Running RPGs at Awesome Con(Part 1)
The other weekend I volunteered to GM at Awesome Con, a comic convention in DC. Over the past several years a local gaming store, Labyrinth Games and Puzzles has run tabletop gaming events there and it's impressive to see the fast growth. I don't know the full count but there were dozens of RPG sessions run on top of the board gaming, card games, and some Blood on the Clocktower. It's nice to ese that pretty quickly this event has seen the tabletop gaming presence grow.
I signed up to run three sessions: Star Wars: Age of Rebellion; Eat the Reich; and Dungeon Crawl Classics. I was a little nervous submitting these because there are always more players who are only interested in D&D than DMs only interested in D&D. Labyrinth did a good job with prep, I was given time slots two months out and a week before the event they had a Zoom covering various procedures for the event.
I’ve lived in the DC area all my life but never attended AwesomeCon, and in fact I’ve never attended an American comic convention. So I’m going to break this up into three session reports and some general thoughts. The first two sessions will be in this post with a longer look at the DCC session in the next.
Star Wars: Age of Rebellion - Rescue at Glare Peak
This module was released for free in 2014 and has a good reputation online so I decided to give it a (one) shot. The first issue I’ll say is that while the module is available for free online, it has been uploaded as a scan. And not a good one. And that’s pretty annoying, but not game-breaking. I considered printing it out but being a poor quality scan it’d eat ink so I just went with it on my tablet. The character sheets I printed out were hard to read and one player struggled with that, which I feel bad about.
The adventure is a prison rescue/heist setup and I liked it as I read it. It’s broken into three acts with the third being the bulk of the action. The author recommends skipping the first act to fit into a three hour time slot, which is what I was running so I went with that. I’d never run the FFG/Edge Star Wars games before so prep for this was split between learning the system rules and prepping the module. Over the years I’ve collected the starter sets for each of their Star Wars games so I have a good stash of the custom dice, which was important to be able to run it at a convention.
One of the first things I did for perp was to make an opening crawl. You can do this easily online, though there are a few frustrations. First, there is a big watermark, I attempted to edit the HTML to delete that but it didn’t work, deleting the watermark broke the crawl itself. Secondly they offer to let you download it, but they want you to pay or wait months. So I ended up doing a screen recording, watermark and all to make sure I could play it at the con. I played it on my tablet and that went fine and I think really does set the mood. The module includes a crawl but I found it overly short and not well written so I revised it.
How annoying is that watermark? Also the typos in that were not in the version I showed the players but I don’t want to have to make this a third time…
“ It is a time of civil war. The rebel Alliance scored a major victory against the Galactic Empire destroying the fearsome Death Star in the Yavin system. Forced to flee the Rebel Fleet is now on the run.
On the icy planet Trivar II, a Rebel star fighter carrying critical intelligence is shot down by Imperial TIE fighters. A local Rebel cell must rescue its pilots before the Imperial forces can learn the location of the Rebel Fleet.
Time grows short as DARTH VADER approaches to learn the Rebel secrets. The Rebels must act fast to save their comrades and the Rebellion itself... ”
For the rest of prep I read through the quick start rules a couple times, and read the module. First to talk about the system some there are parts I really like and parts I really don’t. And let’s start with the dice. The game uses custom dice and personally I’m fine with that. RPGs are not my most expensive hobby and needing a $15-20 set of dice to play an RPG is not a problem for me. And I really like most of the dice system. Having difficulty checks not based on a target number but by adding “bad” dice to a dice pool is fantastic and I’d be happy to have it happen in every game. It’s honestly sort of how the HAVOC system in Eat the Reich works, and in both games I think it really adds something. I think not knowing what your target is until after the roll is more interesting than knowing you need a 10 or 15.
To quickly explain the system, a PC will have a skill and an attribute, the combination will give them a number of good (green d8) and great (yellow d12) dice. The GM will then direct them to add bad (purple d8) and worse (red d12) dice to that pool. Narrative or mechanical advantage or disadvantage can then be added with blue and black d6s. All of these dice have custom symbols representing: success, failure, advantage, threat, triumph, or despair. Most of this is pretty simple, you want 1 or more success symbols, then advantage/thread/triumph/despair can cancel each other out and result in a roll that might be “success with 2 advantage” or “failure with 1 advantage”. And a lot of the time this is great. It’s very much a fail-forward system, or sometimes a succeeded-sideways system, and both make for great roleplaying and storytelling.
