PaioCon 2011 Report
So, I went to my third game convention ever….PaizoCon 2011 (PaizoCon III). The event was held June 10-12, 2011 at the Bellevue Coast Hotel, Bellevue, Washington. Paizo said they were "limiting" the tickets to 500, and I would estimate that they sold 300-350 of them. (Somebody please correct me if you know the actual number.) It seemed to me to be a larger gathering than last year.
I screwed up this year and did not get into the event lottery. Paizo holds a lottery to decide who gets into what organized play event. I failed my knowledge check with a calendar and didn't get signed up in time. I was bummed, but it turned out to be a good thing. There was a lot of gaming going on.
The convention started at 9:00 and I showed up at 8:00 to check in. Last year, I showed about 7:30 and walked directly up to the registration table. This year I was about 200' down a long, narrow hallway, waiting in a crowd of gamers. Jason Bulmahn, lead designer for Paizo, was walking up and down the line, having a good time interacting with gamers. I got his autograph on my
Pathfinder RPG book. The narrow hallway sucked. Some of those gamers apparently did not bathe before the con, and I wondered how an adult could be so careless. (Way to be a cliché, dude!) Once the line got going, it went pretty fast, but convention organizers had to move people up in line so that lottery sign-up people could get to their 9:00 game start times.
One cool thing that Paizo did was allow people to trade and/or give away spots in games. They had a box at the registration table where people dropped off game registration cards for anyone who wanted to take their place. I had been aiming to get into Erik Mona's game but all five participants showed up. (Erik is Paizo's publisher, basically the number two or three guy at the company…a former editor of
DRAGON and
DUNGEON magazines. Erik is an Acaeum member...and the most dangerous man in
OGL publishing.)
I got into a Pathfinder Society game. The Pathfinder Society is a group that has continuing characters that advance through participation in specific convention scenarios. (There's probably more to it than that, if a real member wants to jump in and explain.) Anyway, I jumped into a first level scenario built around a short adventure published in
KOBOLD QUARTERLY. It was called
Ambush in Absalom…and turned out to be an off-the-rack sewer encounter with kobolds.
So, it turns out that I game with power gamers. I took about five minutes to re-write my character feats and equipment…a first level fighter with a greatsword...and then proceeded to plow through the scenario. The other six characters in our party killed a couple of the kobolds, but my character (Tyrrandar Dragonhelm…named for my first D&D character ever) waded through the sewers and pretty much killed all our opponents. The character I built would have been totally standard in my own
Pathfinder game, but I noticed during the con that other
Pathfinder gamers tended to come down more on the roleplaying side. In the game I am most familiar with, roleplaying is what you do while you divide up and sell the treasure.
I tried to get into a 2nd Edition game being run by Ed Greenwood, who was the convention's guest of honor, but there was no space and the game was private. Greenwood may insist on a sharp line between his real persona and Elminster, but I've never seen a dude who looked more like his own character. The PaizoCon game rooms were crowded and it was a challenge for me a couple of times not to run Greenwood over when walking between the tables.
Next, I wandered into a game run by designer Robert Kendzie. Robert was running a portion of the much larger adventure,
The Tomb of Haggemoth, which he wrote for 3rd Edition modified for
Pathfinder. To his credit, Robert wasn't just there to hawk his self-published module.
(I found it later on Lulu, available here, if you're interested :
http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?s ... tSearch.y= )
Robert ran us through a portion of the module where the party has to explore in a vast cavern, walking on slippery, iron grate walkways between encounter areas, over raging waters on the cavern floor. I played Tyrrandar Dragonhelm, again, advanced to 4th level. Much slaying ensued. I had fun roleplaying my character's limited wisdom and intelligence scores…imitating Jane Cobb, from
Firefly.
On a break from Robert's game, I ran into the Frog God in the hallway….Tsathogga himself…Bill Webb of Frog God Games and Necromancer Games. (I tried to shake Bill's hand as he passed but he was clutching a handful of miniatures and could only extend one finger…which I shook.) Bill was running
Swords and Wizardry open games all convention long. With him was Skeeter Green, who does editing and johnny-on-the-spot work for Frog God Games...such as crossing Puget Sound at the last moment before the con to pick up and deliver Frog God publications to the PaizoCon dealer room. (Skeeter and I have recently worked together, although we did not know each other until the con.)
