Pretty interesting blog, actually. The fact that he just scans in handwritten pages is annoying at first, but it grows on you. So, GenCon stories. Hoom. Legend Of The Five Rings stuff In short: I blew chunks. In the constructed championships tournament, I went winless until I dropped out of frustration and exhaustion. In sealed deck I did better. (I now own a giant-ass L5R plastic mug, by the way. This mug makes the various Shelter boyz' mugs look pathetic and wimpy. REAL men drink out of giant mugs like mine.) The lowlight was probably the skirmish league event. The idea behind this was that you bought a sealed deck of cards, built a smaller-than-usual deck out of it, and played others any time over the course of the weekend. When you won a game, you got to pick a card from the other person's deck, get them to sign it, and play it in your own. I was doing relatively well until I came up against someone playing Spirit. For those who don't play L5R, a quick explanation: the game's current cycle is called "Gold", where the overall card pool has been restricted to keep massively overpowered cards out of the main playing environment - it improves the flow of the game. This means that "Gold-legal" cards tend to be weaker than "Open" cards but play more interactively (IE, are more fun). Most people assumed that the tournament was Gold, because that's the de facto standard for L5R these days, but one guy went and bought a Spirit deck. Spirit is an Open deck - it's not Gold-legal. Furthermore, in sealed-deck play, the Spirit deck is probably one of the most dominant ever. To put it in terms of metaphor - imagine playing a game of chess. Now imagine that instead of pawns, your opponent's front rank is filled with bishops, knights and rooks. That is what playing a sealed-deck game between a Gold deck and Spirit is like. And the people letting the tournament let him play it - mainly because they hadn't said it wasn't Open. That was assheaded, but I can understand the decision. Needless to say, he challenged me and I lost - and I had been doing *very* well up until that point, collecting about 27 signatures on various cards. He won two games against me and dropped my total to 19 (taking cards that had multiple signatures on them because different people had claimed them in multiple games). I lost my temper with him. This is rare for me - I'm not one to get actually angry over what's just a game, but this was really an amazing lack of poor sportsmanship on his part. I'm not sure what it says about someone who discovers he's set himself way above the field in terms of competition and just continues on - he wasn't winning because he was a good player, he was winning because he'd have to be completely retarded not to win. By doing what he did, he essentially sabotaged the entire tournament, and that got me angry. What kind of asshole does that? Was winning that important to him? In lighter news, I gave away some nice cards to some guys who were willing to fulfill my bounty conditions and creatively destroy Scorpion cards. The overall winner was a guy who turned Soshi Angai into a fortune-teller flippy thing (you know, the old back-forth open-close things you made as a kid), Bayushi Ogura into an airplane, and who literally ate Shosuro Yudoka. (Although the fellow who dipped Bayushi Norachai into sweet-and-sour sauce certainly had style points, I must grant.) I also went to the LARP (without a fancy costume, though) and got to be Hida Kuon, which was fun because Kuon has nothing resembling "polite conversation" on his character sheet. Sometimes it's fun to be the rude one. The Dealer Room Absolutely packed. There were constant lineups everywhere of people just wanting to BUY BUY BUY whatever they could get their grubby little hands on. (Yes, grubby. More on that later.) Biggest draws, unsurprisingly, were the giant corporate booths set up by Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro, Wizkids, Decipher and AEG. I was more interested in the smaller companies and the independent dealers, because I didn't want to buy the massively overpriced new stuff. Interlude: The Big Mac Index The Big Mac Index - well, best to let The Economist explain it for me: Burgernomics is based on the theory of purchasing-power parity, the notion that a dollar should buy the same amount in all countries. Thus in the long run, the exchange rate between two countries should move towards the rate that equalises the prices of an identical basket of goods and services in each country. Our "basket" is a McDonald's Big Mac, which is produced in about 120 countries. Thus the Big Mac Index - apart from being a useful tool for currency speculation - is also very much a useful tool for relative spending power of a dollar. Which is pretty damn important if you're a Canadian in the States. We all know the weakness of the loonie versus the American dollar, but the spending power of the loonie is pretty decent. Actually this bit should probably be called the "Subway Index" because that's where I went (McDonald's - ick. Incidentally, the Subway logo is different there. Weird). A BBQ rib sub - same price in American dollars there as in Canadian dollars here, thus sixty percent higher. So everything is way more expensive than it should be. Okay, Now Back To The Dealer Room So now that we've established that most stuff is hugely expensive (and I was pretty broke to begin with), most of the independent dealers were terrible as well. One guy was selling a board game for thirty dollars more than the dealer three booths away. I asked why and he shrugged. "Come back in ten minutes. It'll be gone. Nobody comparison shops here." He was right. God, people with too much damn money on their hands and they're all at the con. One noteworthy exception was the Descartes booth. Descartes is this cool company - here's their page - that's one of the major European publishers of board