My Origins-2014 Story

My Origins-2014 Story

Like all great Origin stories, mine has both tragedy and triumph.

This was my first trip to the Origins Game Fair, held each year in June in Columbus, Ohio.  it’s held by GAMA (The Game Manufactures Association) and is generally more focused on Board games / Card games than RPG’s.  It runs for a full 5 days and this year that was June 11th – 15th. I was unable to go for the full 5 days, but I was given my first PRESS badge and want to thank GAMA and the Origins crew ever so much for allowing me to attend their show.

My goal, as a full-fledged member of the Press, was to check out any updated information on the upcoming D&D 5E and specifically the new Organized Play program: D&D Adventurer’s League. I also wanted to play in some of the 40th Anniversary of D&D games and the newly announced Codename: Morningstar Demo.

Due to my schedule, I was not able to make it to the D&D Adventurers League Panel but it was covered and you can find some of that coverage here from EnWorld
The first thing on my Agenda on Saturday (after getting my badge) was to attend one of the CODENAME: MORNINGSTAR run-throughs. Only very recently released, the details of this suit of interactive eTools to coincide with the release or soon thereafter of D&D 5E, were slim. For 2 generic tickets (4 bucks) I was able to attend one of their presentations were they previewed the tool and then allowed us a hands-on demo with it. Everyone there had to sign a NDA and we were not allowed to take any pictures. I asked and I am allowed to talk about it in general terms, but nothing specific. I’ll say this: It does what it should do, but doesn’t (yet) do what it COULD do. Part of the process of the hands-on demo was for us to give feedback. There were two tables in each demo (10 or so attendee’s total) and both tables had several suggestions they said they would take back and many more they said had already come up. At its heart, the current version of the program is a guided character builder, similar to what DDI did for 4E before it went to a Cloud based program and sucked.

It is very possible, under the current ruleset with this program, to create a new character and be playing in 10 minutes. You make choices of Race/Class first. Then get your stats. You can generate them or pick your own (I will likely still roll mine and then fill them in) but the DM has access to see what you’ve done and it will track things like Race bonus +2 vs. System user + 8 (i.e. cheating!)  At least it would have  if the sync feature is working. During our demo the internet went down so we could not actually demo any of the synch features.

Beyond the character building aspect they are working on using the program as an adventure management tool for the DM. By this, I mean that your DM could (in theory) run an entire game using only this program off of an electronic device. Not in a Roll20.net VTT way, they still expect that you are sitting around a table, but the DM would be able to see maps, track monsters vitals and have access to any rules they would need.

When new material is released it will be added to the account and available on the device. So you could buy a module in eForm the same day it is released physically and it will have all the maps/monsters/rules integrating into the system and be ready to run.  Very cool!  We got to try it out on iPads and it was very fast and responsive.

Lots of the big questions, such as:  how much will it cost? Is it a subscription or a one-time cost? Will it replace DDI or work along side? Will there be a marketplace for content creators and not just contract vendors? Most of the answers were either ‘We can’t say” or “we don’t know yet”.

They did say that a beta test would be in the works in the next couple of weeks and that there would be open sign-ups for it. Not sure how limited it will be but I will certainly try to get into that.

Lastly, each of us were given a commemorative coin for attending with a special code that will allow us to unlock a ‘badge’ in the final version when it comes out. Which is very cool. What is also cool is without going into too many details, I ended up with 2 of these. So, perhaps in the near future a follower of the show may be able to get their hands on said coin?
Once the Codename: Morningstar demo was over, I had to rush over to my second event: a demo of the DC superhero deck building game. I have emphatically expressed my love for Legendary: the Marvel Super-Hero deck building game and have heard this one was different but good. I had signed up for a tournament (but didn’t realize that) but when I got to the table there was only one other person there for the event. The organizer gave  us a  refund and allowed me and the other attendee to run through a game while he explained the rules.

This game, in the current non co-op play version, you either select or are randomly assigned a superhero that you are playing (these are oversized cards, easily separate from the regular deck).  Each Superhero has a power or ability that helps build synergy with other card types. These are: Villians, Heroes, Super-Powers, Equipment and Locations.  Similar to Marvel: Legendary you start with a deck made of sub-optimal cards and use those cards to slowly ‘buy’ better cards.  There are affects that make you take weakness cards which are essentially dead cards in your hand and even have negative Victory points so they hurt you at the end of the game.