I bought a copy of
Swords and Wizardry (by Matt Finch…Mythmere here on the Acaeum) and jumped into as much of Bill's open gaming as I could get. During the weekend, a circle of about a dozen players shifted in and out of Bill's ongoing adventures.
Swords and Wizardry is a retro-clone of OD&D, with some AD&D added in. It retains many of the quirky, inexplicable and fun rules of the original game. For instance, rangers start with two hit dice and clerics don't get spells at first level. (Why?) There are also some twists on the old rules. Fighters can add to their armor class by using their dexterity to "parry" against one opponent at a time. There were new clerical turning rules that work fairly well and weight limits on equipment were a big part of the game. High or low stats give bonuses or minuses, but not large adjustments either way. The monster stats matched what one might have found in the Holmes Basic Set, with some additions.
Bill ran a house-ruled version of
Swords and Wizardry where all weapons did 1d6 damage and characters died in large numbers. Stats were rolled up in order, straight 3d6 and you played with what you got. I'm not saying that Bill is a killer DM, but he
will kill you. Also, they don't call him the Frog God for nothing…many screaming souls were sucked our game master's hideous maw. Some of the players were on their third characters by Saturday night.
Part of the problem was the lemming-like suicidal behavior of some of the group. People died by poison traps, falling out of trees, falling off of cliffs, standing in the stone jaws of demon-mouth traps, ripped apart taking on an old-school type I demon (vrock) at first level, or charging owlbears with only seven hit points between them and eternity. They died…a lot. The
Swords and Wizardry version of Tyrrandar Dragonhelm started at first level and survived it all.
We had an epic battle with the type I demon. Our wizard hit upon the good idea of repeatedly setting off the stone demon jaw trap on the demon himself…turning the tables. Three characters died in that one room…as many as a whole campaign in one of my own games. (I had advised that we not even search the place when we found it. Everyone else thought we had won!)
Bill couldn't stop talking about NTRPGCon, which he went to the week before. Apparently, it rocked, with a group of 28 players joining in at
various times for his
Swords and Wizardry games. He said it was the best con he's ever attended.
I did not register for the big Paizo Banquet last year, so I was determined not to miss it in 2011. Only 250 tickets to the banquet were sold, and they went fast. I was one of the first people to register when Paizo announced the con. As it turned out, I should have listened to Bill and Skeeter, who ditched the banquet to game. It was pretty ballsy of Bill, who was a special guest of the con…but he squared it with Lisa Stevens (Paizo's CEO) before he ducked out. The banquet featured a special guest at every table and announcements of upcoming Paizo publications. Pretty standard, really. Erik Mona and Jason Bulmahn are hilarious and charismatic speakers.
The guest of honor at my table was Dave Gross, former editor of
DRAGON and a guy who's name pops up a lot in my game collection's Exel file. Dave was interesting and diplomatic. He was willing to tell tales about people at TSR, but always in a kind way. He told me some of the nicer personal details about Lorraine Williams, who may not have known how to run a game company but was apparently a decent person a lot of the time. Gygax himself wasn't perfect, but Gross had kind words to say about him as well.
The PaizoCon III dealer room was three to four times as large as the cramped little hobbit hole of PaizoCon II. Paizo was hawking their line, of course, along with Open Design and some of the industry's other small press guys. Reaper Miniatures ran a con-long free paint-and-take workshop. (They basically babysat Bill's son, John, who painted miniatures the entire con…and was welcome to it.) I went for it with
KOBOLD QUARTERLY magazine, plunking down the cash for issues #1 and #2, signed by Wolfgang Baur.
At this stage in their company's life, Paizo Publishing is what TSR must have been like around the year 1979. They are rich and powerful (for a game company) but still small enough that the employees all know each other's names. They are in the market to make money, but they do not have noticeably swelled heads. It is said that Paizo's leaders specifically want to avoid some of the mistakes that TSR and WOTC fell into. (Although, to be clear, Paizo people have nothing bad to say about WOTC.)
