PAX East: 4/6 - 4/8

[Leftahead]

I will definitely have AW to run. I own Time & Temp, but have never run it, so I may not be ready quite yet.

I'll also have Monsterhearts (we had a dry run at jenskot's the other day and really liked it), 3:16, Misspent Youth, Dungeon World, and Fiasco ready to go, I think.

[cawshis]

Cool! So how does GoD work? Do we just step up and ask for a game?

[Evilyn]

Basically yes! There will be 2 to 4 hour slots with a bunch of GMs. Early next week I'll post some more details when I get them, but we should be situated near the indie tabletop folks.

[jenskot]

Cool! So how does GoD work? Do we just step up and ask for a game?

Don't quote me on this, but I believe...

- GoD will be open 10am-Midnight Friday and Saturday.
- 10am-4pm (maybe 6pm) Sunday.
- GMs will be assigned to specific tables and specific time slots.
- Each GM will have an assortment of games they can run (3 or more).
- A host will gather players, let them know what's available, and people can jump in and out of games as desired.

[Leftahead]

Cool! So how does GoD work? Do we just step up and ask for a game?

Don't quote me on this, but I believe...

- GoD will be open 10am-Midnight Friday and Saturday.
- 10am-4pm (maybe 6pm) Sunday.
- GMs will be assigned to specific tables and specific time slots.
- Each GM will have an assortment of games they can run (3 or more).
- A host will gather players, let them know what's available, and people can jump in and out of games as desired.

The schedule I received has us officially running through 10 PM Fri/Sat and 6PM on Sunday. Not sure when they boot us out, though, so no reason not to go later if we can!

My official time slots are 10-2 all 3 days, but I expect we'll all probably be hanging around most of the hours we're open. My evenings are spoken for, so I expect to do 2 full-length game slots each day.

There are a bunch of the Western MA RPG folks who plan on attending: Vince and Meg Baker, Joshua Newman, Rob Bohl, etc, and they'll all be running their stuff on their own recognizance as well. Burning Wheel HQ should also have a healthy presence, unless I am mistaken.

[jenskot]

Yes, I believe the Burning Wheel crew and the Western MA RPG crew will be right next to each other. Marvel will also have a booth.

I'm not sure where we will be in relation to them but it should be relatively close by.

[forager23]

I'll be at Games on Demand, too: my shifts are 10-2 on Friday and Sunday, and 2-8 on Saturday. I'll have Apocalypse World, Fiasco, the new Marvel game, S/Lay w/ Me, 3:16, and Dragons at Dawn to run, along with a handful of "indie game classics" (Trollbabe, Inspectres, PTA, etc.).

It's looking like a bunch of awesome folks will be there! I'm excited!

[Evilyn]

Leaving soon! OMG!

[Evilyn]

Post PAX untotal recall:

I didn’t have the full PAX experience in many ways because I volunteered to help run things at the brand new Games on Demand presence in the tabletop hall. Maybe wandered into the expo hall a total of 1 hour, didn’t play anything.

I spent most of my time (actually almost all of it) in the tabletop hall, which was INSANE this year. Last year I recalled on Saturday night sitting at a table at 8pm in a huge, lonely, empty cold hangar with nothing to do. This year, the tabletop hall was bursting with visitors from 11am until well past midnight, if not even later. Most of hundreds of tables were full from noon until well past 10pm both late nights!

The tabletop room was completely reorganized for the better. Traffic flow was greatly improved, and the room was divided into several distinct areas (WoT, indie stuff, retailers, Magick, open gaming, board game library, information) that sucked in the attendees and kept them there.

There was far less cosplay this year, or at least from what I saw. Heard there was a competing Anime convention in town going on that probably poached a lot of them. Looks like some of the A-game ME cosplayers were back, but mostly missed them too.

Missed the Fitocracy panel/meetup, sad face. Missed out on the Bioware/ME panel…probably would have got in the room if I had got in line 6 hours earlier. No idea how it went. This year’s PAX was a sea of N7 hoodies. Bioware had a nifty room for general fandom, got a Dragon Age nightgown (XXL T-shirt) for free.