This system created some of my favorite moments in a session. One Imperial who was asking the players what they were doing in the Imperial base was easily defeated and the generated advantage lead to that Imperial blabbing to the players about where the prisoners were kept. My favorite moment was having introduced an unnamed prisoner unrelated to the rebellion, I had a bad roll from an Imperial Guard blade his door control and let this guy out, where he promptly charged into combat against his jailers.
However, I think the system also has a big flaw which has been brought up by reviewers before, it can get exhausting. Having each roll result in potential narrative or mechanical advantages unrelated to binary success or failure is a lot. For every inspired idea I had there were 2 or 3 throw-away ones. I think if I ran this system more I’d really need to think about this. I think experience would help, the more you come up with these little twists, the easier it will be to have more. Also reducing how much players are rolling helps, but sometimes that’s hard.
My other beef with the system is combat, and this may just be a me thing. The combat system in the game is moderately crunchy, characters can have abilities that trigger in combat, there are extensive critical hit rules, and it’s designed for theater of the mind, but with tracking relative range bands. And this all adds up to a crunchier combat system than I’m looking for, and not one I find particularly interesting. In combat you have something of a menu for spending advantages/thread which is helpful, but I didn’t feel it was that interesting. Someone being knocked prone is only sorta interesting the first time it happens in a combat.
I think with more experience and outside of a one-shot setting combat would be more interesting and would move faster, but I still don’t think this is the combat system I’m looking for. One thing I want to call out is how it works with theater of the mind and rage bands. The game’s attack rolls depend on how far away you are from enemies, but if you have 4 PCs and 5 enemies that means you might need to be tracking 20 separate rage bands. I think range bands work best when they’re more abstracted than this, thought I’ll shout out Wilderfeast for having an amazing relative range band system, but that only really works because the fights are one-versus-many.
The facility’s map from the adventure
To talk more about the session, I was excited to see it was the first one of mine to fill up with pre-registrations. I’d said I could take up to 5 and 4 people signed up, one twice which can often indicate someone is bringing a friend/partner. Unfortunately only two people showed up, one having signed up twice by mistake. Running an RPG for 2 is out of my wheelhouse but I think it went pretty well, both players were engaged and didn’t seem to mind the smaller party size.
The adventure starts in a town under Imperial lockdown, and the players need to plan their heist and gather supplies and contacts for it. Having only 2 PCs means half of the adventures pre-written connections to the Imperial prison, but I gave them access to NPCs who restored some of that and they settled on an infiltration plan.
Once on the base the adventure makes clear that getting in disguised as maintenance techs is pretty easy, but gaining access to the restricted areas like the cell blocks is much harder. And I like this a lot, it’s a good setup, letting the “get into the base” section be pretty simple, and allowing more time for moving around inside the base. As we got into the heist I ended up playing a lot of it by ear. The prison is heavily guarded and I think if you stick too close to the written material you end up in a set of grueling fights as players try and force their way through it. I gave my players quite a few chances to find a way to advance to the cell blocks without a fight as they failed a couple of key rolls.
Once in the final cellblock the adventure doesn’t really allow for anything but a fight, but I think that makes sense. We had one combat which did take a fair bit of time, but it served as a good climax to the one-shot. After defeating the guards I allowed them to resume their disguises as they’d disabled the alarm, and sneak out just as Vader was touching down. I do want to also tip my hat to the game’s meta-currency, force points. Players and the GM share this pool but each force point can be light or dark side. When it’s used to improve or worsen a dice pool it flips to the other side. This means that you’re encouraged to spend them, as they’ll come back, and as a GM I felt good about spending them because it gave the players more power down the road, which I don’t always feel other systems accomplish with their GM-side meta currencies. Making this a zero sum game of flipping them back and forth is I think a notable improvement on systems where players and GMs have a pool that gets exhausted over a session.
I enjoyed the session a lot and the players seemed to as well. I wish we’d had a fuller party but the adventure ran fine with two PCs. I think I do want to give the system another shot, probably with something from Edge of the Empire, there is a lot to like, and I think some more experience would make the narrative dice a little easier to handle, and make the crunchy combat flow a little better.
Some of my Stormtroopers
If I ran Star Wars as a convention game again I’d be sure to get some of my Star Wars Legion minis together to represent the protagonists and the baddies. I’m not sure if I’d go full battle map, but I’d consider it. But just using them to track initiative and the like would be fun.
Eat the Reich
I’ve reviewed this game and most of what I said then stands now, it’s a fantastic game. I’m not going to talk too much about the system here, if you want to learn more about it please check there. This sign up sheet was also full at 5 players, but only 4 showed up which is fine. As I’d done last time, after briefly talking about theme and safety I launched the players into the game without covering rules and without giving them a chance to pick a drop site. It just gets to the action and theme quickly and I highly recommend it.
