I’ve lost count of the number of Stabcon’s I’ve been to now.
Stabcon is the twice-yearly games convention now held at the Britannia Hotel in Stockport. It’s small enough that I recognise all the regulars year after year; in that respect it’s almost like a Mostly Autumn gig. Come to think of it, it’s a very similar demographic…
Although the emphasis is on board games, there are also plenty of RPG sessions over the weekend. The organisation is very informal, with nothing booked in advance. GMs put prospective games up on the notice board, players sign up to them on a first-come-first-served basis. This does mean that popular games tend to fill up by the Friday night, but there does seem some form of self-balancing between players and GMs over the weekend. I see very few games fail to run for lack of players, and additional games always seem to appear on the board whenever all the other games are full. This year I ended up playing four RPG sessions over the weekend, more than I have done in many conventions.
Friday night’s game was GURPS Reign of Steel. The setting was a Terminator-style near-future; the robots had won, and the survivors of humanity are either fighting a guerilla war, or just lying low and hoping the robots ignore them. The plot had the PCs as members of the SAS, the last surviving military unit serving the last surviving government in Europe, and involved Frenchmen stealing Britain’s last remaining nukes, the Channel Tunnel rail link, and this exchange:
GM: The robot manages to dodge the combine harvester.
Me: I’ll turn and try to ram it again – I guess it will take a couple of rounds to circle round.
GM: It’s a cinematic game!
Me: OK them, make that a handbrake turn…
Saturday, after a few card games, was another GURPS game, this time a Diskworld dungeon adventure, run by Phil Masters. I played the stereotypical Hubland barbarian, as we hacked and slashed our way through sewer-slugs and skeletons. The last fight seemed to go on for ages as we had yet another example of my appallingly bad convention die rolling, although my biggest criticism of GURPS nowadays is that fights sometimes go on for too long.
By the evening, things started to get very silly, with InSpectres, which is basically Ghostbusters with the serial numbers filed off. I’ve played this game at Stabcon before; a very rules-lite system designed to encourage player creativity, and played strictly for laughs, of which there were many; when we had player characters with combat origami, our ghost containment device was a wet paper bag, and our vehicle was a mutant hybrid of a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost armoured car and a bendy-bus. You get the idea? We had to deal with a demonically-possessed teddy bear, four escaped tigers (due to an accident with the rocket launcher), and how to dispose of a dead elephant stuck half-way up the stairs.
Paranoia on Sunday was the only way to top that. Paranoia is one of those games I’ve always wanted to play, but up until now nobody had ever run at a con I’d been to. The Computer is your friend! Denounce your comrades as Commie Mutant Traitors! You do not have security clearance to eat blue M&Ms! And are you questioning the skills of R&D with the L-shaped gun for shooting round corners? Report now for termination!
The next Stabcon will be the first weekend in January 2010. I’m already paid and signed up.
How was the Paranoia game?
Golly it is a long time since I played Paranoia.
To begin with I even though it was supposed to be taken seriously.
I prefer true campaigns for my RPGs. but if you are paying a one-shot scenario and are simply in it for laughs, then this system will do as well as any other and better than some.
Call of Cthulhu is another great convention game. In a one-shot it really doesn’t matter if all the player characters die at the end, if they take the monster down with them.
And sometimes, the monster does win. It’s part of the genre.