2019 GenCon Reflections

Alright, I'm back from GenCon, so I decided to put down some of my thoughts on the events I played in.
 

Paranoia: The Happiest Sector in Alpha Complex

This was the adventure I ran at GenCon. I greatly enjoy running Paranoia for all the chaos that it brings about. The adventure focused on players trying to stop a terrorist plot in an entertainment sector of Alpha Complex.

The enemies, it turned, out, were employees of a different entertainment sector that were tired of Friend Computer World getting regularly named "Happiest Sector in Alpha Complex," and so had set out to drive away its customers before destroying the sector altogether.

During the course of the adventure, my players destroyed two of the rides in Friend Computer World, with very little provoking from the adversaries. The sector got shut down because of the rides being blown up, and the enemies used this as an opportunity to set up their weapons. Of course, this was when the players managed to catch them and stop them, after having caused far more destruction and killed far more people themselves.

Monster of the Week: Weekend at Winsome

I've been looking into a lot of Powered by the Apocalypse games lately (more on that in an upcoming post), so I was happy to get to try out two different PBTA games at GenCon.

Weekend at Winsome had us investigating attacks in a small town that seemed like they might have been caused by a large wolf. It wasn't a wolf. It wasn't a werewolf either.

Our team had a unique collection of characters, and I felt like our character types really did have an impact in how the adventure played out. The adventure was slow at a couple points, but all-in-all pretty good.

Masks: Caped Extravaganza

Masks was our other PBTA game of the convention. Here we got to play as teenage superheroes that were starting to gain recognition in the city.

I liked the variety of character types. The mechanics and moves seemed like they were fun and could keep things moving well.

The GM was very nice, and she tried to give us each an opportunity to explore our characters and experience different events based on what our characters wanted to do.

However, the adventure itself was a little bit...lacking. There was really only one encounter of the whole thing that was at all conflict-based, and that was a bit repetitive. I'm not sure what things looked like behind the GM screen as to if there was something we had to do to beat the boss or if we had to rip up his equipment a certain number of times, or if she just ended it after we each had taken a couple turns.

I think that because the adventure was so limited, there were times when the GM floundered a little bit because she was trying to draw things out. I think this took away from the game a little, and came off as a bit indecisive/uncertain.

Don't get me wrong, I greatly enjoyed playing this game, but I would say that based on the adventure itself and its execution, this was probably my least favorite of the games I played in at GenCon

Over The Edge: Under Broken Wings

Masks and Monster of the Week both provided a large number of character options with a lot of customization within each of those choices. Neither of these was as open-ended as the character options of Over The Edge, where the only limitation really is just one's imagination. This allowed for an incredibly unique team that included a pathological liar conman (my character), a short bodyguard, a monster hunter, and a rock bassoonist.

I think that this was the funnest adventure that I played at GenCon. The adventure was a little more gruesome/horror-ish than I tend to enjoy, but there were a lot of wacky bits that made the whole thing a lot more fun. The GM was very adaptable and did a good job responding to the crazy things that we, as players threw at him.

The setting of Over the Edge seems interesting and like something I'd be interested in exploring in more detail in the future.

The system itself didn't seem all that special, and I don't think there's anything it did that wouldn't have been handled as well or better by something like The Puddle. (Not that it did these things poorly, just that the system didn't really stick out to me as something remarkable.)

Call to Adventure: Board Game Demo

I almost managed to get out of GenCon without buying a board game this year. There were several that had caught my eye, but I never have as much time to play board games as I'd like, so I didn't want to spend a lot of money on something to just have it sit on my shelf.

Sunday, the last day of the convention, we'd gone back and looked at the exhibit hall and seen everything we wanted to see. We were going to grab a quick lunch at the food trucks and then head home.

We just happened to choose a table with this guy who had bought the game Call to Adventure, and who seemed incredibly excited about it. His explaination of the game spread his excitement to us, so me and one other from my group went to check out the game in the exhibit hall. We sat down and enjoyed a quick demo.

A lot of games that I enjoy (Betrayal at the House on the Hill, Untold, Secrets of the Lost Tomb, etc) are really almost more a mechanical justification to indulge in stories. Call to Adventure seems like almost the reverse of this. 

With Untold especially and Betrayal to a lesser extent, the mechanics of the game don't really matter as much to me as whatever the story/events of the game are that time through. The mechanics are there as an excuse to tell whatever the story is.

