The Orccon gaming convention took over the Radisson hotel down by the airport this weekend. I love this con, and when I was a teenager, it was my first experience with packing eight friends into a hotel room, sleeping in shifts, playing hobby games with strangers, and really, truly getting my maximum geek on (and not sleeping more than two hours at a time.)
The convention went from Friday until Monday, and my initial plan was to go down on Friday by myself, take Nolan on Sunday, and go back on Monday by myself, if I still needed to recover any HP*. I hoped to find some ghosts of my youth lurking around the open gaming area or in the bargain bin at the flea market, take in a couple of panels, play some games, and do all the other the things that you do at a convention.
Ah, the best laid plans, as they say. Nolan ended up spending much of the weekend hanging out with friends, I ended up staying home and working, and we didn’t go to the con until Monday.
It was clearly winding down when we got there around noon yesterday. There weren’t many people at the show, and we didn’t get to watch a single panel because there weren’t any happening. We didn’t get to do much more than just wander around the flea market, but it was still a good time for both of us. I got to show Nolan a ton of classic games that I used to own — including Illuminati and Car Wars, still in their original keep cases. Awesome. He got to geek out about Magic with some dude who, unlike me, kept playing beyond Ice Age, and we both got to meet and talk with some fellow indie publishers who are also game designers, who hooked me up with two of their RPGS that look awesome.
As we waited for the rudest valet in the history of paying too much to park your car to bring ours around, I told Nolan, “There’s usually more going on at a con than just walking through the flea market, but we’re here right at the end of the show, and –”
“I totally get it, Wil,” he said. “Will you bring me to the next one, and we’ll go on a Saturday when there’s more to do?”
I felt like I’d rolled a critical success on the giant d20 I bought on the way out.***
“Absolutely, Nolan,” I said. “I would love that.”
*Non-gamers: characters in role playing games have hit points to measure how healthy they are. The fewer hit points your character has, the weaker and closer to death he is. During a gaming session, characters will go to taverns, inns, camps, and other places to recover their hit points, or “recover HP,” so gamers frequently use this term or a version of it to describe doing something that brings them joy or otherwise makes up for being forced to live in a mundane world. For example, Steve Jackson, a noted game publisher and important influence on my life, said that when he finished reading my book Dancing Barefoot: “(OK, I’m a geek, I’ll say it: I got some hit points back.) Because this is a real guy, with a real life, and he tells good stories.”
**I haven’t had time to read them, but steampunk fans probably want to take a look at them right now: Sons of Liberty and Full Light, Full Steam.
***It’s the size of a billiard ball, and I had to have it, you see, because I’m committed to seriously stress-testing the theory that says one can never have too many dice.