You have a Super-Villain stack that is random except for the first one. You defeat them by paying their cost and they go into your deck (representing your ‘experience’ at having beat them).  After a Super-Villain is defeated you turn over the next one who gets a FIRST APPEARANCE attack that effects all players. The game is over when you defeat the last Super-Villain or run out of cards in the main deck. You then count up Victory Points to see who has the most and is the winner.

We played with the newest expansion, Heroes Unite. In the 45 minutes or so that I played, I got the hang of it and really started to dig it. I prefer the co-op play of Marvel Legendary but hate the set-up and take down of it. This game can be going in 5 minutes if you organize your cards (and since I have a touch of OCD, mine will be organized). When I mentioned that I prefer Co-op play, I was told that a future expansion would introduce rules for Co-op. I’ve checked and the Crisis Expansion set to release in the 3rd quarter of this year (no specific date) will include the Co-op rules. The next expansion, Forever Evil, lets you play as the bad guys, but doesn’t mention Co-op. I ended up buying both the basic game and the expansion. I’m always looking for games that I can get my non-gamer wife to play with me (she likes Marvel Legendary as well, but not as much as I do) and hoped this would be into this one as well.

So far, pretty good. Now for  some tragedy:

I had gotten a text from Jared (who you may know as having played Wang in some early Made Men games and who had gone with me to Origins) that our 1:00 PM scheduled game had started at 12:00 (the DC Hero thing started at 12:00 also and I hadn’t checked my phone after I got there). So I bailed a couple minutes early and rushed over and got to the Hyatt Ballroom where all the official D&D events were happening and joined into the already in-progress game.

I double-checked my ticket. It said 1:00 pm. Jared was only there on time because we had already been there for the Codename: Morningstar event and he was just hanging around waiting for me. So I missed out on the first hour of the game. It wasn’t like I had my arm chopped off, but that was a big disappointment. And I was kinda put off that no one seemed to think this was a big deal. I’m not that hard to please, but it would have been nice to get an apology, or maybe even a refund. It’s like if you get bad service as a restaurant. A manager should come over. Maybe you don’t get a free meal, but a desert would be nice. But I got nothing. Just “sorry, the tickets were wrong.”

This sums up my overall feeling of the Offiicial D&D events at Origins: un-organized and lackadaisical. I know that Origins is more geared toward board games than RPGs, but if this is the level of connectivity we can expect from WOTC on their organized play events, I’m concerned.

Also, we had a huge ballroom for our games, but it was not even 25% filled. Not a strong showing for my favorite RPG of all time (to be fair, I wasn’t there Tuesday through Friday, so maybe it was bursting on those days?)

Having said all that, I had a blast in the game. This was the module Legacy of the Crystal Shard using 5E rules and part of the 40th Anniversary of D&D Celebration. Our DM was fantastic. His name was Gary M. from Louisville, KY. He ran our adventure like he wrote it, or was making it up as he went. I’m not sure he every really looked at the adventure notes, he did voices for most of the NPC’s and kept the battles moving fast. I would give him a solid A on his DM’ing skills. My only criticism (for this game, more to that later) was that he normally uses maps and minis and he is not as comfortable with Theater of the Mind battles and there were times it was hard for the players to know exactly where people were and what was going on. That’s the biggest issues with TotM games, to be fair, but you could tell he hadn’t done much of it.

I had a chance to speak to him briefly after the game and found out he has a website where he posts some of his home game stuff. I haven’t had a chance to review it myself, but will be checking it out and hope you will also. If you do, tell him I sent you.

http://everygrain.blogspot.com

After this game we had a break, so we toured the exhibit halls and then got our hotel check-in done and had dinner.

Our next event, also part of the 40th Anniversary of D&D, was a DnD 4E game using the King of the Trollhaunt Warrens module. As we’ve covered many times. i’m not the biggest fan of 4E, but I don’t hate it like some do. I played in a 4E game at GenCon last year and had a lot of fun. This, sadly, was the single worst experience i’ve had playing any RPG . . . well, ever.

If this was my first experience playing D&D or any RPG for that matter I likely would have never come back.

It was that bad.

