Concentric 2024

[contrarianarchon]

So, I went to concentric, and then I promised a sufficiently large number of people information about what it was like and I did enough things that I feel like making a blog post on a blog I haven't posted on in two years is the right decision. This blog will have three parts: A summary of all the things I did, a very detailed breakdown of that one 20th level D&D 3.5 oneshot, and finally some rough thoughts about the sort of physical-reality TTRPG community I found here.

So first things first, what things did I do? Go play oneshots, mostly, with some exceptions. Concentric is a board-game con first and a TTRPG con second (TTRPG people were outnumbered 5-10 to one by people playing boardgames; there weren't any trading card or wargame people though, presumably because they have their own perfectly good spaces.). The vast majority of the games on offer were D&D or technically-not-D&D. (I can't remember the exact number and Warhorn doesn't let you view history for games you weren't in, but I'm pretty sure it's something like "40% 5E D&D, 35% other editions of D&D, 20% OSR systems which are technically not D&D but which are D&D in spirit. 5% things which are not OSR or D&D but which are otherwise still D&D-natured (e.g. "Dungeon Kids"), 0% things which are not D&D-natured.") Several people spoke about their desire to play things which are not D&D but there was a clear coordination failure here.

(What OSR games were people playing? Old School Essentials, mostly, which hardly counts, and beyond that, something which the GM just described as "Castlevania", something whose name was something like "legends in the mist" and while it wasn't played, multiple people talked about how much they liked Shadowdark.)

My actual schedule:
Friday Evening: Con opening. No game scheduled (There were a bunch of coordination failures here I'll gloss over). Instead, I wandered around failing to noticed anyone I knew and eventually spent much of the evening in a play-test of a star-trek-pastiche asymmetric 4x deckbuilder boardgame, which was neat except for how the victory conditions were fundamentally flawed (Specifically, to my eye, in the vast majority of situations the game comes down to the shared victory of a three-player coalition, or the loss of a two-player coalition to a different two-player coalition. Note that these aren't flexible coalitions; the rules mandate which factions can coalition with which other ones so if you're sitting down as the legally-not-klingons your only possible victory condition is to convince the legally-not-ferengi player that he has better odds allying with you than with the two other players). Had fun, won't be keeping an eye on this game.

Saturday Morning: Tomb of Horrors! Specifically, this was a watered-down classic Tomb of Horrors run in OD&Dish. There were a lot of players new to D&D somewhy? The specific watering-down was that nearly every instance of "you die" in the original dungeon was replaced with "you take 1d6 damage". This was a good rate of damage relative to rate of things which inflicted it for our 7thish level party. We got a decent way in but ran out of time. I haven't actually played or read Tomb of Horrors before this, and it was interesting. I think it was a pretty good instance of a trap dungeon, I see where the classics come from, but it just ... had so many secret doors. I guess the point of the secret doors is to demand that you actually physically touch and explore the space in character rather than just ghosting through without touching anything. But they were tedious and easy to lock yourself out of having explored a space, even with the GM running more-generous-than-raw secret door finding rules. (one check per room in which there is obviously a secret door, rather than one check per 5ft space investigated). Bring your 10ft pole, and also I told you so for everyone who mocked me for crawling through a tunnel with a conspicuous poisoned arrow dispensing mechanism who got shot with a poison arrow.

Saturday Afternoon: The 20th level 3.5 game. I will analyse this in detail, but it has solidly convinced me that I and people in general are right about the general problems with 3.x/pathfinder has when people don't respond to it in the various good ways that all my online friends have. 3.5 has too many skills; even a dedicated skill monkey was missing essential interaction skills by accident. The fighter and the rogue only matter to give the GM something to melee attack when he's softballing us. 3.5 Delanda Est; if you want to know more, let me tell you more about Fallen Tower. I enjoyed being a wizard a lot (like so much), and I enjoyed the format as a con game (bring endgame characters to a merciless* encounter with the endboss of someone's campaign) but this was not redemptive of the mechanical flaws inherent to 3.5.

*The encounter gave me a lot of cognitive dissonance that reminds me of myself running 3.5 in 2018. "I am the GM and I love the rules so I'm making a ruthlessly optimised boss fight, but also I need to deliberately misplay it a bit because otherwise it'd partywipe"

Sunday Morning: Got there late because I didn't have a oneshot played, wandered around seeing the sights. Played a small fanmade pokemon cardgame with a friend I ran into. Bought some books for my dad. Etc.

