Quarex posted:

Everything about Gen-Con is awesome and you should go

Where are you, Old Man Mozz? I will pick you up on the way. Ignore the fact that I am taking the train.

I have a lot of singular Gen-Con stories I should probably tell, but perhaps I will try to think of something delightful from each year and slowly post them when nothing else is happening.

1997: Knowing absolutely nothing about what I am doing or what is going on, having only been gaming for a couple of years and never having been around more gamers than the dozen or so people I knew who gamed, four of us loaded into my shamefully older friend's SWEET 1988? TRANS AM and drove from Normal, Illinois to Milwaukee while blasting GWAR and "Stayin' Alive" on repeat the whole way there. We carefully examined the convention booklet once we arrived to determine what game the four of us would play in, and decided on the four-day "Society in Shadow" live-action game (running 8 P.M. - 2 A.M. Wednesday-Saturday nights).

"Society in Shadow" was exactly as much of a duplicate in all but name of Vampire: The Masquerade as you can imagine, other than the almost innovative mechanic of using "drawing from your bag of marbles" for conflict resolution. We had a decent time goofing off as various werecreatures, but by the end of the first session we it was obvious the game did not actually seem to have much of a plot. So we decided to try to destroy the game (in a constructive way), and figured the four of us were so jaded with our monstrous existence that we were going to try to take the entire supernatural world down by revealing it to the public.

Cut to half-way through the fourth day of the game, and about 90% of the rest of the players have gathered with veritable torches and pitchforks outside our heavily trapped hideout, and we just have to figure out the most creative way to commit suicide by vampire. We opt to plead for a mediator from the gathered masses so that we can figure out how to let 3 of us surrender to the mob so the 4th can go into exile peacefully. Which meant that we killed and ate the gamemaster PC who came in to do the mediating and then tried to escape through a secret tunnel (though I seem to recall we were discovered and killed; that part seemed so uneventful compared to the rest of the game). Several players came up to us after the game ended to thank us for playing our GM plant roles flawlessly, and were very confused when they found out we had just decided to be the antagonists on our own.

Though I also determined in 1997 that I was definitely not the "game all day" type, as 1-2 games every day in addition to the live-action was way too draining.