Zappcon 2015 - Part 1

I attended Zappcon last weekend. For those unfamiliar with Zappcon, it is a sort of mixed media convention that welcomed more than 2K people over the course of both Saturday and Sunday. Attendance might have been higher if both of the primary means of driving between Central and Southern California were not impacted by serious mudslides. It's a bit hard to figure out what I should write about. This year's Zappcon was my first convention so I don't really have anything to compare it to.

The Future of Icons of Paragon City

I do not know what the future of Icons of Paragon City is right now. We took a break over the holidays and will be discussing it soonish. I pushed hard for a weekly game so we could wrap up in the first half of December. The feedback has been positive so far, but I wanted to give people a couple of weeks to decompress before seriously discussing where we go, or if we go anywhere, from here.

The Lessons of Icons of Paragon City

I had this whole series typed up before I made the first post. This section keeps changing as the evaluation shifts. I decided to go ahead and post this so we can move on even though I know this is not the final state of what we have learned from this first session.

The Story of Icons of Paragon City

The run was originally intended to be six sessions with two one off sessions using different characters in the same setting and using the same rules provided by the game master. I missed one of the regular sessions so that was shortened to five. The first one off session was Halloween weekend and saw the players taking on the role of Universal Movie Monster clones funded by an unhappy Council. The other one off we played Worms: Armageddon as not many showed up as it was Thanksgiving weekend, but it was going to see the players as Walmart employees in Paragon City reliving Black Friday in a Groundhog's Day scenario. I guess I like horror themed one off games.

The Origin of Icons of Paragon City

I am a member of some forums where some of us would get together on Saturday nights and play games sometimes. More often than not the game we played was Cards Against Humanity. The game is fun, but you can only cycle through the same cards so many times before the charm begins to wear thin. Roleplaying games and an interest in trying them had been brought up a couple of times, but no one had a real go at running a game for the group as far as I know.

Leap of Fate

I am in the middle of working on a Fate campaign to be played in my FLGS. The basic concept for the campaign is Quantum Leap meets Sliders. The pitch is, “Body hopping dimensional travelers look for answers to help mend their home planet.”

I have most of the player packet written up. It’s basically a bunch of stuff I typed out for those interested in the setting or want more information than what is needed to actually play. I would share it here, but there are some changes I know will need to be made including dates and times of play.

The decision to run the game came about after another Star Wars RPG game was cancelled due to scheduling conflicts. There were actually two Star Wars games being run at the same time on the same night in the store, and both were facing this issue. An employee asked my roommate if I would be interested in picking up at least one of the games and possibly combine the two into one. I am probably the only person that had played in both games at some point. She stated I would not. Out of this one of the players is running a Pathfinder campaign on the same night now and there is someone else going to run Star Wars in that same time slot. I think it is well covered and the player running the Pathfinder game should run an interesting game.

Obligatory cute picture to break up the text.

So we get home and my roommate tells me about being asked if I would pick up the games. I was thankful she said no, but we got to talking about it right then and there. I did not want to pick up the pieces from one game, let alone two, and try to cobble them together to go forward. I was not that invested in either game despite the fact there were some great people involved in both. There was an additional problem for me with running the system in that nobody really used the dice to their full potential. The format of running the game in the store meant that there were new people jumping in and out of games. Even the people that were familiar with the dice still depended on the GMs to interpret the dice for them. The players would and add subtract the results from the dice then tell the GM what symbols were left. It was not uncommon to take five minutes or longer to work out initiative and I don’t remember ever once hearing somebody describing how a boost was set up after the GM explained to them they received a boost.

We talk back and forth for a few minutes before I even get a chance to switch to the comfy chair. I rule out running Star Wars and d20 right off the bat. Both are fine games, but Star Wars has that barrier of entry with the dice not conducive to store play, and d20 is well represented in the store. We mention Fate or Savage Worlds along with a couple of other games, but aside from saying no to Star Wars and d20 rules were not really featured in that conversation. It was not so much the rules, but the settings that were being ruled out that night.

One of the challenges of running a game in the store is that there are not only a different set of players in the game each week, but they arrive at different times due to personal schedules. I wanted a reason set up beforehand to explain why the player character is suddenly present when they were not there a minute ago. I know this can be hand waved, but if we played for more than an hour and a half then this is something that would happen each and every week.

So the player characters would pop in. I could not have them pop in as a group however. I needed a means for them to pop in, and possibly out, as individuals. This was the dimension hopping aspect of the idea behind the campaign. Then we discussed the how they were jumping in and out. This included how they were all going to the same place. After some more talking we determined their bodies were somewhere else all linked together. It was their consciousnesses that were going to these other dimensions. The inhabitation of another’s body came almost immediately as a means for them to manipulate their environment was seen as needed for long term play.

So that is how the basic idea came about. I did not know at that time why the players were jumping from dimension to dimension or any other real information beyond the basic concept of Sliders meets Quantum Leap. The talk broke down into the players becoming cats fairly quickly.