From: Indy Kochte <kochte@s...>
Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2013 10:39:25 -0500
Subject: GZG ECC 16 - an overview wrap
textfilter: chose text/plain from a multipart/alternative Well, yet another ECC has come and gone. Lots of people showed up, lots of games were hosted, lots of prizes given out, and lots of people had fun. After the long 5-hour drive up (missing the weather channel-warned storm in the mountain passes of Pennsylvania by a couple hours), I arrived with plenty of time to check in, unload the car of my stuff, and get in on Ron Walls' "Star Trek Starship Combat: Into the Maelstrom" game. Setting was a mystery ship has appeared in this nebulosity surrounding a black hole near the neutral zone and both the Freds and Klinks sent a squadron of ships to investigate. I got to be the mystery ship and it turned out I had the Excelsior Prime from the Mirror, Mirror universe. Adm Hikaru "Oh Myyy" Sulu commanding. My goal/objective was to test out the new antiproton beams that were installed in place of the typical phaser banks (antiproton beam - think "planet killer" from "The Doomsday Machine"). I was also to capture any tech from either side, and kill as many as I could (granted, I was in a battleship, but I couldn't take on both sides at the same time, so was going to have to 'ally' myself with one or the other). The Feddies attempted to hail me and find out who i was, but I didn't let out much of info. So to confuse them I asked them where they were from. and set out to maneuver at a substantially high rate, with shields and weapons charged, adding to the apprehension of both sides as they saw my speed and were doing scans of my weapons. I finally let them know who was commanding the Excelsior Prime, and since I outranked the Commodore on the Chandley (or whatever ship it was; can't remember), they decided to try and form up on me to drive off the Klingons. The Klingons in turn tried to encourage me with the 'enemy of my enemy' philosophy. To which I replied that I was leading the unsuspecting Feddies right to them. I wasn't sure yet if I was going to turn on the Feds or blow away a Klingon or two. In the end I got the two sides together, the Klingons (not trusting me) covered some of their (or more literally, my) asses, and in one turn a LOT of phaser and photon fire ensued, accompanied with substantial antiproton beam blasts, which basically gutted two Klingon ships at point-blank range. One Klink blew up, and I went to tractor the other and take it back to my universe, but it self-destructed so I let it go and went home. :-) The remnants of the Klingons warped out, and the few surviving Fed ships picked up the pieces and survivors (as good Feddies are to do). Saturday morning Noam Izenberg and I ran a playtest of a starship combat game we are developing and got a lot of good and positive feedback from it. Double win there. Saturday afternoon I got in on a Tomorrow's War game run by a friend of mine who had come up to the con for his first time. He has doing a Mars Rebellion series of four games locally, and ran the middle two scenarios at the con. Prior to this I had only been able to help him playtest the first scenario. So it was neat to see how the second one went. Basically the Terran Marines had worked their way into one of the Mars Domes and were looking to secure it (take control of the facilities in order to pacify the resistance). I was helping play part of the resistance commandos (lower tech, lower troop quality units) and we somehow managed to avert a Terran take-over of our control complex at the last possible moment. WIN for the Mars Revolution! The People's United Mars Provinces (PUMP) rule! Saturday evening we had our awards ceremony for the minis painting contest. This year, since Ken Wang was going to do a scratchbuild workshop, we expanded the minis contest entries to include a scratchbuild category. There were a lot of fantastic minis entered, and as usual, I abstained from voting since I wanted to remove any actual or perceived bias from knowing who's mini(s) was(were) whose, and let the attendees of the con vote instead. This year, over most any other year, the first place winners were far and wide in the lead in ALL categories - by a factor of 2.5 points in votes! The differences between 2nd, 3rd and 4th place were pretty slim, and I even squeaked in a 3rd place win with an "old style" NAC battle squadron. :-D (I usually enter something in most categories just to help fill the field and to give everyone a chance to compare 'poor' painting to 'great' painting techniques :-) ). Due to the generous donations of our GZG and Brigade sponsors, I was able to give some very nice prizes to the winners. After that I got in on Ron Walls' Tomorrow's War game set in the Aliens' universe. This was a fun and tense scenario but the flow was disrupted a bit by some communication disconnects between the GMs, the GMs and the players, and the Aliens player and the players, which caused some confusion and frustration for those playing (and I'm sure GMing). But getting beyond that, it was a fun game, and as one of the Marines I got to shoot things: egg sacks, face-huggers, and a handful of highly armored Aliens (D10 on the defense? holy crap!) We even got to see the Weylund-Yutani Mercenary plasma-fusion armed grav tank explode. I'd play it again. Sunday morning I ran MY Tomorrow's War game, "A Walk Through the Valley of Death". From my scenario blurb: *"The humans, I think, knew they were doomed. But where another race would surrender to despair, the humans fought back with even greater strength. They made the Minbari fight for every inch of space. In my life, I have never seen anything like it. They would weep, they would pray, they would say good-bye to their loved ones, and then throw themselves, without fear or hesitation, at the very face of death itself, never surrendering..." Emperor Londo Mollari, 2278 The year was 2247. Flinn Colony was the site of some of the bloodiest ground fighting during the Earth-Minbari War (2245-2248). Prior to this the Minbari were able to deal with ground forces in a pretty straight-forward manner, but Flinn Colonys ground-based defenses forced the Minbari to land a large number of units on the planet itself. Massive hand-to-hand combat raged across the planets surface, until every human of Flinn Colony was killed. But high Minbari casualties told the tale that the humans made the Minbari pay for every human death inflicted.* I had four players, two Human, two Minbari. Three of the players were brand-new to Tomorrow's War, so it was a little frustrating for them as they had some preconceived notions as to how it should play vs how it did play. But once they got past that they had a good time and shot stuff up. In the playtest games I'd run before the Minbari won, but at a substantial price (usually with half of their members seriously wounded or KIA), but this time only one KIA and one or two seriously wounded. The rest of the Minbari were running rampant on the Human defenders. The boneheads (especially Jim Bell) had gotten some great die rolls most all game and combined with lack of movement by the humans (they should have either moved up to perform a pincer or move together and levied withering fire into one or two Minbari fireteams rather than go at them semi-piecemeal) contributed strongly to the Minbari win. Nevertheless I think the game went well. I shot a lot of photos and took a number of time-lapse sequences (with and without the dolly) but upon review last night I'm not wholly happy with most of the time-lapse shots. I'll get a slideshow together later when I get some time and I'll drop in some of the TL sequences, but won't be as many as last year's was (https://vimeo.com/38046845) Jerry Han has the Quote Board, and while there are not nearly as many quotes posted as there have been in years past (mostly because I think people are starting to forget about posting quotes during games), there are some gems in there. One of my favorites is this (may be slightly paraphrased; Jerry will post the actual quote, but this is close enough) : Jerry Han: "I didn't realize Aliens had opposable thumbs" Greg Davis: "...and the tank?" Jerry Han: "The tank was the Aliens' lunchbox" (if you didn't draw the connection, this was the explanation for why the W-Y Merc tank mentioned earlier exploded) Mk