Origins'98 - a 'mini' con report

Origins '98 - a mini <cough> Con Report
by Mark 'Indy' Kochte

My schedule for this summer has been in a serious state of fluxx, and I wasn't
sure if I was going to be able to make either Origins or Gen Con. As spring
came and started to go, my summer plans began to take shape and I found I
would be able to attend Origins, but not Gen Con (being atop of Granite
Mountain in Montana that weekend will put a *slight*
crimp in trying to be at the con at the same time ;-). So to Origins I
went, prepared to run a gamut of Full Thrust/FB demo games for
KR/Geo-Hex.

BTW, this is rather long. You've been warned! Print it out and take it home to
read at dinner or something.

The highlights of this con, aside from gaming, were guest appearances by Mira
Furlan (who was at GenCon last year with Rick Biggs), David Prowse (aka, Darth
Vader), and Jeremy Bulloch (Boba Fett). KR and Nelson were
there from Oregon representing Geo-Hex.

I arrived friday, late morning. Once I got my stuff dropped off in the hotel
room, I located KR to find out what kind of schedule he had set
for me. It turned out to be a fairly light one: friday 2p-5p and 7p-11p,
and sunday 10a-4p were our allotted times. All other demo times were
taken up by other games. Alas. Well, I was psyched to be there, anyway. I had
scenarios to run, booths to browse, and people to see. Unfortunately I was on
a serious budget, trying to prepare for my next major adventure, so I couldn't
buy out half the dealers' stock like I intended. Ah well!

Now as this is supposed to be a report on the *gaming* activities that
occurred at the con, I'll skip most of the non-gaming/non-gaming-related
stuff I did.  ;-)  I apologize ahead of time if I deviate slightly.

There were two of us at the con who were doing demos for KR: myself and a guy
named Mike (whose last name I have just totally spaced!). There were a couple
other fellows at the con running FT and DSII games: Mike
Henthorn (doing a couple FT games on friday/saturday, and a DSII game
on sunday), and the guy who intro'd me to FT, Daryl Poe (who was doing a
neutron star FT scenario using vectored movement). Other than that, I don't
think there were any other FT, SGII, or DSII games going on at the con this
weekend. There were a few list members scattered hither and yon (Jim Bell was
there and I ran into him a number of times), but I'm not sure if I saw them
all or not.

So anyway, Mike had fallen ill from something he ate (or maybe it tried to
later eat him?) and wasn't feeling up to running a game so I 'volunteered' to
do both the friday slots (hell, I was prepared to run upwards of 6 demo
scenarios!:). After a quick browse through the dealer room and a stop or three
to say hi to some friends, I went to run my first demo game of the weekend.

Unfortunately, no one showed. But I wanted to play, so I managed to
d-r-a-g
Mike (who was feeling queasy, but could run a few ships) into a game and
we did one of my scenarios: "La Foudre-Greve Encounter", an FSE/NSL
scenario
I put together, pitting the FSE CVA "La Foudre-Greve" (loosely and
probably badly translated from 'thunder strike') with escorts against an NSL
battle force centered around two NSL BDNs. Mike had never encountered
Salvo-Missiles
before, and had never played with fighters, so this was going to be an
education for him (he took the NSL, leaving me the FSE). On the other hand, I
have limited experience with the FSE tactics (notably proper SM tactics
in a drawn-out battle), so this was an interesting challenge for me,
too.

The scenario, which the details you can find at:

   http://scivax.stsci.edu/~kochte/s3.html

let me come charging in at the NSL force, who decided the best course of
action was to slow down to a snail's pace of 2-4. By the time I hit
their
ships, I was cranking in at 14-16, my SMs were well-placed, and my
fighters were overcoming their defenses (with his ships moving at speed 2, I
didn't need to move my fighters much to hit his ships; my die rolls, on the
other hand, were less than admirable, considering the broad side of the barn
that was being presented to me).

As some of you prolly already know, those NSLs are DAMNED tough ships to take
out! A full 40% of all SM fire I did was knocked out of the sky by PDS'. I
lost 51% of my fighters to their interceptors and PDS' by the end of the game.
And I had lost each and every escorting vessel the FSE had assigned to the
CVA. The
"La Foudre-Greve", on the other hand, had only suffered just less than
2/3
damage to the *first* row of boxes by the time it shot through the middle of
the NSL fleet and proceeded to disengage in the opposite direction.

When the smoke had cleared, all I had managed to do was destroy one NSL BDN,
critically damage the other BDN (it had 9 damage pts left), seriously injure
the NSL CA, and touch moderate to light damage to a couple of the smaller
escorting DDs and FGs. Both their Interceptor squadrons had been taken out,
but at a cost to my fighters (good rolls, Mike!).