games. (Board games are much bigger a deal in Europe than here.) They had a lot of games I would've liked to buy for only twenty American a pop - but that was more than I could honestly afford anyway. (At thirty-two Canadian a game, that was a huge deal, especially when here they usually go for sixty.) Fat People With No Social Skills And Too Much Goddamn Money Talk about a huge reminder of why gaming as a hobby pisses me off so much - Gencon was filled with no end of fat, socially retarded fucks. Some might read this and complain that I'm being harsh, but you know what? I play games. I am not pissing in the pool from outside here. This is my hobby, and many of its practitioners irritate the shit out of me. I long ago understood why a lot of gamers have no social skills. You'd think roleplaying - an activity where you have to sit down and talk to people for hours on end - would be inherently social, but it generally isn't - you're sitting down for hours to pretend to be someone else and that means you're not talking about your life or anything like that, you're busy being Grabthar The Unavenged or similar. So you get these social retards. That's the long and short of it. Here, an example - a mate was sitting down, having purchased a few boxes of the new BattleTech collectable minis from WizKids that were being demoed at the con. I was sitting with him and he went to the bathroom, so I stuck around to watch his stuff. Up comes a (typically) grossly fat guy in his early twenties who smelled bad, and he just starts pawing these boxes. I look sharply at him. "Hey, what are you doing?" "Oh, I'm sorry, is this yours?" Oh, I'm sorry, is this yours? Jesus Christ, pal, is it yours? No? Then why the fuck are you groping it? And yes, the gamers there typically were fat and typically did smell bad. (One of the great saving graces of Legend of the Five Rings as a game is that its players tend to be cognizant of the basic rules of social interaction, like "be polite" and "wash", which is why I still play.) I'm still carrying fifteen or twenty extra pounds, but I can run a mile without collapsing, swim miles with ease and bike around downtown Toronto every day. The average gamer was typified by one guy standing in registration line, three hundred pounds at least, who said "you know, there's no such thing as a real gamer who weighs less than two hundred and sixty pounds." He of course said this while eating a big drippy burger and chewing with his mouth open. Jesus. And he wasn't even close to being the worst. The worst was one guy who was sitting on the floor. I literally thought this guy was a beanbag chair until I got within ten feet of him and realized he was breathing. No, seriously. I'm not exaggerating. One of his friends was leaning against him and sunk into him, just like into a beanbag chair. And why the fuck won't they wash? The first day wasn't too bad, but by the end of the con I was happy I'd brought Fisherman's Friends with me to kill my sense of smell. Is getting to the tables so important that you can't take twenty minutes to goddamn bathe? Do you fucks game better when you don't come in contact with soap? What's the deal? And like I said - money? Not an issue. Not in these people's worlds. I sat in briefly at the gamer's auction because I wanted to see if I could get a cheap copy of "Rail Baron", which is this great game from Avalon Hill that's been out of print for a while but they printed a lot of copies of it. Six copies in quick succession were up at one point - not one of them went for less than forty dollars. Just as a case in point, two weeks beforehand I checked on eBay. The average price for a copy of "Rail Baron" was about twenty bucks. And this lack of understanding basic economic reality didn't extend to just the buyers. There was a used-games store at the auction for sellers who wanted to sell their stuff at a fixed price. One of the things I noticed: a copy of the new Deep Space Nine RPG hardcover (a pretty book, all things considered) - priced at forty dollars by the seller. That's about six dollars more than the recommended sale price on the back cover. Getting to Meet Sam Raimi I missed the chance to meet Warwick Davis, but meeting Sam Raimi was coolness personified. The man is cooler than iced vodka. I asked him a couple of questions about Darkman and The Quick And The Dead and he smiled and said "that's the first time anybody's asked me about anything other than Spider-Man and Army of Darkness in the last two hours." And he explained to me how he composed a shot I particularly wanted to know about in Quick and the Dead. (And yes, the guy with the machine-gun-leg in Darkman, that was his idea.) Klingons Fucking No, I didn't seek it out. Yes, I saw it. I was hunting for a bathroom that still had toilet paper on Saturday. The men's rooms are excessively overworked at the con. (The women's bathrooms are in comparison safe havens for the few girls present. My friend Charlotte was gloating over this.) So I went down to the basement level, which wasn't really being used for the con proper, and found a bathroom, and walked in, and there were Klingons fucking. Two people in Klingon dress, of course. I think they were straight, although it was standing doggy style over the counter so I couldn't really tell exactly. It's not like I stuck around to watch - I swiveled and walked away REEEEAL fast. Somebody I mentioned it to asked me if it was a fetish thing and personally, I don't think so - I think some Klingons just got horny and wanted to fuck in a hurry, and that meant not bothering to remove makeup. Still. I have seen Klingons fucking. It may haunt me for the rest of my days. In Conclusion It was a pain in the ass on many levels, irritating on many others, and expensive as all hell. And I'm probably gonna go back next year.
posted by
Christopher Bird at 11:58 PM
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