Recalling Thursday Night

First thing that happened when I got to the con hall floor, I was recognized by a guy I met at NerdNYC’s recess event, and he was about to start a game — and so I finally got a chance to check out Vincent Baker’s Dogs in the Vineyard, which was a really good time, and while it took a little bit to grok how the resolution and escalation system worked, it went very well owing to the high quality GM’ing from Kit LaTouche. Thanks Kit!

We finished up just in time for my hyper-exclusive party. Yea, like I get invited to those. I did go to a private party that was mostly focused on podcasters meeting each other with food and drinks and space to hang out.

Later on I went out to visit some of my Fear the Boot forums buddies at an open gaming space, where I got to catch up with a lot of geographically disparate friends and then play Jeremy Keller’s new game Technoir. The game runs very smoothly, and while I haven’t had the chance to read through it yet, my experience was VERY promising. Our only real problem was that we as PCs weren’t quite behaving in genre, and so our contacts/”friends” wouldn’t just tell us what was going on. Blame the fact that the game started at midnight.

Friday Morning

Friday morning I took the opportunity to briefly skim through the dealer’s room before my appearance on This Just In from GenCon. I had donated some money to help fund their goal of bringing GenCon to those who couldn’t come, and they had me come on to co-host with guests J.R. Blackwell (Shelter in Place), and Ryan Sturm (How to Play podcast, The Dice Tower blog, and a new podcast on game design called Ludology). I’m very excited to check out both Ryan and J.R.’s various projects further when I have some more time.

After lunch I went back to the most-excellent Games on Demand space, where awesome hardworking GMs ran anything and everything as pick-up games for players who were there to play. Definitely worth the $2 generic ticket, and my thanks go out to everyone running the space, running games, and the players for showing what I hope ends up being massive support of Games on Demand. I caught my first actual game of Daniel Solis’ Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, and immediately afterwards facilitated a game of Jason Morningstar’s Fiasco.

I had to leave that game halfway through to go meet my ENnies dream dates, Jeff Tidball and Will Hindmarch from Gameplaywright Press. Part of the deal was that I got to claim credit for Jeff’s ridiculous mustache, which quickly led to the following photo of Ken Hite and Jeff hamming up the 70s cop show theme. Hanging out with these guys was a hoot – see below:

Ken Hite and Jeff Tidball as 70s Cops Skitch and Grissom. THEY FIGHT CRIME!
Photo credit: AtomicOvermind

Actually attending the ennies awards ceremony was nice, I got to meet a ton of awesome people during the cocktail hour and had a great time twittering back and forth with Jeff and Will; but I wouldn’t call the actual awards ceremony one of the must-see events of the show if you don’t have anything at stake. We followed up the actual ceremony with a quick recording session – now available as Episode 30.

To begin closing my evening out, I went to the Burning Wheel Social, hosted by Luke Crane and Peter Adkison, hung out a while, played a prototype of a game called Ninja Clans by this guy Jurgen, and took a photo of Peter in his hilarious new outfit.

As it got later, and I got closer to closing my night out, I went back to the Embassy Suites and found people including Steve Segedy, Daniel Perez, and Ryan Macklin chilling in the lobby chatting over beverages. Games were brought up, and I mentioned that I had Feed the Birds with me. We got in a 3-player game of half-asleep/half-drunk FtB before crashing and it was extremely well received. The last new rules tweak I just made actually works really well, too! (Jenn and Aron – I owe you two some errata.)

So far so good. I’ll write up Saturday and Sunday soon.

Show Notes – 4/17/2011

Conversation with Daniel Perez, the Gamer Traveler. We interview each other back and forth about travel, how we got into podcasting in this weird niche of ours, and a little bit more of each of our distinct yet surprisingly similar backgrounds.

Find Daniel at The Gamer Traveler

Download MP3

This is turning out to be a great week for games for me in particular, and I’m really excited about it and wanted to share.

Sunday morning, I found out that the Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple Kickstarter campaign had started, and I immediately made my donation. In two days they have raised nearly $10,000, and as I joked on the comments page, it’s on track to make $12,000 in the first three days. Boy I hope that comes true – I totally want to have been the first one to call it.

Sunday night, DFL was the third podcast to interview Daniel about Do and the Kickstarter campaign. The prior interview with him actually has a lot of sneak-preview type information about the origins of the game; they are also some of the best episodes so definitely give those a listen if you haven’t already. The Do episode will be releasing either late this month or in May – I’m way behind on editing. The next episode to drop will be a mutual interview with Daniel Perez, the Gamer Traveler

Further, I wrote a letter to the Monks that Daniel will be including in the book. So on top of this awesome project coming to fruition, I will also be a contributor.

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Last night I got together with my friend Scott to do some play testing of Ghost Pirates, and managed to get a lot of little kinks worked out and more variety of play injected with a few little changes. The game is coming along really well, I’ve gotten the second round of playtest art and layout finished and I’d love to send out some print-and-play copies to people who want to test the current set of rules. Email me!

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This morning I got a note from Robert Bohl that he’d plugged HYPERREALITY in an RPG.net forum thread. We’ll see where that goes, but it’s really exciting to see that something you’ve created has generated enough interest that other people want to promote it on their own.

Next step, some of these games need to get their own page and writeups.