Sunday Afternoon: Old School Essentials oneshot - GM was running a "sampler" type oneshot of his home game which he'd clearly put a lot of effort into worldbuilding-wise and also presumably in other respects. Collection of adventurers in town to hunt down falling meteors of chaos-energy. Like a collection of dumbasses, we collectively made PCs who couldn't actually use chaos-energy-metal weapons despite them being the main form of magic item in the region (see: fame for meteors of the stuff). This was a completely unforced error on our parts (I for example, just picked the patron which best fitted with my character concept without thinking about this). We rescued some slaves, the guy sitting next to me made some very uncomfortable jokes about the slavers "enjoying the spoils of war" and then we collectively TPKd in a completely unforced fight with some ghouls who were sitting on the meteor we wanted. Ghouls are fucking nasty, especially when they have numerical superiority, never forget that. We were a terrible party with regard to decision making and I'm pretty glad we got what we deserved for our mistakes; conventions and oneshots are a good time for it.
 

So. 3.5 20th level oneshot battle time.

The premise of this fight is "there's an 41HD advanced white ancient wyrm threatening all civilization, so all civilization has got together a party of level 20 adventurers supplemented by the resources the local states feel like shuffling in their direction to threaten him instead." The GM has made use of some wastefully worded wishes to give us diagetic knowledge of the chosen battlefield and circumstances of the fight, but not the dragon's build (but he's def a 9th-circle sorcerer with a full build and WBL and so on).

I want to be clear, for posterity, that I am reasonably sure the GM was not familiar with any online thinking about D&D 3.5, and if he was, it didn't show. He also wasn't online in general; I kept using gaming terminology like "AOE" or "proc" that he wasn't familiar with. He's just a guy who has been running D&D 3.5 since it was the current edition because he didn't want to switch.

On the PC side, the dramatis personae are as follows:

Me: Running a fairly optimised abjurer wizard (strictly, a wizard 3/master specialist 10/abjurant champion 4/archmage 3, many thanks to nandwich for being a sounding board for this) . My spell list and buff stack are bad, however, because I wasn't going to spend more than twice the duration of the oneshot on chargen and I've never actually played such a wizard before. I mutilated Rozmar's excellent 3.fallen tower charsheet for this ( https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zwpEulB6lej7-1E7NJjkZGQuP797nYsnlSkoYMHqJf4/edit?gid=2064837375#gid=2064837375 ) (BTW Rozmar the GM seemed nontrivially interested in a 3.5 version of your sheet as a substitute for keeping characters on roll20, congratulations)

Also Me: He said we probably needed another caster and dropped one of his warmage pregens on me? It was not a good build, but it was a warmage 15/fatespinner 5. I kept forgetting I was also controlling this PC.

The GM's Brother: Running a pregen wizard as a substitute for his actual wizard PC in the GM's actual campaign. The pregen wizard didn't come with spells known or spells prepared, which I think means it's not in any meaningful way a pregen, given the complexity load of those things in 3.5. No wonder we had no cleric, etc.

The GM's coworker: Did not much want to be here (likes OSR and other rules-light systems.) Playing a fighter/paladin pregen. Has none of the skills or mechanical options which would make this not as bad as it sounds. Has a 10ft pole and fatalistic attitude. Does at least have dragon bane weapons.

A final person: Running an attempt to rebuild her 5e home-game rogue in 3.5. Honestly, I liked her build a lot give or take the thing where she did skill shopping or item shopping without an understanding of the "meta" for those things, it was basically built around dealing ability damage in sneak attacks. She wasn't confident piloting it, but it was a oneshot and she was new to the system, and the GM kept being unhelpful about what exactly incorporeality did for her as a buff, so she didn't contribute much, but not for lack of trying. Lots of respect to her for this.

