GenCon 2013 - Day 4 - Slaying With Dice

GenCon 2013 - Day 4

8/17/2013

Lolth has a mean handshake. I'm not sure if she likes posing for pics.

Saturday we expected to see a swell in the attendance for GenCon as those who could not make it on the weekdays finally arrived. We arrived at the ICC just a little before 10 AM and the horde was massing at the gates of the Exhibition Hall. Although we had already seen much of the hall, Sean and I determined we would give another go at grabbing some of the Robotech limited edition minis. Dan wandered off to check out some demos and avoid the swarm.

We positioned ourselves at a side entrance that was fairly uncrowded. Then we studied the map to plot the most efficient course to reach the Palladium booth. As soon as the doors opened, we rushed to the booth. No joy - the line was already monstrously long when we got there and it continued to grow. We admitted defeat and decided to move on. Sean went to check out another seminar and I decided to roam the hall a bit more.

I met up with Dan and we hung out in the auction house for a bit watching the "RPG - Misc." segment. Dan was sorely tempted by some old Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1st Edition stuff, but it was more than he was willing to pay. Dan really wanted to see the costume parade at 4 PM, so we headed over to the ballroom to get in line. We got there almost hour and half early, because Dan wanted to be towards the front. I wasn't real enthused about waiting around that long, but I had nothing else planned so I stuck around.

The show proved to be worth the wait. There was pre-show entertainment by a belly-dancing troupe. There were tons of great costumes in various categories and many of the contestants had little skits they performed. I had never been to one of these shows and I was impressed. The winners: some characters from StarCraft. Dan and I were rooting for the kaiju monsters - you should have seen Godzilla's tail sweep!

We got with Sean after the show finished up and headed to dinner at the Noodles & Co. about 7 PM. Wisconsin Mac & Cheese with meatballs - 'nuff said. After dinner we roamed back over to the ICC to explore some more. We happened upon the Pathfinder Society hall upstairs. Massive amounts of PFS being played. We saw the award winning minis on display. Then we found an open table and Dan taught how to play the new game Kings of Artifice. We had a good time trying this one out.

After the game, we headed over to Hall D and the D&D play area for a 10 PM game. Jon and one his con roommates, Jeff, met up with us and got in line. They had a pretty good line and were apparently short of DMs. The plan was that we all would get to play some D&D Next together. It got modified a bit when I stepped up and volunteered to run our table. Luckily I was fairly familiar with the Next rules. We had no dice or rule books among us. I got the scenario about 15 minutes before hand and prepped the best I could. We borrowed some dice from one of the other DMs.

The scenario was "Confrontation at Candlekeep". It was a delve with a battle interactive component. The first half of the scenario our table explored one particular part of Candlekeep. The last half we teamed up with all the other tables to fight a blue dragon. Most of the guys had never played Next and Jon had never played any rpgs. We had a great time and Jon's elven ranger struck the killing blow by shooting an arrow into the dragon's eye, thus saving Candlekeep!

Things went really well considering I was remembering the rules off the top of my head. We all walked away with a cool set of dice and I got an embroidered D&D dice bag as a DM reward. We all headed off to our respective hotels for some much needed rest.