This past Friday I attended the Friday After Thanksgiving Miniature And Gaming Expo (FATMAGE) in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. It was a small event hosting in an American Legion hall. I am not a huge fan on conventions, which is to say spending a chunk of money for the privilege of being in a huge crowd of strangers and buy stuff. This smaller event had about a half dozen tables for gaming and three local vendors selling hand-made goods. It was also a one day event, and earlier the organizer (who was an acquaintance) posted a plea for people to run games and I, not having enough to do [/sarcasm], agreed to run two game sessions.

I did have one good idea: use this chance to run games and genres that I have not had the chance to do in a long time. So my first pick was Prowlers & Paragons. I have been telling myself that I miss superhero games and I have not run this game in almost ten years.

For my second, I decided to step way out of my comfort zone and run urban fantasy with a heady mix of one of my other passions: roller derby. What can fit that particular mix? Cue up Buffy the Vampire Slayer the Roleplaying Game!

As I got closer to the event, I realized that I had a lot more interest in Buffy than in Prowlers & Paragons. Upon introspection, I think the reason is because my interest in superheroes as a genre is in the long-term character and plot development. A one-shot is basically get to the fight, fight, resolve the fight. In addition, a lot of superhero stories have a lot of backstory: world building, established villains, etc. Again, not an option. In the end, I just featured sample PC’s and villains from the book with a thin plot. I did place a bit of an ethical dilemma: are alien invaders, especially solo villains, treated like typical supervillains (defeat and incarcerate) or typical enemies in war (kill them)?

By contrast, injecting an element that I loved into an RPG gave it real interest for me. I spent hours building pre-gen PC’s, NPC’s, locations, and plots. I became super excited about the game.

Turns out, that was a mistake.

So when the convention happened, I realized that of the five tables that were actually occupied, three were running D&D 5E, one Call of Cthulhu, and then me. One of the three D&D games featured pre-gen PC’s at level 20, which personally sounds horrible, but for convention gamers who rarely get to that point, it was quickly filled. The CoC game was limited to four players (even though the organizers asked us to plan for eight), and one of the other games was also filled. Me? I had one player, who wanted to play CoC and was upset that he hadn’t made the four-person roster. So I recruited the odd GM’s and players from the other tables and ran Prowlers & Paragons.

It was a fun game. P&P is a fairly straightforward system, the players were cool, and I even liked the fact that a dad was introducing his son to gaming for the first time and I was a part of that. Even though I personally thought it wasn’t my best work, it still felt like a lot of fun.

What I didn’t have? Miniatures and maps. P&P is very “theater of the mind,” which fits for the genre.

Then the rest. By the afternoon more people had shown up and this time the three D&D games and the CoC games filled up. No one, not a single person, signed up for my Buffy game. What was really frustrating was that several of the games started early, even half an hour early, so I could not sign up for one of the D&D games because I felt responsible for keeping my game open until the start time in case there were late stragglers.

So in the end, I am sitting there with an empty table, hours of work wasted, and now I can not even repurpose the time to do some gaming. Which was depressing and frustrating, and gave me the chance to be an emotionally mature adult without self-confidence issues.

It was not lost on me that the D&D games in question were full of shiny toys: miniatures, terrain, etc. And it really hammered home the fact that D&D has established such industry dominance. That was likely enhanced by the fact that the organizer, most of the volunteers, and a good chunk of the participants came from the Bucks County D&D group.

So my conclusions:

• D&D > Everything else
• Flashy toys > Theater of the mind
• Established and familiar > Something new or off-the-beaten-path

At least for this kind of event. I will have to ponder if I want to agree to volunteer again, and I suppose could recycle the Buffy game for a one-shot with my friends. But on the whole the experience was a mixed bag of shells.

Thoughts? Your own convention experiences? Comments welcome.