I want to be clear, that I was the only person in the party with a cloak of resistance (well, actually I didn't have one either, because superior resistance is a 24-hour 6th-circle abjuration which is strictly better and non-stacking with owning one, so I was running an item to give us immunity to dragonfear in my shoulders slot instead, which is a shame because the GM forgot dragonfear was a thing. Also, the GM gave us "this appeared sort of in a sourcebook once so it's not homebrew I don't do homebrew" items for +10 to saving throw DCs with specific spells, which was relevant because we were fighting a monster with 25HD more than we had; that said I feel like he should have thought about whether "save or dies fall off in usefulness in the late game because you can't land them on anything that matters" was actually a problem that needed solving. I bought such items for Imprisonment, Maw of Chaos, Deadly Lahar, and Finger of Death. Additionally, we have magic healing potions to the tune of 100-200 HP per swig that we're allowed to swig as nonactions (technically the GM says it's a move action, but not a move action that prevents you also moving - like drawing a weapon, mechanically)

Prebuffing: I had a lot of prebuffs and quite frankly spent most of the afternoon thinking of more stuff to add here, I was very disorganised. But also I departed with something like 20 active spells and nobody else departed with any that I didn't offer to cast on them. We would have TPK'd immediately without these buffs (mostly the energy resistances and the anticold aura).

We're all teleported in on the edge of the dragon's Forbiddance, having been assured (apparently by operation of brute force low-level scrying?) that the dragon is currently alone without its family or henchmen.

Rounds 1-4ish are us trying to figure out a way through the wards (Forbiddance isn't much of a problem, but there are other wards and also quite a lot of ice), also me casting some additional buffs I forgot the first time around. The other wizard uses shapechange, and takes the form of a 20-HD advanced beholder statblock which he asked chatgpt to make for him, which he remains in throughout the fight. Also he forgot that shapechange removes his own spellcasting, but I wasn't going to start a discussion of the technicalities of 3.5 shapeshifting magic right then, was I?

Round 5ish: At this stage, a mix of disintegrate eye-rays, search checks made with bonuses that would have disappointed a 10th level rogue, antimagic eye-cones, and my knowledge and spellcraft checks let us into the lair. Which is apparently warded against overland flight specifically, so I drop out of the sky but the beholder is fine. The fighter and the warmage and their lack of traversal options better than feet and 10ft-poles are a bit of a pain and I'm sad to join them, but the dragon is upon us.

Round 6: The dragon arrives, and shatters the ice around a frozen marilith it had lying around. The rogue panics and hides in a wall. (She is correct that her defences can't survive casual contact with the dragon, to be fair). The fighter shoots the dragon with his dragonbane bow. (I'm wasn't following the tech the fighter was using because piloting my build was effortful and the GM was one of those "if you don't have your action ready when your turn comes up you spend the turn thinking" sort of guys, but suffice to say the fighter will consistently output 50ish damage per round to the dragon with >1000HP from here out). On a skim of the warmage class, I was very short of options which did point damage without save that weren't polar ray (white dragon), so I shot a prismatic ray at the dragon. It casts wings of cover, which denies line of effect for any one effect. I realise what sort of fight this will be. The other wizard uses a charm monster eye-ray on the Marilith; they RP back and forth over the next two rounds but eventually she leaves.

Round 7: The dragon does what I am not exactly sure is RAW, that is to say, it uses an item to maximise breath weapon admixture and also because this is breath weapon admixture, it can also apply piercing cold (with another feat to reduce the metamagic cost). I am not sure that works out but suffice to say because it's the GMs monster, the dragon does about a hundred cold damage and a hundred fire damage to the party, with a save for half that nobody passes because the DC is in the 40s. I have anticold aura (also mass resistance to fire, cold, and acid) protecting the party and me and the GM spend some time analysing RAW to see if this protects us all (it does, but he believed that the clause in question only applied to the cold subtype and not other immunity sources). The Warmage still dies instantly. Everyone else is hurting, half or less HP (except the rogue, who was in a wall in an inconvenient location and thus safe). The rogue pings the dragon in melee with some con damage, which due to the number of HD the dragon has is still doing more than the fighter when the fighter enters in melee with the fighter. I cast Maw of Chaos, using the Archmage class feature to give the PCs safe places to stand; it does a (relatively speaking) lot of damage but the dragon passes the save so it's still taking actions. The other wizard forgets he's a wizard for the moment and launches some eye rays that do very little because of how the dragon has terrifyingly high saving throws relative to whatever saving throws chatgpt thinks a 20HD beholder should have. Everyone chugs healing potion.
 
