Sean NittnerAfter the convention ended, bleary-eyed and mildly delusional from lack of sleep, I envisioned writing a review that captures the highs and lows of Kubla. I planned to write a review of every game I was in (and one that I wasn’t) and on the convention itself. This, after some consideration, sounded extremely dull. So instead I have decided to compile a list of things I learned at KublaCon, roughly in the order of their significance to me.

  1. NEVER, EVER, EVER DITCH A GAME YOU ARE SIGNED UP TO RUN. Do you see all those capital letters? I didn’t use them because the first sentence was the thesis of this paragraph. I used them because I’m shouting, shouting as loud as I can in 12 point font! On Saturday morning I had a very tough decision to make. Three games really appealed to me for different reasons. Nick Page, a GM who I had never heard of was running the only game using the Burning Wheel system at the convention. Ever since I heard about Burning Wheel from Paul Tevis (at havegameswilltravel.net) I have been itching to play it. The system, as I understand it is all about challenging the players, forcing them to step up the plate and make sacrifices to achieve the ends they care about. Conflicts arise often and they quickly become heated. Players evolve their characters based on the results of these tense encounters. A guard stops you at a door? How far will you escalate the conflict to get past him? Will you pull out a knife and gut him? What happens to your character as a person afterwards? These kind of questions are ones that too many games gloss over, and I was (and still am) really exited to try a system that will bring them to the forefront of my gaming experience. In the other corner was Mike Bogan’s In Nomine game. Not only did I really enjoy the last In Nomine game of Mike’s that I played in, but this time Mike had a character he told me in advance was perfectly suited for me (I believe her name was Pretty Pretty Princess Jenny and she was an agent of Delirium, how friggin perfect is that?). Lastly was Kevan Forbes’s Werewolf: The Forsaken game. Having worked with Kevan to build the characters and helped with playtesting them, I knew his game would be a blast. With great hesitation and trepidation in my heart I signed up for the games in the order listed above, knowing that because Burning wheel is a small press game, I would probably get into it…. and to my initial delight I did.

At nine in the morning on Saturday I had only gotten 2 hours of sleep the night before due to picking up breakfast food until 4:30 and then being woken up by the kids at 6:30 but I was still exited about the game. When I arrived there were three other players present and a few crashers but no GM. After 20 minutes of asking the Kubla staff, waiting around and much griping, we finally determined that the GM hadn’t even checked into the convention. By this time both of the other games I would have really loved to play in were full and I, along with five other players, got the shaft. I was so irate not only that I missed the game, but I missed out on the chance to play in any of the others, that after my initial desire to hunt down the GM subsided I though about what happens to gamers when their GM doesn’t show up. As shouted above… I will never do that to my players. To the GM that stood me up, I offer you a big fat one finger salute!

  1. Eight players are really tough to keep entertained for eight hours. In the past all of my games have capped at 6 people, but this year because a number of people wanted to crash my Mage game (and I had extra characters), I allowed eight to play. I know GMs who can manage eight and keep most of them entertained, but I don’t think it comes naturally. The problem with an eight player game is that you are guaranteed to have players who are less assertive than others, who will naturally loose center stage to the more active and exited players. Even if the GM makes an effort to draw these people out some times that takes so much energy that now seven players are all suffering as the GM tries to coerce as response from the less active member. Intellectually I knew eight was too much, but hubris struck and I believed I could swing a full squad of players. What an appropriate vice for a Mage game!

  1. Shadowrun is really fun. Hey that rhymes! Although I didn’t get into Greg Matheison’s game (and didn’t want to crash because there were at least three others would be crashers trying to get in when I showed up) I did slip into Rich Taylor’s game “The Heart of the Matter” where our runners, after trying to be knocked off twice found out who was hunting them down and learned a little of their previously clouded past. I don’t know about you but I think “Ghoul Revivication” is twisted and fun, not necessarily in that order.

  1. Don’t expect the convention to make fun for you. As you may have noticed from some of my other points not only did I have a game that I got into canceled because the GM didn’t show, but to top that off the “randomizer” was apparently set on “stupid.” According to a software programmer there was a glitch that was assigning weight incorrectly to the con goers. If you’re not familiar with the weight system, it is essentially a database that starts off giving everyone an equal chance to get into the games they sign up for but as the weekend progresses, the people who got into games get a greater weigh which puts them at a lower priority for getting into games, so that those who don’t get into many games early on in the con will get into them later. Unfortunately the glitch made it so that those who signed up for games and got into them early (Friday night or Saturday morning) just kept getting into games, and others folks like myself got into nothing for the rest of the con. Now, as a database developer myself I can fully understand how a “little” bug like this could come up. That being said this isn’t the first time that a system has messed up the game assignments (using computer programs, sign up sheets and even manually operated lottery systems) at conventions I’ve been to. The solution I recommend is to make your own fortune. Rather than bother the con staff that most likely will be very apologetic but not really able to do much, go out and start making games happen. Talk to GMs of games that you want to play in and see if there will be any extra space in their games, if so show up early. Get a group of others in your same predicament and start a game in open gaming. Heck, try something new like board games or find the nearest theatre and see if any movies are showing. After my initial fuming on Saturday morning I was able to get Meghan Miller to run her Good Omens audition game “The Princess Bride’s Little Sister” on Saturday night and then crashed Rich Taylor’s Shadowrun game Sunday morning. Both games were fantastically fun. Heck, even if they were horrible the still would beat doing nothing or spending my time complaining to the staff.

  1. Games that pit players against each other can be fun if done right. On Friday night, the one game that I actually signed up for and got into was a Hero system Monster Mash game. It was run by the Hero game developer Darren Watts who is a great GM. At first, even though I knew Darren was a Hero developer I was a little leery of the game. We were all playing monsters (Wolfman, Invisible Agent, Dracula, the Mummy, Swamp Thing and Frankenstein’s Monster) who were commissioned by a powerful sorcerer to recover a lost artifact from a scientific madman who lived alone with his monstrous creations on a small island. Okay, it doesn’t take two firing synapses to know where this one was going. Based on the Movie cannon that the game was set in, many of us knew each other and had killed one another several times in the past (thankfully dying in a previous movie doesn’t really mean anything to these folks). Playing the Wolfman myself, I was the closest thing to a “good guy” the group had, while the Mummy was purely opportunistic Dracula was just plain evil. So, as expected we worked together for a while, found the amulet and then it turned into a monster mash where we all turned against each other, knocking the castle down on top of ourselves. In the end Dracula got away with the amulet. Big shock! Now, in most cases I hate games where players are set against each other with some secret agendas. But in this game we all knew that we couldn’t trust each other but pride, professional rivalry and a strong desire to make sure the amulet didn’t get into the hands of the “guy to my left” made us all work together until the end. We knew that betrayal was eminent and had a blast playing it out. Thumbs up to Darren for running a player vs. player game that exited me from beginning to end. I think the trick was giving us a compelling enough reason to work together in the beginning and then just letting go at the end and let the players spell the fate of story once they turn on each other.