{"id":13655,"date":"2016-08-24T02:06:13","date_gmt":"2016-08-24T06:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geekstronomy.com\/?p=13655"},"modified":"2016-08-24T02:06:13","modified_gmt":"2016-08-24T06:06:13","slug":"e-v-a-gen-con-2016-a-brief-review-of-some-new-games-or-have-dice-will-travel-but-only-as-far-as-indy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geekstronomy.com\/?p=13655","title":{"rendered":"E.V.A.: Gen Con 2016 a Brief Review of Some New Games…or “Have Dice Will Travel But Only as Far as Indy”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The best four days of gaming is over but I am \"Gen<\/a>still riding the gaming high.\u00a0 I took a hiatus from Gen Con last year and was anticipating this year being another great year.\u00a0 I was not disappointed.\u00a0 Cos-play was at an all-time high this year.\u00a0\u00a0 The lines moved smoothly through the will-call and event-registration lines.\u00a0 I went this year I wanted to play games out of my comfort zone a bit.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My first event was a game call 13th<\/sup> Age<\/strong> by Pelgran Press<\/a>. It is an improved version using some dungeons and dragons 4<\/span>th<\/span><\/sup> edition-like mechanics and an a more organic background system that allows the players background to justify a bonus rather than a more skills based system.\u00a0 It also has \u201cone unique thing about your character mechanic\u201d.\u00a0 You decide, when you create your character, one unique thing that is special about your character.\u00a0 It can be that you created a song so beautiful it made a dragon cry, or you defended the dwarven king and he honored you with a pass that always allows you entry to the dwarven kingdom.\u00a0 Within the campaign, you are the only one with that thing.\u00a0 Combat play has a 4<\/span>th<\/span><\/sup> edition feel in that you have powers you can use once a day, twice a day or all the time.\u00a0 I played this game twice this year and both times enjoyed myself greatly.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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The next game I played was an oldie but a goody; Alternity.\u00a0 This RPG has been around since 1998. It was one of the last products the company TSR made before they were bought by WOTC.\u00a0 It is a skills-based system, which differs from most other products from TSR which used the D20 system.\u00a0 Alternity was a universal base system. It has three main product lines published by TSR. The main product line is a far future standard Sci-Fi game that had many options to make it unique from other campaigns run in the same far future base.\u00a0 The second has a modern or near future X-files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural feel.\u00a0 The third is a multi-dimension type game.\u00a0 There are an infinite number of dimensions, each different from ours.\u00a0 The ones closest to ours are the least different.\u00a0 The further away from ours, the stranger the dimension becomes. I enjoyed the nostalgic time playing Alternity.\u00a0 It has a large online community that still updates rules and campaigns.<\/p>\n

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Savage Worlds came next.\u00a0 First, I really like the Savage Worlds system by Pinnacle Games<\/a>.\u00a0 Like Alternity, is a base system that has spawned more than a hundred licensees.\u00a0 The difference between the two is that Savage Worlds has spawned all types of genre; Sci-Fi, pulp, horror, modern, post-apocalyptic and more.\u00a0 The system is easy for the player to learn and is modified by whatever campaign specific rules apply.\u00a0 This game was set in a future where an alien race had attacked the earth and mutated many citizens. We called them demons. Another race came and helped us banish them to another dimension.\u00a0 We called them angels.\u00a0 A side effect of the angels was that some people gain powerful mental powers. After the angels left, those with powerful mental powers took charge. The earth is no longer inhabitable so man lives on seven giant space stations each controlled by an emperor.\u00a0 You play a seraph, an elite guard for the emperor.\u00a0 The game was fun and I had a good time.\u00a0 The player to my left knew a great deal about the world but the GM admitted he didn\u2019t know savage worlds rules that well.\u00a0 I knew a great deal about savage worlds but nothing about the setting.\u00a0 I helped the GM in the combat rules and everyone had a good time.<\/p>\n

Next up was a Spycraft 3.0 play test by Crafty Games<\/a>.\u00a0 I love Spycraft. It is perhaps my favorite game to play at a convention.\u00a0 It is a game where every character gets their 15 minutes of fame and pure awesomeness. Crafty has been developing the third addition rules for some time now.\u00a0 I talked with Alex Flagg co-founder of Crafty Games; he said they would soon be putting up a Kickstarter to get 3.0 up and on the shelves for the many devoted players awaiting this game.\u00a0 They have been using the same playtest characters for several years now though they do bring new missions for the agents.\u00a0 Everyone had a blast as usual.\u00a0 The main mechanic is action dice that you can spend to add to a roll or force a critical failure on the GM, but the GM also has these dice as well.\u00a0 Another mechanic of third addition, which seems to work really well, is the escalation die.\u00a0 Every time 5x the escalation die occurs, the side (GM or players) that has spent more action dice gets to decide something to happen in their favor.\u00a0 It is a great mechanic to get people using their action dice, rather than horde them and end up not using them at all.<\/p>\n

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I spent a good amount of time in the dealer hall this year talking with the many new game companies.\u00a0\u00a0 There are an astounding number of new companies starting their games with Kickstarter.\u00a0 One such company, Endtransmission<\/a>, has released two games and several expansions of both through Kickstarter.\u00a0 Their newest game is Splinter which I will be reviewing soon, so stay tuned.\u00a0 The people at the booth\u00a0were very nice and their games have two different systems rather than using a universal system.\u00a0 They say they are doing quite well and the fact that they have successfully run several Kickstarters with the product out within 6 months of fulfillment of the Kickstarter is pretty amazing.\u00a0 Like the RPG-boom of the DnD 3.0 open gaming license, we are seeing another boom of RPG creative games because of Kickstarter and universal rule sets like savage worlds.\u00a0 People, GMs, and players alike all have great ideas.\u00a0 We have all thought at one time or another, \u201cI can make a better rule set than what we are playing\u201d.\u00a0 Just look at blogs and message boards of your favorite games. They are filled with suggestions of either how to do something better, how to use house rules to fix a mechanic or \u00a0how to stylize the game toward what a group is looking for.\u00a0 One only need look to Pathfinder to see that someone can do it better than the original.\u00a0 Today we are seeing Kickstarter is giving GMs the courage to try and produce their own games. I am always looking for a new game to try.<\/p>\n

-Michael Allport<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The best four days of gaming is over but I am still riding the gaming high.\u00a0 I took a hiatus from Gen Con last year and was anticipating this year being another great year.\u00a0 I was not disappointed.\u00a0 Cos-play was … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,15],"tags":[4538,4536,4534,2349,4532,641,4531,4074,4537,4535,4539,677,4533],"class_list":["post-13655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-e-v-a","category-training-simulations","tag-13th-age","tag-alternity","tag-crafty-games","tag-dungeons-and-dragons","tag-endtransmission","tag-fantasy","tag-gen-con","tag-michael-allport","tag-pelgran-press","tag-pinnacle-games","tag-role-playing-games","tag-rpg","tag-spycraft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geekstronomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geekstronomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geekstronomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geekstronomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geekstronomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13655"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/geekstronomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13655\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13657,"href":"https:\/\/geekstronomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13655\/revisions\/13657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geekstronomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geekstronomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geekstronomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}