The place to meet people at PaizoCon is to lurk the bar/restaurant, where all the company staff tend to congregate between events. Everyone in the company is approachable and they like to talk gaming and publishing. Also, I realized at one point that a tall, thin guy right next to me was Clark Peterson, the other half of Necromancer Games. Clark is the man whose legal prowess made the D20 explosion go boom. He was at the con for his new pdf publishing company, Legendary Games. He and Bill Webb were college roommates. They talked about how they used to call cans of Coors "potions of healing." (No other brand…just Coors.)
Anyone who wants to geek out on game celebrities (which, if you've been reading, was obviously one of my goals) could do a lot worse than attend PaizoCon. My Pathfinder book now has signatures from Ed Greenwood, Wolfgang Baur, Bill Webb, Clark Peterson, Jason Bulmahn, Lisa Stevens and Erik Mona. I could have gotten more, but I was shy about annoying people. One of the guys at the Swords and Wizardry games turned out to be game designer Lou Agresta , who runs the Iron GM competitions at cons across the country. The guy next to me turned out to be Ed Healy of the Atomic Array podcasts. The guy across the table at the Pathfinder Society game turned out to be Tim Nightengale, editor of the
WAYFINDER fanzine.
PaizoCon III cost me $35 for the three-day pass, plus $15 for the Paizo Banquet. The gift bag that went with the con almost covered the cost of the convention. When I went to GenCon in 2001, I got a bag that held a convention brochure, a lanyard and a few stickers and brochures. At PaizoCon I got two Paizo modules, a map folio, two GameMastery map packs,
WAYFINDER #5, a GameMastery deck of magic item cards, a convention-special Reaper miniature, a convention Paizo button, the convention brochure, a hardcover RPG book from Malhavoc Press, a Planet Stories novel and a Pathfinder novel, along with the usual loose advertising swag. I'd call that pretty good, even it if is Paizo clearing out items from their warehouse.
The con is still small enough that I saw a lot of the same faces from PaizoCon II. People came from all over the continent to get to this small con…reflecting the deep loyalty
Pathfinder players feel for Paizo. A lot of the customer loyalty apparently has to do with the corporate attitude of Paizo, that welcomes other third party publishers and wants to grow the entire OGL publishing community. (WOTC cancelling the print version of
DRAGON magazine, leaving Paizo with their core customers, will go down as one of the largest mistakes a game company ever made.)
It looked to me like PaizoCon III will be the last PaizoCon held at the Bellevue Coast Hotel. The convention was bursting at the seams of this venue and looks likely to grow by a third next year. I could do with a dealer room large enough to host about three times as many vendors, including guys selling dice and used game publications. On Saturday night, all the open gaming tables were full and Bill held his Swords and Wizardry games in the restaurant, after getting permission to take over a section of tables. (We made it worth their while by ordering stuff.)
Although the Pathfinder RPG is at the stage where Paizo has announced their third monster manual (the Bestiary III, which Erik Mona insists on pronouncing "BEST-iary"), and they are publishing character class hardback splatbooks, they have been smart enough not to make the game unplayable without each new supplement. Their company game world of Golarion is detailed and they are adding to it all the time. So far, their core customers do not appear to be getting tired of buying books. Their most recent addition to the Pathfinder Adventure Path line is #46, with Greg Vaughn as the lead writer. It features old friends from the Cthulhu Mythos, on license from Chaosium…which ought to give any old-school gamer happy feet. The OGL market could not be described as "booming" in the wake of 4th Edition D&D, but it is definitely alive and gaming. (If nothing else, PaizoCon 2011 established that the ongoing OGL market is good for novelty T-shirt sales.)
I'll be going again next year, wherever PaizoCon IV is held, as long as it's in the Puget Sound region. (I have also heard rumor, from Astenon, here on the Acaeum, of a PaizoCon UK.) I thought it was an excellent game value and lots of fun for an old-school geek.
And, to repeat for the record, my character never died in Bill Webb's game.
