GenCon Day 1 – The Return
On my first day at GenCon in 14 years, my first impression is that it’s even bigger here in Indy than what I remember from GenCon. The gaming room is absolutely insane (and loud). In my past GenCons I never actually played any RPG’s, although I had done computer games, board games, and miniatures games on a few occasions. (I didn’t really appreciate the chance to play RPG’s when I had easy access to RPG groups back then.) My Shadowrun mission game I played in ended up being my first RPG at GenCon.
However, what everyone would like to know about is MYTH. Am I right? I actually visited the MERCS booth first thing when I arrived. It was really busy, and I didn’t take too much time to speak to anyone. (I had an RPG to get to, so wasn’t going to be able to spend much time, and I really didn’t want to interrupt Brian’s demo.)
One of the first things I noticed were the play mats created for doing demos of several games. They are poster sized, and the MYTH mat has the character cards for the acolyte, apprentice, archer, and soldier printed around the sides, and has preplaced tiles in the middle. Add card deck and miniatures, and you have yourself a game. They were absolutely beautifully designed. (Sorry I can’t remember who to give credit to.) I really hope these don’t go away now that they have been designed. They are perfect for doing store demos, and for conventions. If they aren’t officially created, I may have to seriously think about printing out something similar myself at some point to really make transportation and setup easy for those kind of situations.
I did play in a demo with Kenny a bit later in the day, getting a run with the apprentice. Kenny was great. I’m hoping to get a chance to talk with him again sometime this weekend both about Myth and another project. I took a few pics during the game. The metal minis look awesome, and I regret not ordering any. The demo game goes through 2 trap tiles and one monster lair tile. Ironically, all the cards aligned, and the monsters (skeletons) never got off a single attack at us before we rolled over them. We even maximized the treasure tokens dropped. Observing a few other groups, it almost never went that smoothly, and the soldier even died in one of the demo groups.
I also had a chance to sit down with Andrew Meredith for a bit. Played two games of Mercs Conflict, a dice game where you play the CEO of the corporations in the Mercs world of the miniature game. Very elegant design, lots of strategy to it, and I was surprised how much depth there was in it for a dice game. (My previous experience with dice games was sitting down with the designers of dragon dice when it first came out, and within 20 minutes telling them the system was flawed, and one strategy should always win. After 4 hours of them trying to prove me wrong, both in games, and trying to find flaws in my math, and they conceded. The first expansion fixed the flaws in a fairly big game overhaul.) The game plays pretty well now, and much like MYTH, it has a ton of room for growth as well. Andrew already has a lot of plans on where to take it. I definitely plan on picking it up when it is released early next year. I will definitely try to get a review of the game together based on my experiences to give a bit more depth as well. It’s a nice elegant design for a game, and I’m all about that.
After playing a couple games of Conflict, Andrew and I also talked quite a bit about MYTH and it’s future as well. No, I’m not dropping spoilers right now, but lets just say the conversation validated everything I felt about the future of the game. The game as it stands right now is awesome. There is just so much you can do with it. However, even more exciting is the directions it can go over time. The potential of the game has hardly been touched right now. MERCS already has plans for the game to ensure that nobody will get bored with the game. New stories. Expanded rules. Expanded treasure. More character advancement. They aren’t waiting until it’s too late to plan the future. They are already planning now. Just some of what we discussed for character development options has me excited.
At the same time, Andrew also brought up power creep (or Codex Creep) and that MERCS thinks very seriously about this. The latest and greatest thing released should not be “better” than older stuff. Different is good. Better is not. They have a lot of experience ensuring this with their Mercs line of games, and are applying the same principal with design of MYTH and Conflict. What does this mean to us with Myth? New characters introduced down the road will not be better than the original characters. They may be able to do things current characters can’t, they may have new rules, but the overall power level will always be kept at a balance. Every character should always have it’s place, and none of them should become obsolete, just because they are old. The fact Andrew brought this up was huge for me because it’s a major topic of game design that is near and dear to my heart. I majored in economics in college, and I apply economic rules to gaming balance as much as I do to the economy. To hear someone from a game company preaching some of the same principals that I apply to gaming has me feeling even better about the future of MYTH.
Two more days, and I’m sure I’ll have a lot more MYTH stories to share by the end of the weekend.