We are going to cover most of the specifics in a Table Topics podcast that will be out next week (6/26) but I’ll say this:
1) The original DM had to cancel so someone got voluntold to run it (He gets some credit for stepping in)
2) The fill-in DM had a horrible tooth-ache and was not at 100% (again, credit for powering through)
3) The DM had no idea how to run this game and i’m not sure any game
a)Several times he had stop and call over a player from an adjacent table to ask for a rules clarification
4) I would have been happier had the game just been canceled. Money back or not, I could, have found something else to do with my time. Games on demand most likely.

I promise I’m not just leaving it out to lure you into listening, but It would take me pages here to write out what will take only a few minutes to explain verbally.

So that night ended on a very sour note for me. The game wasn’t over until almost midnight, and since I’m old, it was straight to the hotel and the promise of a new day.

Sunday, we only had one event scheduled which was I was really what I was here for. The DnD 5E Play test of the new D&D Adventurers League games.

Remember when I said the whole thing was un-organized? Yeah, more of that here. Maybe it was my expectations, but the whole thing seemed . . . off, somehow. We were bunched closely together on 4 tables because someone named Chris (no one explained who that was) was supposed to come talk to us as a group, but he never showed. So we had 20 people crammed together on 4 tables right next to one another playing a game where you could hear the other tables doing the same thing you were doing (sometimes slightly ahead of us) whether you wanted too or not.

I think the mysterious “Chris” was the main missing element. We got no insight into what we were doing, how we were helping the process, what they were looking for as far as feedback or how the program would be run. We sat down, the DM handed out pre-gens and we started. There were no introductions (of each other as players, the DM or the characters). It took me awhile to get settled into the game because it was such a cold opening.

For these games, we were supposed to play 5 one hour missions as part of the Defiance in Phlan series (The session was only 4 hours long, so we could not have gotten to all 5, and barely managed to get through 3 of them – again: poorly organized)

We had a good table, though, and the games were fun once we got started. The three adventures, designed to be short, were very rail-roady but interesting.  One was pretty much a straight forward dungeon crawl and combat, another a Role-playing who-done-it and the other a puzzle scenario.I liked the design of them and think they will be a hit with new players.

Because we had had such a great time yesterday playing with Gary as DM, Jared and I were able to work it out so we could get him as our DM again. Maybe it was “last day of the Con” syndrome, but he didn’t bring his A game to the table on Sunday. It was still better than the Saturday night game, and still a solid experience. I’d give him a B here, but it was still a bit of a letdown. Gary clearly didn’t have these memorized like he did the one from Saturday morning. He had to keep referencing the materials, which were on his phone and not printed PDFs which seemed to cause him trouble finding what he needed at times and reading it. A printed booklet would have been much better. I’m hoping  they will have those at the actual events.

Once our third adventure wrapped up (which happened very shortly  when another organizer came over and said “wrap it up”) we were given a sheet of paper with a link to give feedback with no further explanation.

And that was it for the D&D games.

I had fun in two of the three, had a blast in one of three and wanted to murder the DM and take over in one of the three.

After the RPGing was done, I headed back to the exhibit hall to finally come face to IRL face with my podcasting partner, @TheCalebG. He was checking out the board game demos with his wife and a couple of friends.

I found them trying out Smash Up. Since Jared and I were exhausted and he was with other people, I didn’t want to keep him too much. So we pretty much just said Hi. I also gave him some maps that we are going to discuss on a future podcast so he could review them as well. (Caleb plans on writing up his Origins 2014 experience as well).

Lastly, I bought a new Forged Foam sword. Last year at GenCon, I bought a sword and shield combo. At home, my 4 year old generally takes the sword and my 3 year old takes the shield and they fight the Dragon (me). I got the other sword so they could both have one.

After getting home and giving it to them, we had a battle in the living room of epic proportions. All I can say is this: after seeing my 3 year old rush at me and then beat my ankles black and blue with that sword I have a sudden and overwhelming fear of Halfing Barbarians.
That’s my Origins story. Tragedy and triumph. Did I have fun? Yes! Will I go back next year? Yes. Caleb and I are hoping to have a more official presence next year with some on-the-floor interviews, and possibly run a few games ourselves. I hope to get a Press badge again, but even if not, I plan on being there in 2015. If I do run a game though, I promise this: If I end up with a tooth ache, I’ll just cancel my game.

~Michael

P.s. I got the wife to play DC Heros with me.

She hated it.

YAY!