Will Kirby from Eat the Reich
The players here were mostly but not exclusively D&D players and I felt they picked up the system pretty well. Eat the Reich’s system of describing your actions as you “spend” your successes works very well, but is can be hard for players to wrap their heads around. It is a system that gives players a ton of narrative permission and I love that, but it’s a paradigm shift for D&D players, and one that can take some time to grok. Unfortunately the player who seemed to best click with the system was playing Flint, and I love Flint but they’re the most one-note character meaning this player didn’t really take full advantage of the system. This session also convinced me that players should just pick a skill to roll and should decide on equipment use after rolling. This just keeps things more flexible and can feel better to the players.
My preferred dice for ETR
Another thing I realized is that next time I play this I’m bringing some little glass beads. Eat the Reich lets vampires share blood (their power and and healing pool) and this group really liked doing that, and having little tokens to hand around would have been more fun and tactile than tracking it on their character sheet. I have some on-theme dice from Baron of Dice that I think also really help set the mood, having the bite symbol on the 6 reminds players it’s a crit. I use standard D6s as the GM because the GM doesn’t crit.
Next I’ll say that you should really encourage players to ask for secondary objectives. Getting the subway train running was an ordeal but good fun and put the metro scene in a far better spot mechanically. The players had been struggling versus an armoured infantry squad so leaving them behind when the train started and having a motorcycle squad chase them took some pressure off the player’s dice. Later, when a German tank appeared they wanted to steal it so I gave them a secondary objective to do just that. Nothing like a table of players shouting “Tank, Tank, Tank!” And in all these places I was reminded of how great the system is, it very smoothly accommodates anything players want to do, and they used that tank to blast through the Eiffel Tower’s defenses with the bonus to Frontal Assaults I gave it.
Like the last time I ran it I ended each scene by giving the party a choice of two locations to head to next. I think this keeps the game moving quickly and avoids players being bogged down in discussing their route. For these I give pretty simple one or two sentence descriptions.
“To your left you see the wrought iron entrance to one of Paris’ many metro stations. Ahead and to the right you see a church, and in the small cemetery behind it you see what looks to be an honor guard presiding over a Nazi funeral.”
Iryna, the old money vampire socialite - Will Kirby from Eat the Reich
My last tip here is that the GM should really push players to make forward progress. When players and the GM are rolling similar numbers of dice a huge number of turns can just be “I block all the damage” and nothing changes in the game state. I think this is a little bit the system’s fault, but remind them that taking damage to move the objective forward is sometimes the play. Once I reminded the players of this they started doing it and a couple scenes that had bogged down were quickly left behind.
The most surprising thing to me was how fast the game moved. I love this game’s system for that reason but I didn’t anticipate just how quickly things would move. When I last played this it was with a large group of distractable friends with some long breaks and we spent most of the day playing it. At Awesome Con I completed about the same number of sites in just under 3 hours. Again I played this, and explained the rules for the Loot action, and again no one looted anything. I think going forward when I play the game I’m going to try and give every location at least one cool item for the players to steal.
Related to how fast it runs is how well this game is set up to cut back on planning. One of the best and worst parts of RPGs is players talking things out. Players spending 10 minutes to come up with a fun, exciting plan to sneak into an enemy encampment is fun. Players debating for 10 minutes the best way to sneak past a guard is not. And it can be very hard to hit the right balance between the two. Eat the Reich and the HAVOC system throw that problem out the window. The action is non-stop. This is a big reason why I’d not want to run a campaign of this, but it works very well for a one-shot, particularly for a group of strangers. Players can and need to help each other out but it’s very simple mechanical actions, not with elaborate plans. Similarly, the game scales very well, as the GM’s turns are folded into player turns a game with 5 players is not going to take that much longer than a game with 3 players, it’s mostly a question of how much time each of those players will have in the spotlight.
I also really like how replayable the game’s one adventure path is. This session started and ended in the same places but everything in the middle, and what happened in each place saw a huge shift from last time I played. I think next time I run this session I’ll mix up the finale with Hitler and <redacted> a little bit, as I explained in my review
Having now run the base scenario twice I want to try something else in the system. I have a Call of Cthulhu supplement set in 1920s Japan and I may take some parts of that to make a Hiroeato game as the book suggests. I may also check out ReVamped again, which I highly recommend picking up if you like the base game.
