GenCon Day 3 – Demos, Demos, and More Demos

I started off Sunday the way I ended Saturday, over at the True Dungeon hall.  With that out of the way, I headed back over to the exhibit hall and checked on how the Sunday crowd was reacting to Myth.  I took some more photos, swapped a few stories, and since the crowds seemed to be lightening up a bit on Sunday, I sat in on a few demo games when a group was short a player.   In the end, I’d played through a demo game with each of the 4 heroes (Accolyte, Apprentice, Archer, and Soldier) over the course of the weekend, along with the slaughterfield game with the soldier.

The final game of the day was with Kenny (while Brian started prepping for cleanup. )  He dropped an interesting tidbit that was new to me, although I’m sure someone out there already knew this info.  Brian was evidently the lead designer for heroes, their decks, and their mechanics, while Kenny concentrated more on the mechanics behind the monsters.

All four groups I played in were successful in surviving the trap and monster tile of the demo.  Three out of four finished the quest from the second tile.  (One group failed to kill 4 minions in a single attack to impress the bard writing our epic.  Ironically, it was a demo Brian was playing in, and his attack picking off one of the minions prevented quest completion.  (I didn’t speak up about it, because moving quickly was more important than finishing quests when playing a demo.)  The last game of the day got that same quest (hand selected by Kenny since he thought it worked well in Brian’s demo earlier) and we managed to accomplish the goal 3 times over with some nice maneuvering.  It was a bad day for the darkness in that game.

After the Myth was boxed up (next to be seen in Germany I believe), Brian was kind enough to grab Keith and Kenny for a final picture to close the con.  After what I’m sure had to be a long week, big crowds, and braving some mango tacos, they were still all smiles.  I take that as a good sign that it was a successful convention.

GenCon Day 2: Slaughterfield!

Unlike most everyone else at GenCon, I actually went back to my hotel and slept Friday night.  As a result, I was feeling pretty good Saturday.  (Yes, my day 2 was Saturday, since I didn’t arrive in Indy until Friday morning.)After doing some exploring of some other parts of the exhibit hall and hitting the auction room for a little bit, I made my way back over to the MERC booth for some Slaughterfield.

The Slaughterfield demo was set up for two players, and Brian Shotten  helped walk us through the waves as we went.  He mentioned he didn’t believe anyone else had made it through 4 waves, which I obviously took as a challenge.  Unfortuantely, as wave 5 spawned, the other player had to leave for another session, so we don’t know how far we actually would have ended up getting.  (We were sitting very good for treasure, and the Apprentice had esacped the situation that I thought would lead to his death in round 4) so I really think we could have made it through the next wave intact, but it was going to be rough.

The slaughterfield demo is based on a 10 step spawn list, and using counters to time when the next spawn will appear.  The advanced slaughterfield rules will include custom spawn cards, custom treasure cards, and objectives.  I can tell you at least one of the objectives involves infiltrating the enemy spawning zones.  (We ran into enemy spawn zones to kill faster and grab treasure, which is why the topic came up.)

After slaughterfield, I introduced myself to Brian (since I hadn’t up to that point…just blending in with the other gamers), and we talked a bit about various MYTH related stuff, as well as some of the other products MERCS has coming out in the next year.  (2014 will be a very busy year MERCS, with 3 game launches including MYTH.  I’m sure everyone was already aware of the MERCS and MYTH product lines, and Conflict has been mentioned both in my first GenCon post, as well as in my Q&A with Andrew Meredith earlier in the year.  I didn’t get a chance to learn much about the 4th yet, but you can be on it being a topic of discussion in an upcoming Q&A with designer Kenny Sims.)

A few key Myth notes:

• The German partner has really been on the ball with this project, and should be be shipping almost simultaneously with the US release.  (Sorry, I didn’t think to ask about French translations.)
•   Just like everything else with this project, MERCS is planning and preparing for the shipping once everything gets to them.  They should get everything turned around in a very timely manner to get the games in our hands.  At the same time, they are being very realistic in their expectations and their ability to deliver, so I don’t feel like they are overpromising.
• Base games will be shipped separate from stretch goals.  They’ve been working on the best options for shipping the stretch stuff efficiently.
• MERCS already has plans for the expansions for 2014, and going into 2015.  This is really important for people coming into the game after the kickstarter so that more heroes and monsters come into play for everyone.

With that, I went off for an evening of naked true dungeon before heading to bed.

(No we didn’t actually play naked, we played without bringing equipment tokens, only using whatever got picked up during the adventure.)

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.

I’m very much looking forward to meeting the MERCS team at GenCon, possibly getting an interview, and definitely getting some pictures and comments on the game.

I won’t get the full weekend due to work, but here is my plans for my GenCon Experience.

I’m working through Thursday, and then catching a bus from Memphis to Nashville to Indianapolis, arriving in Indy Friday morning.  I’ll stop by my hotel to drop luggage and get a quick shower, hopefully arriving in time for my Shadowrun missions session.

The rest of my day is devoted to the show floor, with MERCS being my top priority to take in the progress on MYTH.

Saturday and Sunday will be split between True Dungeon and the show floor.

Can’t wait to see and play MYTH live, and meet the design team.  Should be a really fun weekend.