Thus ended game 'demo' #1. Several people stopped by, watched us, then moved
on, even after I offered to let them take over some ships. Alas, oh well. Mike
Henthorn was running his attack on a base station scenario a couple of tables
over from us and had a good number of people there playing.

Game Demo #2 was scheduled for 7pm, as noted above. I had, at this point,
run into several list members or ex-list members (who have taken
themselves
off this list due to the signal-to-noise ratio, even if it is generally
less than other lists). They wanted to play, and had been looking forward to
my running something, but they also wanted to see the fireworks (which,
surprise surprise, were scheduled at 9:45p THAT evening, the 3rd, and not the
4th like I had originally thought). I told them no problem. We'll do a quick
scenario, have everyone kill off everyone else, then go see the fireworks! And
basically, that's what happened.

When I got back from dinner, I found 6 people (+2 kids, roughly 10 yrs
old?)
waiting at the table (and knew 2 more guys, Robert Line and Mike Henthorn,
were going to be coming once they finished their dinner). Great! 8 players. I
had a
scenario set up for 4-8 players. :)  (see also:
http://scivax.stsci.edu/~kochte/s6.html - "Eye of the Tiger"). This
scenario, in a nutshell, pitted cruiser squadrons from the 4 major powers
against each other in an attempt to retrieve a 'valuable resource' from one of
two asteroids which were set in the middle of the field (these were
substantial asteroids: I used a pocket thesaurus and a large miniatures box
from a Superior Starfleet Wars capital ship, measuring ~5" on the side). I
announced that should a ship touch one of these asteroids, they would suffer
damage equal to 1d6x(ship velocity) in beam damage. No other asteroids were on
the map, so navigation
should be relatively straight-forward. However, two people managed to
'land' their ships on asteroids the hard way (one an FT vet, the other had
played only once before). But more on that later.

At a neighboring table Daryl Poe was running his neutron star scenario. It was
filled with people (I believe he had 12 preregistered a month or two BEFORE
the con! and they were all there...). Later I asked him how it went; he said
no one fell into the neutron star, no one flew off the table, and everyone
managed to quickly grasp the vectored movement system, where most of them had
never tried it before. Chalk up another point for the optional system.:)

Anyway, back to my game. As can be predicted, the ESU and FSE made a loose
alliance against the NSL and NAC, while the NAC and NSL did the same (by
'loose
alliance' I mean they weren't firing at each other - yet, but would
support each other against their traditional enemies if the opportunity
presented itself). So the game proceeded and people went to town, scanning the
asteroids for the 'valuable resource' and attacking their enemy fleets. It was
during this that one FSE (relative FT newbie) and one ESU (FT vet) navigated
their ships (a DD I think and the sole CA, respectively) straight into the
asteroids. The FSE ship did not survive...but the ESU cruiser managed to! Took
'only' a bit more than half its total damage, and lost very little to
threshold checks, so was still a viable ship to fight with. The game
continued. The next turn the FSE launched a spread of SMs, intending on
intercepting the NSL fleet coming around the asteroid. The ESU also navigated
to intercept the NSL squadron. Unfortunately for the FSE and ESU, the NSL's
anticipated this manuever, and
slammed on the brakes - hard! The ESU ended up sitting at the edge of
the SM line, and their escort cruiser became a target for a volley or three of
SMs.
Robert Line and Mike Henthorn were playing the NSL, and they role-play
them very well. Robert can do a great German accent, so stood up and called to
the ESU side, saying, "Hey Ivan. I haf an Aegis Fire Control. How much money
do you haf?" (read this in a *deep* germanic accent...failing that you had to
be there, I guess).

To make a long encounter short, the ESU did not pay, and lost their ship. More
fighting continued between the sides, and in the end the ESU and FSE were
leaving, and what was left of the NAC also retreated, leaving the NSL time to
retrieve the 'valuable resource'.

Then we did the fireworks thing, then game back at 11p and did another game!
Several of the players from the scenario (Scott Miller, Robert Line, Mike
Henthorn - who, btw, is not the same Mike I mentioned earlier who was
doing demos with me) wanted to try out the vectored movement sytem. So we set
up an
ESU/FSE encounter ( http://scivax.stsci.edu/~kochte/s4.html ) and went
to it. There were a few of asteroids on the board for navigational hazards
(again,
these were the LARGE asteroids, not dinky inch-sized ones ;). We were
also using the Core Systems rules, something I don't use very much.

