This weekend is MichiCon 2010, being held at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan and I sure do hope that any gaming hobbyists in the area are planning to attend. It’s a two day event and I’ll gather that there’ll be a good turn out Friday and Saturday. That is my hope at least. Gamers, as much as we enjoy the huge multiday cons, really do need to support smaller and more intimate gatherings of gaming. If we’re to continue to grow our hobby, bring in new recruits, as well as garner more acceptance of gaming in the public eye, we’ll need to not only attend but also help organize more one and two day sorts of events.
Honestly, and as opposed to what the big cons want to tell us, people get involved in the hobby by way of friends, family, meet ups, and little organized game days; someone interested in learning more about the hobby aren’t necessarily drawn to huge conventions with tens of thousands of people. Something of that size can be rather intimidating for someone who is curious about what these games are all about. I’m not embarrassed to say that, after years of gaming with friends and attending small game days, I was a little nervous attending my first Gen Con with Elliott. And I was in my twenties! Yet even after a good dozen years of RPGs, war games, boardgames, and what have you, I was still a bit leery of going to Gen Con. Seriously! I really think Elliott would tell you the same thing.
Of course it was silly to feel that way and we had a great time. It took us all of about three or four hours to shake off the anxiety and have a blast; Gen Con was an unknown to us so we weren’t sure what to expect. Of course it didn’t hurt that we were slicker and better looking than 95% of the people who were in attendance that year.
Oh, I kid!
Since this is a Gaming Memory post, I figure I can digress a bit but let me get back to the subject.
I think I can say that over the years I probably had better times at the little gatherings of four or five hundred people than I have at any mega convention. Or at least I’ve had just as good a time. Now this could be for a few different reasons. For one, I know there were more of my friends who could afford six or seven bucks to go to a game day than have a few hundred bucks for a hotel room, con tix, along with food and drinks. Or, if you’re like myself, a lot of drinks were downed. Secondly, the organizers of little gatherings already know that they aren’t going to get rich holding events in the basement of the local church, so the people who are running the show are doing it because they love to play and meet new people to game with. Lastly, the focus of these get-togethers was never about the dealers’ area or someone trying to sell you something. These gatherings were about playing games and having a good time!
I’ll have more small con memories to share in the future but I’ll write about the first game day I remember ever attending.
As I recall it was during our Freshman or Sophomore year in high school. There was a hobby shop I want to say was called The Squadron Shop in the Northern suburbs of Chicago. As I mentioned in my Fletcher Pratt post, there was a core of guys who played together at Lane Tech High School’s Gamers Guild as well as outside of school. It was Scott Weigel, Tim Felan, Pete Bonafete, Darryl Meltzer, Elliott Miller, myself, and some others. We were the young bloods compared to the juniors and seniors who were in the club. As always, I apologize to anyone that I leave out from these early days of my hobby life (not to worry Ed Rupprecht and Paul Miller – you are part of my greatest gaming memories but you weren’t part of the Gang at that point) but more than twenty five years have passed and, as I pointed out in an earlier paragraph, I’ve downed a lot of adult beverages in my time.
I do remember that on one early Spring morning Scott’s mom loaded up her station wagon, with a bunch of gaming goofballs, to drive off to some hotel conference room, in the ‘burbs, that was holding a day of playing games that she obviously had no interest in. Yet there she was going out of her way to pick up every one of us so we could play games. Not that I remember, but it wouldn’t surprise me that the tires of the wagon were squealing as she told us she’d be back at “XYZ time” to pick us up.
This was back in the day when gaming was essentially Dungeons and Dragons, along with Dungeons and Dragons, with a little bit of Dungeons and Dragons sprinkled in to liven things up. We’re talking about 1982-83 when kids like us were being first introduced to companies outside of TSR. Thankfully we weren’t just following the piper’s flute from TSR but also branching out into other sorts of game. We heard magical names like TGU, and Flying Buffalo Games, and (drum roll please… Avalon Hill) but the game I remember playing at this game day was actually a TSR game. It wasn’t D&D though, it was Boot Hill.
