Day 24 of #RPGaDay2024 and we're asking for famous advice?
"Acclaimed Advice"
Call me a stubborn old man, but I've got years of bad decisions, poor choices, and odd rashes to develop my own brand of gaming wisdom. Unless your Ken or Robin and you host a podcast with a different Ken or Robin, I tend to take things with a grain of salt.
So if we look at acclaimed advice, I need to go back thirty years and talk about hot dogs.
1995 July - My buddy Wooly and I were very tired, but thought we were hot shit. We had been allowed to be official demonstrators for Legions of Steel by Global Games. We had done some local cons in Pennsylvania and New York, but had just returned from Origins when it was in Philly. We had been bookended by official 40k terrain sets on the left, and Uncle Duke's Northwest Frontier Wargaming "Extravaganza" and managed to maintain a large and captive audience for all of our games.
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| Wooly (left) and some jerk name ViscountEric, in the wee hours of the morning, before an epic drive to Toronto. |
A few weeks later, and his Jeep, "Old Blue" was packed up for a shorter trip to DexCon, in Edison, New Jersey. I daresay that DexCon was more diverse than Origins. More Indy press games, more board games before board games were cool, even Nexus, which I will erroneously call a long-running meta-LARP campaign, that still happens to this day.
The miniatures room was even more awesome than Origins, because of the MACROTURES.
There was a Star Wars space game... in 1995. There was largely nothing produced at the time, yet, on a 30-foot black cloth, X-Wings, Y-Wings, and Corvettes fought against various TIE Fighters, all on a 3-foot tall flight stands... WITH A SIX-FOOT LONG STAR DESTROYER LOOMING IN THE BACKGROUND, on a base with wheels on it.
When that wasn't running, it was OGRE Macrotures. OGRE was original a hexbased game where you moved chits around representing infantry, tanks, artillery, and GEVs against a single OGRE, a gargantuan cybernetic tank. This has been been made into miniatures at an "Epic" scale, that's either 1/285th scale (Battletech), or even smaller than 6mm.
Macrotures? Let's bump the vehicles up to 25-30mm you'd expect for 40k (and Legions of Steel). Never got to play, but oh boy was it fun to watch.
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| From @sjgames Twitter account, circa 2013. Everything was painted up in the mid-90s. |
As GMs we got some of the limited perks from the con, most notably lunch and dinner, if we liked hot dogs and got to the staff room within 15 minutes of a posted time.
Saturday afternoon, the con staff came to us with food! It just happened the fellow behind us in hot dog charity was Steve Jackson himself... the American one. He was there as a Guest of Honor, and was usually giddy either participating in, or simply watching the OGRE games.
Steve knew about Global Games (and they were an advertiser in Pyramid, I believe,) so we talked for a bit.
Wooly, who had already met one of his heroes from FASA, "Who knew before this weekend, that I'd be standing around, eating hot dogs with Steve Jackson? Life can’t get better than this…"
Steve casually quipped back, "You need to get out more often."
Call it what you will, but we oddly took his self-depreciating advice seriously. We didn't need two GMs running each demo, so for the rest of Saturday and Sunday, we took turns exploring the con more.
While I won't declare that "You need to get out more often" became my mantra and changed my life, it is something you need to do, at a con, as well as regular gaming.
Get out of the D&D room
Get out of the Pathfinder room
Leave the Indy Designer's suite and try trad games.
Find a Historical RPG or Historical Wargame.
Leave your 12-your Napoleonic Wargame and play ANYTHING else.
Try the "NEW HOTNESS" just once, before it's a flash in the pan and disappears.
And CCG players? *Insert the worst hygiene jokes here. Seriously, it applies to all other gamers as well, deodorant is a supplement to showering, not a replacement* It was bad -pre-CCG 35 years ago, I think it's the same % of attendees, just with larger numbers of gamers. /Rant.
Seriously, go out there and see all the hobby has to offer, and if a famous game designer/author/game company owner shares your space over boiled hot dogs in New Jersey, be cool... say you love INWO, say fnord if and when it's appropriate, and set up your next game of Legions of Steel, man....
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