PAX Prime 2013
Hello.
Previously I've attempted to match Matt for output and have ended up getting quite comprehensively behind (I know I'm behind, I've got excuses reasons. shh.) I've decided to do things a bit differently this trip, I'm going to be writing probably one post per location rather than daily and not forcing it.
So. PAX Prime. I set off at far too early thursday morning, arrived at the airport nice and early only to whisk straight through security leaving me with quite a bit of time to kill. Breakfast helped pass the time. I hopped on the plane which deposited me in... Frankfurt. This is what you get when you go for budget tickets. A few more hours to kill and then I was on my way to Seatlle only delayed by an hour.
To try and cut down on the amount of jetlag I end up with I'm taking the revolutionary step of knocking myself unconscious at appropriate times, which seemed to work well. I arrived late-ish evening and again breezed through, more through luck than any plan. I hopped on the light rail and was soon at the hotel.
This is the point it went a little wrong. The hotel had no record of me as a guest (the booking was in Matt's name) and wouldn't be able to sort it out by phone, I would just have to wait for him to arrive. Luckily I had spotted that there was an attendee organised boardgame event going on at the Sheraton a couple of blocks away, so after grabbing dinner and contacting Matt via Google hangouts I headed over there.
There was a good range of games being played, from love letter to a group looking to play diplomacy (I overheard one of the players comment on the number of people walking past shaking their heads knowingly). After a bit of a wait I ended up in a game of Battlestar Galactica with the new Daybreak expansion (with no other expansions in play, except for new characters). I opted to play Hotdog as he's new this expansion.
If you're not interested in BSG, you may want to skip the next three paragraphs.
It was a good game, things were going very (too?) well until I became a Cylon at the sleeper phase (distance 5 in daybreak). I started leaning some crises and being a little less helpful than I could be, trying to work out where the other cylon card had landed. Unfortunately I ended up brigged from a crisis thanks to the other cylon. It did give me some "not a cylon" credit but unfortunately the other cylon was brigged shortly after and the quiet period that followed sort of gave us away and let the humans get near completion.
The humans got me out of the brig, albeit with some mild suspicion. The other cylon had been given away by a crisis after his turn and wasn't going to get to declare... and we were near the human win. I dropped him an executive order with considerable glee but it wasn't enough and the humans made the final jump with the worst dial being 3.
My main regret is that I didn't actually get the names of the people I was playing with. I had a fantastic time, especially given I was pretty jetlagged by the time the game wrapped up at midnight. The new expansion makes numbers of players other than 5 viable apparently, and from what I saw seemed very good. I'm not sure how it would interact with the other expansions (although a glance at the rules indicated that a lot of the rulebook dealt with exactly that) but not having the cylon fleet board in play did make space combat something to simply jump away from again.
As the game wrapped up I stepped into the lobby to find a barrage of messages from Matt. Turns out I was slightly out of range where I was playing and he'd got in some time ago. I headed over to the hotel, noted the unusual number of bathrooms and promptly passed out.
The next day we got up pretty early and headed over to the keynote and first Q&A. Both good events, Peter Molyneux has managed to convince me to have at least a look at Godus when it comes out, although I'm still not sure about game worlds that force multiplayer through regional interaction in the standard (would normally be single player) campaign. Mike and Jerry were their usual entertaining selves, and time flew.
After lunch and a brief spin round the show floor we took a breather, then missed the next panel we were looking at going to due to an unclear UI design in the guidebook app (my story and I'm sticking to it). We decided to forgo the concerts this year as most of our favourites weren't about (no Paul and Storm, no JoCo. Frontalot was on Saturday and we didn't have tickets that day). We headed over for an evening with Scott Kurtz (PvP) which was hilarious.
Saturday was a bit of an experience in streaming frustration. We didn't have passes so we watched the make a strip panel and Acquisitions Inc. via streaming. Even on Matt's phone hotspot, it was juddery and would occasionally stop and then pick up tens of seconds or a minute later. I don't think the problem was our end, I think it was just oversubscribed. For the make a strip panel it wasn't bad, but I found it quite annoying for Acq Inc.
