So Gen Con is coming again in less than a month. Those of you who know me realize what that means:
It’s time for my Christmas in f**king August again, baby!
That says a helluva lot from someone who was born on Christmas.
[Editorial aside: Yes, I was actually born on Christmas. Almost every year of my life, without fail, someone new whom I’ve met over the previous year finds out about this and goes, “Get out, really?” as though Christmas is a totally verboten day to be born. And every year, I have to tell them that, yes, I actually bucked the 365 to 1 odds, just like everyone else who happened to be born on the day they were born.1
And yes, there is still something absolutely cosmically unjust about the fact that I don’t get presents on everyone else’s birthday.]
For the uninitiated (all two or so of you), this is the time of year when the biggest and most important gaming convention in all the world—and I mean that with only slight hyperbole—comes to my hometown of Indianapolis, looks around a bit, and plops its Ranch-Doritos-and-Mountain-Dew-gorged fat ass down for a four-day weekend of the best bunch of role-playing, board, card and miniature gaming with a fair smattering of anime, cosplay, writers’ symposiums, seminars and MMORPGs.2 It’s the pièce de résistance of every summer, the one time of the year that I can happily walk for a mile and a half through stifling 103 degree heat (with sweat dripping off body parts that it should have no business dripping from) and still have a wide grin on my face that won’t come off with anything short of a belt-sander.
Gen Con is far and away the best four days of the year, although Day 4 on Sunday is generally short, so there might actually be a neck-and-neck race between it, Tax Check Arrival Day, the First Round of the NCAA Basketball Tournament, and NFL Opening Kickoff Weekend.3
It really can’t be explained; it has to be experienced. Watching guys walk around the exhibition halls in Lucasfilm Stormtrooper getups, side by side with grown men in Utilikilts carrying backpacks with Naruto and Pokémon patches, and blue-painted women wearing tactically applied strips of leather/chain and elf ears and Cthulhu buttons. And then the other ten thousand people dressed in novelty tees and torn blue jeans and costumes they created that are being held together with glue, stitching and clever use of a soldering iron. And the only thing they all have in common is games. Board games. Card games. Miniature war-games. Role-playing games. An army of gamers, thirty-five thousand strong.
Hell yeah. This is my time.
Now, every year at Gen Con, I try to do something a little different. For a while, my criteria was “buy a new game and try it out,” but the last couple years the finances have not really allowed for it, and what with us expecting, I may have to *gasp* do the responsible thing and keep my buying a little under $200. $300, if nothing else.
(It’s kinda funny; I think I just heard my Trophy Wife™ give one of those disbelieving noises that generally precedes a “You just said what?”)
So at any rate, a new game may not be in the budget. However, what I’ve done each concurrent year is at least try something new. Last year, I went to the Writers’ Symposium for the first time. The year before that, I did my first Living Pathfinder Special That Involved A Lot of Running Around the Satellite Hotels and Was Therefore Awesome For Everyone But the Out Of Shape Asthmatics.
This year, I’m running a game, something very new to me. It’s Castles and Crusades, my personal favorite game that works well with a narrative/story style like the games I like to run (Dungeons & Dragons latest editions having jumped the shark and become too video-gamey for my taste and Pathfinder requiring an hour and a half of patience and a ridiculous head for numbers to create characters properly). And that will be awesome. I’ve already written up the adventure and am in the process of some tweaks, which gives me about a month to get everything put together and ready to roll.
I’m psyched.
Gen Con’s a month away, and already I have that little voice in my head that says, “You’re ready to f**king get your game on, aren’t you?”4
So hell yeah. Bring on August. Please.
1 – Not including Leap Year (February 29th) children, naturally. Those people deserve some kinda medal for hitting the bullseye on the dartboard right out of the uterus.
2 - Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, generally something like World of Warcrack, which are not real games, per se—they’re actually more like sedentary lifestyles for people who can’t focus their imaginations on a game that doesn’t exist on a digital screen of some sort. Think of them as RPG’s for the Angry-Birds-ADHD generation. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt in this case, because they are—at least in a generalized sense—games… kinda in the same way that algae is, in a generalized sense, a living creature.
3 – We’ll go ahead and assume now that the Day COUCH is Eventually Born will most likely crack the top three… although to be fair, that may completely depend on whether he or she exits the womb carrying a Gatefold 2nd Edition Dungeon Masters’ Screen or not.
4 – Among other things. It also says things like, “No one will ever know if you hit that porn site, doofus,” and “Maybe $35 isn’t that bad a price for the Collector’s Edition of the 1977 Superfriends DVD,” so its judgment is probably iffy at best.
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