Round 8: In a polite concession to letting us win the fight, the dragon decides to melee the gnats at its side. They take a lot of damage, but not a "die this round" amount of damage. The rogue full attacks (we have to explain what a full attack is, and also that you should be adding your base attack bonus to your attack rolls; apparently if you don't grok 3.5, the numbers from other bonuses just look big enough to a 5e player and then your attacks still land because they're vs. a dragon's touch AC so you don't question it except in as much as the fighter next to you has numbers three times as large.) The GM has given her (one dose of) a special legendary venom that the dragon will actually fail saves against, which stacks with her own native con and str damage to be solidly respectable, but she forgets to actually sneak attack. Fighter fights. Maw of chaos procs again for some more damage but no save. I cast Deadly Lahar (because at this moment I'm mostly just trying to deny actions without getting wings of cover'd). Beholder's turn, he remembers he has spells and casts energy drain. Dragon casts wings of cover, so it does nothing, but it was a respectable attempt.

Round 9: Dragon leaves the melee and goes and awakens an ice devil. (yes, it has both demon and devil mooks in a planescapelike setting. GM had a lore thing there wasn't time for exposition about going on, I think). Ice devil joins the melee. The rogue and the fighter kill it one round (making this turn pretty low-value for the dragon as well), but they move out of their safe zones in the maw of chaos to do so, so I have to drop the cast lest it kill them (which it absolutely would, 26d6 damage + save or be dazed is no joke vs. PC-sized numbers). More ice devil related lore occurs as it dies.

It is at this point that I remember how wings of cover works with the action economy. If we have *two* guys casting save or die spells, it can't block them all no matter how many spell slots it has. I move up. I'm barely within range (I have the Archmage arcana for casting touch spells at range, so at least I don't have to be in melee). Me and the GM spend a bunch of time discussing the minutiae of immediate action refresh mechanics (why do some many people want stuff to refresh on a round by round basis rather than a "when you get more action economy" basis.) The rules favour me and the dragon cannot at this moment cast wings of cover. I cast imprisonment. It lands. The dragon is dragged away to wherever it is the spell imprisons things (it's sort of underspecified). (The GM rolls some kind of divine intervention check, but Tiamat wasn't actually watching the fight, apparently)

We loot the place, celebrations are had, apparently there's nobody in the land able to resurrect the dead warmage for worldbuilding reasons. We didn't ever deal half of the dragon's HP track to it.

TL;DR Save or dies are fucked, man.

After this fight, what lessons have I learned: One is just that saving throw DC maths is jank. One is that the linear fighters are oh so painfully real and I don't know how this wasn't blindingly salient as a problem to everyone else at the table. Another is that I haven't had enough practice playing wizards and that I'm therefore not that good at it. Finally ... I would like that practice? After all the intense, utterly obvious problems - I still genuinely enjoyed playing a wizard and want to recapture that feeling in contexts where it doesn't carry the connotation of playing at a level which simply isn't accessible to most people at the table. Prepared casters are cool. I want to be good at playing one.

To finish up with some thoughts about the experience overall, mainly about the social experience of being here: Going to cons to make friends works at all, which is nice. I left with several people's phone numbers. Now I just need to figure out how to convert that into actual interactions or friendships, help. But I felt really out of place at this con; the demographics skewed much older than me, I felt like very much like the median person there was a married couple ten or thirty years older than me. It was also surreal to go to a con which hasn't run since the before times, seeing the same cast of organisers and people who I don't know but do recognise floating around the place, all five years older. Also, I've spent enough time in my little bubble that I've forgotten viscerally how extensively I am a weirdo; maybe this just wasn't the space for it, but I'm very used to - having transcended the dichotomy that goes "there are two types of games: D&D, and games which are lighter and more story-focused than D&D, like WOD and the Index Card RPG." The people I talked to today did not seem to have done that. They also seemed, collectively, very resigned to the idea that they would mostly play TTRPGs with people who did not much want to play TTRPGs and who definitely did not particularly want to play any particular TTRPG they liked (this is, presumably, selection bias).

I am so intensely grateful I live in the world where Shadowrun isn't an impossible myth, where people play tactical TTRPGs other than 4e, where Exalted and Jenna Moran are things people have heard of at all, where there are mystery games with mystery mechanics, where people actually form intentions about game design, and not the world they live in. I'd still love the hobby if I was in their boots, but. It'd be worse. I still wanna be friends with them, though! They seem like cool and interesting people on their own merits, and their home campaigns seem just as cool and interesting, and I'm sure I'm doing wrong by many of them by painting them with this brush based on minutes or hours of talking and playing with them. But the contrast has reminded me why and how much I love the people I play, write, and talk with regularly (that is to say, you, the target audience of this post).