The Death Cookie

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #27: If you were an Ent, what kind of Ent would you be? Or, what other NPC creature would you be? Why? (Courtesy of Atlas Games. Visit them at www.atlas-games.com)

I haven't played D&D since the mid-90s, but back then I only remember one kind of Ent. This must be some kind of 3rd or 4th Edition thing. Oh, wait, this is a take-off on the old Barbara Walters "what kind of tree would you be?" thing. Only instead of a tree, it's an Ent, because those are like talking trees in Tolkein. So it's kind of like gaming humor, right? What's next, Atlas, are you going to start quoting Monty Python? I mean, you're the guys who produced Over the Edge, Pandemonium, Unknown Armies, Lunch Money, Spammers, and a lot of other great games. And this is the best you could come up with? I'm not angry, just disappointed.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #26: Who or what was the most memorable NPC you've ever encountered? Why? (Courtesy of Atlas Games. Visit them at www.atlas-games.com)

Yankee Doodle Fuck You. Leighton claims that the character (along with The Lady With No Hat) came to him in a dream. I like the character so much, that (with L8on's permission and art) I included him in All-Stars: A Game of Low-Budget Superheroics.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #25: If you game enough, you're bound to run into someone being an ass. What's the most asinine thing someone's done in a game with you? How did you react? Did that experience change the way you game? (Courtesy of Atlas Games. Visit them at www.atlas-games.com)

I run a lot of games at conventions, so there are lots of possibilities to choose from here, but there is one that kind of stands out. It happened during a game at Origins the year we released the first edition of M-Force. I think I mentioned Mad Bombers in the last post, but probably need to explain what I mean. Mad Bomber is our name for the (incredibly common) type of gamer who always plays characters who are demolitions experts and who attempt to blow things up at the slightest provocation. The Mad Bomber in this particular game was even worse than usual. At one point (fairly early in the game), he blew up another character's car for no apparent reason. In broad daylight. On a busy city street, right outside of the M-Force office. In plain view of the car's owner. Then he hung around. Leighton Connor was playing the guy whose car got blown up, so he did what any normal person would do in that situation: he called the police and they arrested the Mad Bomber. The player hung around for maybe an hour before he figured out that his character was, in fact, going to spend several years in prison.

I don't think the experience really changed the way I game, but it was the first time I got to test my theory that if one person's ruining a convention game, it's best to just get rid of them. It's usually best to endure players who are just garden variety annoying (especially if you're demoing a game, since you don't want to alienate a potential customer). But if someone is actually disrupting the game, get rid of them. It's better to piss off one person than to have a whole table full of people take away a bad impression of your game due to the actions of a lone moron.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #24: Have you ever been to a game convention? What was it like to be surrounded by so many other gamers? If not, would you like to go to one? Why or why not? (Courtesy of Atlas Games. Visit them at www.atlas-games.com)

Lots of them. I usually go to six or so conventions a year these days. Before we started Hex, I went to a handful of local cons of varying quality and a couple of Dragon*Cons. Once we started making games, we had to go to every con we could in hopes of selling product and it started being work. Since I was also working in a comic and game store at the time, I had by then grown to loathe the kind of people who usually show up at conventions. Sometimes what I called "The Hate" would set in before I even got into the building. After a few years, The Hate gave way to just sort of a dull exhaustion, and more recently it's actually started being fun again.

Part of the reason that I don't get The Hate anymore is because Hex rarely runs its own dealer booth (we usually let The GPA or a FLGS like Castle Perilous sell our stuff), which cuts out direct interaction with 75% of the most annoying genetic defectives you find at conventions. Having to listen to some idiot talk about his Rifts character for 30 minutes because it would be unprofessional to strangle him can give you a bad attitude for the rest of the day. Not having a dealer table also makes the whole con less stressful, since you can relax between events instead of having to work the booth. 

Another reason cons are more fun these days is because we get a lot more players who are actually interested in what we're doing. In the early days, we mainly either got your typical hack n' slashers and mad bombers, people for whom our game was a second choice because their first choice was full or didn't run for some reason, and people who had heard QAGS was a "funny" game and just did stupid shit through the whole game. These days, Hex has been around long enough and has a wide enough selection of supplements out that (thanks especially to PDF sales) more people are signing up specifically to play what we're running. That means that instead of every game being 50%+ bad players, each of our GMs might get 1 bad player during the course of a con. When the bad players do show up, we have a lot more experience dealing with them and a lot more good players to drown them out, so it's harder for them to ruing the game through sheer force of suck.

Also, I enjoy conventions more these days because I don't go to Origins. For some reason the people at Origins always made me want to call in a nuclear strike.