Josh the Aspie’s Blog

Today has been a long, hard, exhausting, and rewarding day at WID

Today I woke up rather early, unable to get to sleep due to excitement about the Con and hanging out with my gaming group so long. I got as much as I could done in prep for the con, then headed out. I got to Belleview quickly and early, but I find the layout of streets in the con area rather confusing and counter-intuitive as I followed the directions I was given. After asking directions, and doing a food run later, I think that I’m passingly familiar with the area now though.

I worked in the concession stand for most of the first part of the day, hauling and schlepping, arranging and labeling soda and snacks. My legs were on fire, and my knee hurt, but luckily I eventually got rotated to the front desk due to people needing someone to sit and watch it. I now have more experience with working a convention’s front desk. I had a break for lunch at Arbie’s, had a Reuben, and then someone hauled some subway down for a friend of mine, and picked one up for me on the way.

Third round we finished marshaling except for three people that had 1st through 3rd level characters, all of them were relatively young. We also had a DM. I asked the con co-ordinator Lesa, and she released me from my duties for the round, and because I hadn’t played the mod, I was able to round out the table to the minimum number of players, 4.

We started the 4 hour mod 45 min late, and one of the players was rather young and hard to keep on task. However we wound up completing the mod with the best favor possible, max money, max gold, I was able to learn a lot of info I’ll need later in the con ICly, and my character presented herself as the most competent of the group. Of course she was played by an experienced player, and she was level 3 vs the level 2, and the two level 1s.

Unfortunately, the youngest of the group, who was all over the map on trying to try rather creative, but insane things had a fair amount of that squashed, so that they could be ready in time for their father to be there, and I rather monopolized the group. But how I did it was to say “I see our best path as this. Anyone see it any differently?” and for the most part, they trusted me, and I got them through the mod well. We survived, and none of our number even got a single point of damage. Then again, if you do things right, it’s a very combat light module.

I also found out that apparently, except for a few mistakes I’ve been making, I’ve been mostly an alright GM. Those mistakes are the worst at cons and game days through, as they are mistakes about keeping a game inside it’s intended time slot. Hopefully realizations, understanding, feedback and some simple base techniques I’ve been given should make me at least an acceptable GM at the convention this week.

Also, tomorrow is the day of the interactive, where all the available GMs, including myself, will be routed to help out. I don’t have much experience running for high end tables (or playing at them) so I hope they give me a low to mid range table.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 26th, 2007 at 1:41 am and is filed under RPGs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.