Call to Adventure uses a lot of storytelling-type elements, but they are being used instead to justify the mechanics of a board/card game. In Call to Adventure, players are given a character type and background as well as a secret destiny/goal for their character to get bonus points at the end of the game. Gameplay extends over three phases, or acts, ranging from a character's humble origins through their growth as a hero or antihero to their climactic finale. In each phase, players gain cards representing different events in the hero's journey but mechanically granting additional resources to gain more cards. When one player manages to get their hero to the end of Act 3, gameplay ends and players all tally up their points (from cards, experience, and other things). Whoever has the most points wins.

It's a pretty fun game, and it's notably playable with 1-4 players and only runs 30 min to an hour, which makes it easier to play than some other games I have which require more time or players.

Cooperative Story-based Board Games and My Contradictory Nature

My favorite board game is Betrayal at the House on the Hill. I accept that it is not the best board game, it is still my favorite. Even though I'm not normally a fan of horror.

Betrayal Explanation

If you're not familiar with the game, I'll give a short explanation. In Betrayal, players are exploring an old mansion. The mansion is revealed room by room as room tiles are drawn from a deck and placed down to form the places the players are exploring. Different rooms may trigger varying frightening events or reward the players with items.


Partway through the game, an event will happen which will trigger the second phase, the haunt. When the haunt is triggered, players look at a chart to determine, based on the variables that started the haunt, what adventure they will be playing. There are 50 different scenarios (100 with the new expansion) that can occur. Usually, one of the players (often the one who triggered the haunt), will be the "traitor," and will take a role opposing the other players from that point forward. Depending on the situation, the traitor might be a vampire, or a madman trying to blow up the house, or a cultist bringing ghosts up from the dead, or many other things. Each scenario is unique, with unique objectives for the traitor and the players.

Why I like Betrayal

I like stories. They're some of my favorite things. Betrayal provides some of the fun of being able to experience an adventure together with friends that roleplaying games bring (with less depth, of course), without requiring someone to spend a lot of time prepping an adventure to GM.


I like exploring the house and seeing it form completely differently each time I play. I like all the different scenarios allowing me to get a new story/scenario each time I play.


Also, your characters have stats that can improve or be lowered throughout the game, so I like the RPG-like mechanic of being able to work to improve my character as I go along.

Some of it's Problems

I think some of the "best" board games are based more on skill than on luck. While Betrayal does offer the players some-possibly even many-choices, it is certainly more luck than skill. While the high level of randomness in room tiles, event cards, item cards, omen cards, and the adventure itself makes the game more interesting, it also makes the game less skill based. Things happen to the characters and they don't necessarily have much choice in it. It's easy to draw an event card that screws up everything for your character even if you've made all the right choices. You may have been building up your Might and Speed, and the haunt, when it's revealed, might be based on Intellect and Sanity, making your efforts prove to be in vain.


For me, I'm less concerned with being control when playing Betrayal. I'm not playing it for it to be a game of skill, so the randomness doesn't bother me so much. But, I know that for some people it does, and I know that isn't as good of a "game" because of it.


The other problem comes with the role of the traitor. The players have no control over who becomes the traitor, but once someone does, everyone else is against them. For some players, this is not an enjoyable experience. They feel like everyone else is ganging up on them, and they don't like being the enemy in something that is cooperative for everyone else.


I am among those who like being the traitor, so this experience doesn't bother me. However, I know people who have been alienated from the game from becoming the traitor on their first play.

Lately, I've been Looking for a Board Game that May not Exist.

I've been thinking about board games, and I've had a yearning for something that I'm not sure exists. Some of this comes from wanting a game that has elements of Betrayal, but with certain other distinctions.


2-6 Players
Betrayal at the House on the Hill is 3-6 players. Munchkin is 3-6 players. Vast is 1-5 players, but it definitely seems less fun with 1 or 2 players than when there are more.


A lot of the time I would like to play a board game is during time when my wife and I are hanging out. I want something that I can play with her and have a good time playing, but that we could also share with other friends of ours.


Cooperative
I like games where I get to work with people. Going along with the next point, I feel like having the players on the same team allows for better story/adventure potential. While I do enjoy games where I put my wit against that of other players, my current fixation is more focused on something that can be done together.


