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.
 

( That 3.5 fight summarised in detail. )

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).