We had a pretty quiet day, which was sort of what I needed given the time difference.
Sunday started with the second Q&A. It was a pretty sparse queue, I think less than a quarter capacity (less than five hundred people). That said there were plenty of questions and no problem filling the time. I'd be interested to see if the four day pax model ends up with two Q&A sessions though, as it didn't seem to be as popular as expected.
After lunch we made a hard choice and headed to the Doublefine panel rather than Strip Search. I think it was the right choice but it was a shame that the two events clashed. As Matt has mentioned we ended up being in the queue next to a guy called Clifton, who was demoing a game called Clobbr. I played for a bit, seemed entertaining enough, and on hearing about the jetlag he gave me a sachet of a couple of the most comprehensively unpalatable caffeine pills I've ever encountered. He also talked about how he had set up a Kickstarter to get Tim Schafer to acknowledge their game. It was apparently pulled very quickly.
I enjoyed the panel, even though to backers of both Broken Age and Massive Chalice it was largely a repeat. There was time for three or four questions at the end. Clifton hurried over and bagged the last question, which he used to namedrop his game, ask Tim Schafer to acknowledge it and generally run headfirst into Tim's wall of disapproval. On the way out he said that he thought he'd made himself the most hated person in the room, which I think is a bit strong but not far off the mark...
After that we were going to head to Voice Acting 101 but it filled up as we were on our way. So we headed over to the convention centre annex and signed up for a game of D&D next, "Confrontation at Candlekeep".
Before I start its worth saying that the most recent version I've played and groked the rules of is Pathfinder. I've skimmed the player's handbook of fourth (and listened to Acq Inc) but things I've marked as 'new' may actually just be carried from fourth.
It was an interesting game. The system feels fairly simplified and this version of the playtest rules (unlike the one used by the Acquisitions Inc game) doesn't have positional play baked in (in the Acq Inc game, flanking would gain you 'Advantage'). The modifiers for attacks are set by the character and farvourable or unfavourable circumstances are modelled by having advantage or disadvantage. Advantage involves rolling twice and taking the better result, disadvantage involves rolling twice and taking the worse result.
Some other differences are modifiers by dice. For instance, the elven ranger I was playing had experteise in dexterity. This meant that for dexterity checks he added a D6 to his roll. Similarly, towards the end of the fight the cleric cast bless. This aided our saves and attacks, but instead of being a fixed modifier it added a D4 to our rolls.
Overall the game felt pretty streamlined and seemed to give the DM a good amount of latitude to resolve unusual actions. The characters were second level pregenerated so its hard to know what the level progression was like. It looks worth a go. I like that positional is not included in the base ruleset (at least at the moment), as its the sort of thing that is relatively easy to bolt on with an optional book (Combat and Tactics perhaps?) but can make it harder to play in a sketch map style.
We finished the day off by going to the late night dub fight, an overdubbing event where four people of various note were given a subject and then adlib overdubbed various game footage, tv shows and adverts. I thought it was hilarous and would definately go again.
On the monday we caught most of the nVidia givaway shout-woo-and-applaud-a-lot, showing off a couple of interesting bits of tech. The fog engine in the new Batman game looks very impressive, especially given its everywhere. Assassins creed: Yarr lets make a pirate game edition looked fun to play. The shield is interesting. Its got a bit of heft to it but its ergonomics are good, its very comfortable in the hand. The game streaming is the main draw for me, but the price point is just too high for me to think about it really.
The last panel we saw was Robert Khoo interviewing Mike and Jerry. It was a fantastically interesting exploration of what they thought on various things, retelling of old stories and generally questions being asked that would have had them walking out if they came from anyone else.
We then dashed off to the airport to catch a couple of planes. No real drama, we flew a short hop to San Fran and then on to Auckland. I'd intended to stay up for a while but I was flagging by partway through Oblivion and decided to knock myself out properly before I ended up dozing for the flight. I woke up with a couple of hours to go which I filled with Into Darkness.
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