Story/Adventure
I'm looking for something that has something of a story/adventure to it. I want to be playing characters with a goal to overcome something, like the varying scenarios in Betrayal. I like the idea of something that feels like it has a plot arc to it-a beginning, middle, and end, where more is revealed as the story goes along.


Lots of Stories
Some games are designed around one specific story. In Vast, each of the characters has a motivation or reason that they are in the Cave, and an individual objective to carry out as their adventure/story. But these motivations are the same every single game. The story is an excuse to have these things with different mechanics to be acting against each other, rather than the other way around.


Betrayal has 50-100 stories. Even playing the same scenarios more than once, the changed positioning of rooms and other important things adds some interest (and the number of scenarios means that at least it's unlikely to play the same scenario twice close together.)


Optional: Character Advancement
I like things where my character advances, what can I say?


"It sounds like you want a tabletop RPG..."


Yes, you're very smart.


BUT the distinctions between what I want and a tabletop RPG are:

• I want it to be playable with two players. (I want it to be playable with more too, but I want it to be able to go down to two)
• I don't want either of the players to have to come up with the story
• I want all the players to be able to work on a team as the adventurers/heroes. I do not want any to need to play the villain or to GM the scenario.
• I want it to have a lot of replayability with varying stories/adventures/objectives for the players.
• I want a complete story/game to be playable in one sitting (probably about an hour would be ideal, but I imagine that what I want would probably come out closer to 2).

"Do you know about...?"
While I do want suggestions, if any of you know of a solution that I am not aware of, here are some things I have thought about or looked into, and why I don't think they fit what I want.

• Betrayal at the House on the Hill-Need 3 players, one player ends up not being cooperative.
• Munchkin-Need 3 players, all players competitive
• Vast-All players competitive
• Order of the Stick-While I haven't played this game, it seems like despite having a degree of randomness to the dungeon, the story itself is always the same.
• D&D games like Castle Ravenloft-I haven't played these either, largely because the price is somewhat prohibitive for something I'm not sure I'll enjoy; However, my understanding is that they a) take forever and b) don't have a lot of replayability.

My Solution
For a while, I had been thinking of a game like Betrayal, but heist-themed. Instead of using Might, Speed, Sanity, and Intellect of Betrayal, I'd been thinking of taking Leverage's key focuses of Hacker (for tech stuff), Hitter (for fighting), Grifter (for talking), and Thief (for things like lockpicking or pickpocketing). Players would spend the exploration phase scoping out the location of their heist (built with individual tiles), and eventually the actual heist would begin and they would have objectives to complete within the overall location.


It seemed cool. If I was confident in my ability to get around the copyright issues of deliberately ripping off both a popular board game and a television franchise, I might even look at developing it more.


But, here comes a bigger obstacle with me trying to fill my void myself-if I wrote out 50 or so scenarios for this game, I would be familiar with all of them. There would be no discovery for me to play through them. No real surprise or gain. So it's a lot of work attempting to put in front of myself something I'd enjoy to lose a large part of the enjoyment factor.


So, recently, I was thinking of a new plan:


Something with a lot more moving parts. A game that mixes and matches villains, plots, storylines, etc into varied and unique combinations such that each part of the story/adventure is randomized along the way, providing for the full stories/scenarios/adventures to be different based on the combinations. With this, even though I would be familiar with all of the moving parts, I would be able to be surprised by the combinations.


I'd think of potentially having the setting itself discovered with hexagonal tiles-like a hexcrawl.


I like this idea a lot, and I'd like to spend some time developing it.


However...
Tomorrow I'm starting at the beginning of the drafts of Episodes 104 and 105 of Heroism and Other Lies. I'm hoping to get The Wonder Vault Heist out later this week. I'm working on the final edits to Episode 101. I'll soon be running some RPGs with my regular group that-while I was thinking I had premade adventures to run-I've realized I'll need to do a fair bit of work preparing. I'm working on a one shot to test out my system in early December. Assuming that works out, I'll be going on to trying to start a campaign with my system probably in January. And then there's actually developing system/character options/etc for my system. And I have no idea when I'm going to work on Looking Glass Moon.


So, what I'm saying is...I don't really have the time to devote to making a board game right now, even if I *really* want to.


So, I'll keep the idea here and in my back pocket, to work on maybe on the side or when I get more time.


What are your thoughts on my idea? Is it a game you'd be interested in playing? Do you know of any existing games that might fit what I'm looking for?