented.
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