Kickstarter had a really cool “arcade” room dedicated to indie gaming projects! Looked like fun!

The classic arcade was back, awesome as always.

Working at GoD, talked a lot to gamers who never played a tabletop RPG. Probably talked to over 100+ people a day. Lots of folks looking for something outside of the D&D experience visited us. A few had no interest in playing anything but loved that we were offering “weird” games and friendly GMs willing to run them. And GoD was definitely in demand! We were overwhelmed and a little overworked. Lots of designers GMed their games, which was great.

I was too tired to go to party much at night and walking a mile or so each day to find non-gross veggie-friendly food (that area around the convention center is a food desert), helped that I brought snacks. The shuttles to the hotels were overloaded, so most of the time we walked 35 minutes to the hotel and back in the freezing Boston spring weather. Can’t say we didn’t get exercise at a gaming convention this time around.

Next year I look forward to helping out GoD, and we’ll do things differently. This crowd is very different from other tabletop conventions in that they don’t have a lot of time (2 hour games are ideal), and many have never played tabletop RPGs, but are hungry for the weirdness that are indie games.

Secret bonus highlight: Sunday afternoon, watching voiceless Jared GM via typing on a laptop a Parsley game (projected onto a huge screen) to a room full of players. Bringing the text adventure back to the live RPG that’s a sim of an 80’s text adventure.

[cawshis]

TT was completely insane. So many tables were full of people playing games all weekend. This is good! But often it was tough finding a space to play my games. And the game rental area was routinely picked over!

PAX was a blast again this year, like every year. It was fun to see nerdnyc'ers (the BW clan, Mr&Ms Felleye, jenskot, evils, bar s and many others!) and a total blast to get some time with each of them (though abzu owes me some ME3 discussion!).

Place was crazy, expo hall was nuts (Borderlands2 was the BIG big hit, but I think small company designers stole the show). Lots of games to look forward too.

Max Payne Multiplayer looks fantastic and crazy. Borderlands 2 is going to be amazing co-op play (though they made so many changes, I found the demo overwhelming). Firaxis gave a first (or second?) look at X-Com and it was like someone has been reading my wish journal...smaller squads, suppressing fire and a goddamn grappling hook - fuckyesxcom! The game will be on the top of my "where is it? why is it not released?" list of games.

Got to play Technoir RPG with the designer via Games of Demand which was awesome. I wish I had time to play out a full session, but so much to do, so little time! It's a fun game with a fun mechanic of pushing dice back and forth...very noir-ish in that players need to be willing to take a beating to get what they want. It was jarring to roll "failures" in an indie game, but it felt like it worked in a con game (whereas in a friend game, you'd do a better job of ensuring fails = fun). Jeremy is a great GM and was kind enough to sign my copy of the book.

Speaking of GoD, you guys looked CRAZY busy! So great work! I especially enjoyed the evolution of your signage as the con went on. It was awesome stepping up to the booth and having Evils throw my friend and I into a game she knew I'd love. That's a bit of Game on Demand awesomeness.

Final round Omegathon was hilariously awesome (TOAD!) as was the penis-bomb of @wilw's twitter feed. At one point in the night, I was playing 7 Wonders while watching MC Frontalot lay down beats - and behind us off-duty enforcers were group dancing to Daft Punk songs. Awesome.

Some hilarious cosplay as well. Great katamari-princesses dancing on the sky bridge above the line sunday morning, Solid Snake hiding under a massive cardboard box from an Aliens Grunt who pretended not to notice the box sliding by. Hot zombies and a few left for dead cosplayers threw down at one point. And late Friday night, there was a dude in a Link costume playing Legend of Zelda songs on his guitar. Seriously.

My only regret is that once again, I did not plan my food very well. Ate so much junk food and overindulged in so much booze and crap that my body feels like shit. I guess it's neat that since I've been eating/exercising, I know feel bad when I eat crap...so that's a step forward!

PAX East is a fantastic weekend! Will be going again next year for sure. Think I'm going to look into their suite options...a tiny kitcheonette would be awesome for removing that low quality eating problem.