Anyway, it was a late night, but the game ended in a couple hours, with the
FSE getting their heads handed to them in a bad way. Both sides decided to
'split' their forces up, us (the FSE) to bracket the other side, and the ESU
to give themselves maneuvering room. I had set us up at a far enough distance
apart for people to play for a turn or two with the vectored system (it took a
couple of them a while to get the hang of it; it wasn't as intuitive as the
original FT movement system), but they managed to deal with it okay (and got a
couple of really nice maneuvers in by accident). So the ESU came straight in,
while we FSE split up to bracket. A few turns later we were in engagement
range. I laid a sweet string of SMs out to intercept the incoming ESU ships (I
kept the
standard range loads, while Scott traded all his in for extended-range
SMs),
and Scott set a scattered spread behind mine (for him extreme range). Well,
the ESU then did two things: the rear squadron hit the breaks and veered off,
while the forward squadron hit the accelerator. Now we were also using the SM
burst radius as being 3 inches, as recommended by the FleetBook. KR later told
us that his group found this to be too limiting, even in the vector system and
they now use the 6 inch burst radius all the time.

Well, the end result of our SM fire was that EVERY ESU ship was outside the
burst radius of my SMs, while those Scott put out caught a few ESU ships. But
the ESU weren't too worried; they knocked most of them down in short order.
And then they proceeded to knock *my* ships down! Seriously laid waste
to my Jerez-class heavy cruiser, and knocked out the power plant core
system. At this point this guy had walked over to check out our game. He then
walked over and looked at my ship sheet over my shoulder and said, "I take it
by the damage to your ship that you must be Mark Kochte."

(and that's when I shot him, your Honor)

This by-stander turned out to be none other than Joachim Heck. He hung
out and kibitzed with us while we finished the scenario (my cruiser eventually
blew from being unable to repair the power plant, my light cruiser also took a
power plant hit but was destroyed outright by ESU weapons fire, Scott's ships
were mauled, and my super destroyer was raked over pretty good; all in all it
was a serious FSE loss, though Scott managed to escape with a couple of his
lighter ships (his BC, on the other hand, was eventually taken out, having no
thrust engines left). Thus the scenario ended. We sat around and chatted a
bit, then headed off to our respective beds and homes. It was 1:30 when I
finally crawled into bed.

Saturday. 7am. I was awake. Half hour later showered and on my way out the
door. As there were no demo times set for today, I was free to browse deeper
in the dealer room. But I was also psyched to play more FT, as were a few of
the guys from the evening before, so we made arrangements to get together at
some table at 7pm again, do some more playing. I told KR our enthusiasm and he
was able to dig up an 'official' demo table for us to play on. We had a table
reserved from 7p-11p again. :)  The rest of the day I wandered the
dealer room, sold off a few Magic cards I've been looking to let go of,
visited with gaming
and non-gaming friends who were at the con, played a game of Astro Smash
(Silent Death rules), spent a bit more money than I intended (christ, those
AOG ships are **expensive**!!), and prepped for the evening scenario. 7p
finally rolled around and I went to find the table we had reserved...and found
no one around. Turned out everyone was over playing in Mike Henthorn's
scenario at the time (which started before the 7p demo time we had gotten). So
I hung out, napped for a bit (that lack of sleep thing really drains), and
when Mike's scenario finished, went to his table (since he still had his black
game mat on the table I didn't have to break my starmat out:), and 'recruited'
a few players for a game.

The details of the two games we ended up playing I cannot divulge, as they
were early playtest ideas. But suffice it to say 5 of us played two FT games
from
8-ish to 1-ish, then sat around for another hour+ talking about a great
many things dealing with FT (the playtest games, the FleetBook and various
aspects of it, such as the core rules and different ideas people had about
them (one idea was to have the core systems only roll once for the block of
them instead of for each one of them, then if the block suffered a threshold
hit, roll to see which one took it), and so on and so forth. We were joined by
a couple
other people for the idea-jam session, and I thought it very productive.

Sunday. Sunday was my day to depart, so wasn't able to do the 10a-4p
demo time. I slept in 'til 8am this time.
Mike-the-guy-who-got-the-demo-schedule-for-us
took that slot, but moved it to 12n-4p. I meant to stop by and see how
things were going, but I spent the latter half of the morning running around
the con looking for a few people to say 'bye' to before heading out. I had a
rather long drive ahead of me (~7 hours), and had some old college friends who
still lived in town I wanted to see before I headed back, so bolted by
noon-thirty.
I did see Mike Henthorn who was running a DSII game sunday, but unfortunately
nobody showed! Most of his players had already paid in prereg, and he also
knew a couple more people had signed up that morning...well, their money, we
figure. I helped him fold up his gear before heading out.

And that, in the proverbial nutshell (hah!!) is my Origins Con Report. If you
managed to hang in there this long...you need help!  ;-)

This will very likely be my last post to the list as I'm taking off on a
rather
extended vacation for ~5 weeks. Anyone in the New Mex/Colorado/Wyoming
area wanna get together and play a game or three? (I'll wave to y'all in
Texas; not planning on stopping long except out in the Guadalupe Mtns;)

Y'all have a good summer now, ya heah? Try to keep the noise down while I'm
gone...  :)

Mk