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 Roleplaying game designers and guests of the inaugural Gen Con Oz ROBIN D. LAWS and STEVE DARLINGTON level with JODY MACGREGOR about the gaming convention that is geek valhalla.
The very first Gen Con was a meeting of 50 wargamers held at the Horticultural Hall of Lake Geneva in 1968, coming together to talk tactics and do battle over tabletops. It was popular enough to repeat, and at the next year’s Gen Con one of the organisers, Gary Gygax, met a fellow proto-nerd named Dave Arneson. The two of them went on to create Dungeons & Dragons. Robin D. Laws, who has written a book about the con’s history, takes over the story. “As the game took off, Gen Con gradually became not only a gathering of wargamers, but the central destination for roleplaying. As D&D exploded, so did the show, outgrowing a series of venues to eventually become the gigantic event it is today, with an attendance the size of a small city.”
Local game designer Steve Darlington took in the gigantic event it is today in America. “What surprised me was how much more there was than just gaming,” he says. “I ended up spending most of my time in the dealer hall, playing demos and looking at merchandise.” Over the years the convention has grown to cover events like costume competitions, computer games and card games. It’s also spread to new locations; there have been Gen Cons in the UK, Barcelona and Paris. This year marks the first Gen Con Oz, and it’s being held in Brisbane.
Both guests will be running seminars on a variety of topics including ways for players to improve their own roleplaying games and what it’s like writing them and be on hand to sign copies. Says Laws, “Seminars and signings provide a much better way to meet the largest possible number of people during that finite window of time at a convention when your brain is actually working.”
Darlington will also be running a game of his own. “I’m running an introductory Warhammer game every day. I’m also helping a friend make a mockumentary about gamers at the con. So I’ll be pretty busy.” However, he’ll be there as an attendee as well. “Shopping and browsing is the main reason I go to cons. As for other games, the catalogue is huge and hard to pick through but there is a Jane Austen LARP [Live-Action Roleplay] that’s caught my eye...”
GEN CON OZ will be taking place at the Brisbane Convention Centre from Thursday July 3 to Sunday July 6. www.genconoz.com
The Roles We Play: ROBIN D. LAWS, designer of roleplaying games Feng Shui and Dying Earth, explains what this roleplaying thing is.
My wife explains what I do for a living by saying that it’s collective storytelling with dice. My response is interactive.
Me: “Okay, so imagine you’re a knight in shining armoUr, walking down a hallway. You have a choice of turning right or left. Where do you go?”
Other person: “Uh, right.”
Me: “You come to a big wooden door. What do you do?”
Other: “I open it.”
Me: “It’s hard to open. What do you do?”
Other: “I kick it in!”
Me: “It swings open with a mighty crash! There’s a dragon in there, about to breathe fire on you. What do you do?”
Other: “I hit it with my sword!”
Me: “Congratulations. You’re a roleplayer.”
 INFORMER POP CULTURE: Gen Con Oz - Special Feature Review
DUNGEONS & DRAGONS 4th EDITION
(Wizards Of The Coast)
Pen & paper roleplaying gets a long-needed update.
I love roleplaying. It is escapist, it is dramatic, and it is surprising challenging – but in a strictly non-competitive fashion. Yet, with 3rd Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, I found the roleplaying to be almost non-existent. Sure, the Player’s Handbook did a fantastic job at identifying every action a person may wish to undertake, it cleverly linked them all to governing abilities, and provided simple equations of numbers and dice rolling to determine realistic outcomes. But therein lay the problem: with every player interaction reduced to numbers, there was very little incentive to roleplay at all. It resulted in a festival of power playing and dice rolling, where sinking enough points into a certain skill would mean almost certain success, and the challenge of existing in a dangerous, fantastical realm was reduced to the phrase “roll a d20”.
The 4th Edition of D&D changes all that, as roleplaying is built into the rule set. The mechanics have been simplified, but hold as much depth as previous editions. Characters no longer have attack bonuses per se – as Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma are rolled against Armour Class, Reflex, Fortitude, and Will for most actions. These actions are called Powers, and each class has a unique set. They, like a CCG such as Magic: The Gathering, add a layer of complexity over the otherwise basic rules, which adds vast amounts of flavour.
For instance, there is no standard attack for any of the characters, as almost every combat action is a Power. For a Level 1 Fighter, this may be a Reaping Strike (the flavour text reads: You punctuate your scything attacks with wicked jabs and small cutting blows that slip through your enemy’s defences) which deals 1 x [your weapon’s damage] + your Strength modifier. Even if the attack misses, the jabs and cuts still do an amount of damage equal to your Strength modifier, as your opponent concedes flesh wounds to ward off your raking blows. The Fighter has 89 such powers to choose from over the course of the game, and each class is similarly equipped, and it goes a long way to making 4th Edition more cinematic, and, interestingly, tactical.
The combat encounters in the game are now played out on a square grid, not unlike a chessboard. Characters can move a certain amount of squares per turn, and each power has a range given in squares also. This makes strategic use of powers paramount, as many allow extra movement per turn or, in the case of some stunning attacks, the ability to reposition foes away from vulnerable allies.
Fortunately, the classes are much more balanced this time around, so Wizards and Warlocks are just as viable at Level 1 as a Fighter, while the melee archetypes aren’t outclassed by the spell casters’ apocalyptic invocations late in the game. Magic Missile can now be cast every turn at Level 1 like a basic attack, while No Mercy, a Level 29 Fighter attack, has the potential to do 80+ damage on a regular hit.
It all adds up to 4th Edition being the best instalment of Dungeons & Dragons yet. For while it will never carry the particular flavour of pen & paper games like Vampire and Ravenloft, nor match their specific (and often quite clever) rule sets, as a cover-all roleplaying system, D&D does a great job of being genuinely entertaining, while bringing a cinematic and strategic feel to what has long been a tired pastime.
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PRINCESS ZELDA
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