Here was a bunch of 14 and 15 year old kids playing a Wild West game, or at least a Hollywood version of the Wild West, being run by a man who had to have been at least 45 or 50 years old at the time. Being snot nosed teenaged kids I’m sure we sort of scratched our heads as to why this grey beard was running a game but we had signed up and we were going to play. It turned out to be the best roleplaying experience I ever had at a convention! In reality it was simply a rehash of the John Wayne film Chisolm, which he was very happy to disclose to all of the players in the end, but he kept everything moving along through the three or four hours. I remember that he told us that he had submitted his rule adaptations to Gary Gygax and the powers that be at TSR in the hope that they would sign him on and publish an expansion.
What a shame they never took on his changes but I can say that single Boot Hill game impacted how I ran roleplaying games throughout the rest of my life. I learned that it wasn’t about the rules and the die rolls. It wasn’t the GM vs the players. It was the ref (I’ve never wanted to be called a Dungeon Master or Game Master) creating a tale worth telling. It was all about the story and nudging your players along to experience something they hadn’t before; it really didn’t matter if they blew that critical die roll.
What a revelation this was! The game is the thing!
I’m sure if I only attended big time conventions I would have never learned this simple rule of roleplaying. I’m sure many of you have been to conventions and played an RPG where the person running it still doesn’t grasp it. All of us have been part of a roleplaying session that completely bogged down because the person running it was way too concerned with just how many ounces that leather puch of gems weigh and if it will put you over your encumbrance limit… Good roleplaying is to all too difficult. It’s a rather simple concept none the less that the story is everything and the rules (or mechanics) are nothing. Obviously the newer generation of roleplayers out there are thinking this is what RPGs are all about and I must be a dope to have not to have figured out the “story” angle by the time I was four years old.
Yet, I’d have never put two and two together (or it would have taken a good long time) if I hadn’t played that game of Boot Hill all those years ago. Funny thing is I can’t imagine that western game being run at one of the big cons. It was too much of an experiment, too much of a “variant” that probably wouldn’t fill up uless everything else going on at the time was filled up.
That’s why we have to support the small cons and the local game days! They give us the opportunity to delve into why we enjoy playing what we play while, at the same time, we can experience games and concepts we might not be thrilled with paying $100.00 a day for – including food and hotel. As we allow ourselves the comfort and convenience to relax, in a more intimate setting, the small cons reaffirm why we enjoy gaming in the first place and allow us to pass along our love for the hobby.
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Nice article! It really resonates with me. I've been reluctant to hit some of the buig cons for some of the same reasons.
BTW, this website has many interesting articles and some good reviews too. The site really looks good too.
Eric
Eric, I'd recommend bringing a friend or family member with you – more would be better – to the next big convention. You'll have a great time I promise and having people, who you love and enjoy spending time with, you can sign up to play with takes a lot of the pressure off. After a day or two you'll find that you should have signed up for more games to get into all by yourself.
You'll find gamers, for the most part, are realy good people and you know you already have a lot in common with them already!
Hey Jeff, late reply to this post but…. the little convention you fondly remember I believe is stuck with all of us. #1 is because I don’t think any of us played D&D there (ok maybe Tim did). It was a suburb going south on Harlem Ave. (don’t think it was Berwyn). This is where we first played Fletcher Pratt’s Naval Game that I promptly got the money order to get our Gamer’s Guild a copy of (I still have it and all my sheets, books and most of the cutout models). This is also where we got introduce to the best card game ever – Nuclear War (Magic eat Nuclear War dust, or that would be the mushroom cloud on the glow in the dark die – I still have it). I do remember the Boot Hill game and we did have a discussion on how that session was orchestrated and it did change the perception of coming out from behind the screen (I believe D&D actually had a Dungeon Master screen you could hide behind) to spin an adventure instead of seeing how many characters you can take out and start over again.
Actually the convention I was writing about was different than the one off of Harlem Ave in Oak Park. The Oak Park con was a two and a half day event sponsored by the community center’s game group. I remember the bunch of us playing Nuclear War, D&D – there was that tournement game we got screwed out of winning because the GM had to keep running out to talk to his sister about how to run the adventure – Bushido, some Fletcher’s with a guy who made all his ships from balsa wood, and so on.
The game day we played Boot Hill (and I seem to recall it was only a game day) was somewhere else and sponsored by a place that was called The Squadron Shop. I seem to remember that being at a Holiday Inn or some hotel along those lines…
Regardless of what cons they were it’s pretty amazing to still remember this stuff 30+ years later! Good times are like that though!