So as of today I've visited two local game conventions in two consecutive weekends. Last weekend I was in Bloomington, IL for FlatCon and today I went to Springfield for a taste of I-Con. Both of these are small local conventions with attendance in maybe the hundreds.
At Flat-Con the role-playing section was dominated by the RPGA, with Living Greyhawk 3.5 events winding down the campaign and Living Forgotten Realms well-attended. I talked to one active RPGA friend who boths DMs and plays that said a lot of people he knew were making the switch of both campaign setting and game edition with little difficulty. And my informant was really digging LFR's crazy new campaign rules.
Meanwhile, the roleplaying in Springfield was dominated by Pathfinder, with a smattering of other 3.5 events. Not a single 4E game was scheduled for the weekend. In fact, if you wanted to play an rpg besides 3.5, your choices were a single game of Dark Heresy (the new 40K rpg, right?) and All Flesh Must Be Eaten. And those games were running at the same time, so you couldn't play both.
I found it pretty dang weird that these two cons would be so polarized like that. The towns they're in are only like an hour's drive apart.
Its sorta like that around here, too, Jeff. We have some early Pathfinder adherents, a separate sizable populace still playing OD&D through 3rd Ed., and then the 4e crowd. There's not a lot of crossover, really. There is definitely an audience for both Pathfinder and 4e, though.
ReplyDeleteI also run into a lot of anger at WotC, with some of it justified, some not, and standard "rage against the system" stuff. A lot of that crowd isn't just not converting to 4e, but is pretty hostile to the game itself. You should have seen the Keep on the Shadowfell demo.
I haven't been to a 'real' convention in at least a year, but to confirm what you noted, yes Dark Heresy is the Warhammer 40,000 RPG.
ReplyDeleteI mention it because the last game I ran of it (this past Friday) made me think of you, Jeff. The violent and psychotic Player Characters attended a fancy dinner party (of course).
I wanted a way to easily tell PCs who they might be standing near or talking to at such a party. So I created a D100 table called "Jerks to Talk To". Jerks who might help advance the plot or hasten the inevitable violence were placed on the table multiple times.
Random tables make me think of this blog. I dare say you inspired me to make the table in the first place!
So...thanks. :)