Demoing OVA at conventions: Shiroi Con (9-1-2007)

[Jandar]

Hello Clay,

Last week you asked me for an update on what I experienced at the gaming convention in Augsburg, Germany. I figured that most of what I wanted to tell you can also be posted right here on the forum.

As I told you, I went there early last Saturday and spent most of the weekend there. I had three copies of OVA there with me, plus my character sheets, blank character sheets, notes, dice, pencils, and so on, and OVA was definitely the RPG I was going to run at the con. This was a new con under the name of "Zock" and it was held at an old sports club's gym.

I only had a small flyer from the organizers for that con, and knew nothing about the location or the nature of it. All in all, I must admit I expected a pretty standard, small, pure RPG con, with maybe a few tabletops, card games and miniatures games (like HeroClix) thrown in somewhere.

One of the con's sponsors was a comicbook shop, though, and little did I know it was the largest manga store in the Augsburg area. So somebody from the comicbook shop got together with a club that wanted to host their own manga and anime con called the Shiroi Con (or the other way round?), and they did.

Shiroi Con was kind of technically a part of the Zock and held in the very same hall, so it turned out that about 70% of all attendees were manga-anime fans, usually girls aged 13 to 18. Not a bad crowd, just ... different. As far as I can tell, the Augsburg event drew some people who also attend other anime cons throughout the year and some young teenagers who couldn't afford travelling to one of the larger annual anime cons. So by the time I arrived in the con building (as I said, a gym), which was Saturday at 2 PM, there was a nice gathering going on, and the section that was "Shiroi Con" had its own booths with costume players, "con hons" (which I am told is where fan artists sign each other's diaries or artbooks and can try to draw and design while the con is going on), a Japanese-for-beginners class, a manga-drawing workshop, autograph signing sessions by two yaoi artists, and more.

To make things a bit complicated for me, though, the anime and manga portion kind of overshadowed the actual games section, and the games that were actually going on at the other tables were, for the most part, HeroClix, Dreamscape, the Star Wars Battle Game, and another large miniatures tabletop thing I can't remember the name of right now. Somebody also ran demos of Descent and the Doom boardgame. In addition there were several cardgame tournaments and a Dreamscape tournament on the stage of the hall. For a slot in those tournaments, you had to buy something from the respective product line. Of course, there were also prizes ...

Now, that was all very nice and all, but where were the RPGs?? - I know that this kind of template is now usually the form that cons take on these days, and the card game and miniatures stuff draws in a large number of people who would not otherwise attend.

I later learned that there were actually a few people running pen & paper RPGs, but almost all of them (I think all of them except mine) were "sanctioned" company demos for the respective line ... There was one for D&D, one for Vampire, one for a German fantasy game.

Anyway, I scheduled myself to run a demo of OVA at 5 PM, but it looked very bleak that I should actually get players, even though there was this massive crowd of anime people right before my face ... many of who by the way had no idea what a "pen and paper RPG" was! Luckily, not long after I had arrived and put my bag with all my stuff in the middle of that hall, I was greeted by Bentley Silberschatten, who I knew from another con in Southern Germany. Bentley is a tremendously nice fellow and he loves OVA maybe more than I do. He had previously played in my quick game session in March, where I ran "The Starstone Treasure."

He is also the chairman of the Celtic Circle roleplayers' club and easily one of the most active and dedicated gamers in all of Southern Germany. He has played about 4 times as many different systems as I (and I always thought my gaming background was rich and diverse already).

Since he didn't have anyone in particular to talk to and I didn't, either, we had a pretty long and detailed conversation about OVA, about new book releases in general, about games and movies and anime and also about podcasting. He was very supportive of that, too. I must say that Bentley was all like, "Hey, when does your game start?", but I had to wait for at least one more person to sign up for it.

At some point between 6 and 7 PM we finally and quite unexpectedly got two more boys to join us, who had travelled quite a bit to get to this particular con. They were both dressed almost identically all in black, so immediately I thought, "Ah, gamer goths," but I was mistaken. It turned out they were maybe about 18 years old, maybe younger, and they had only played a brief D&D demo, maybe even earlier on that day. Other than that, they had no concept of RPGs, so I was happy to introduce them to the hobby. They were also both die-hard fans of the manga "Ranma 1/2" by Rumiko Takahashi. In fact, they were extremely well-versed in all things by Takahashi, since one of them later made up an OVA character that was an exact copy of Inu Yasha. There was a cool connection immediately in place because, unbeknownst to them, or anyone, Ranma 1/2 is one of the first manga series that I ever read, or collected for that matter. So I could use characters and situations from that series/show to explain OVA terms and rules. That saves me a lot of trouble every time. It is much harder in my opinion to introduce hardcore long-time fantasy gamers to OVA, or people who are a bit on the jaded side and have no penchant for anime whatsoever. I also noticed that most of the older, 30-ish gaming crowd do not have this obvious familiarity with manga-anime that the younger set have.

Unfortunately, none of the cute girls wanted to play. My three players and I jumped into char-gen, which took us roughly an hour, but that was OK and didn't bother anyone. I was very relieved at that since the two newbies also dedicated at least a full hour to listening to me explaining rules and supervising the char-gen process, and the demos for card games or HeroClix last maybe 20 minutes each, max. So yes, RPGs do require more patience and dedication.

At a few minutes past 8 PM we could start an adventure, and we had, as player-characters, the carbon copy of Inu Yasha, and a motorcycling super agent gunslinger from another anime who went by the name of "Cloud" (or maybe the player wanted him to be called "Claude", but I am not sure about that), and an undead soulless Chinese soldier from the Middle Ages who had lived more than 1,000 years because a sorcerer had stolen his soul. They were all in present day Tokyo and about to investigate a terror plot. So, it had a very neat anime flavor in general.

Now the downside of it all: After about an hour, the two newbies told me they had to leave because another game they really wanted to be in was starting. Dang ... it was all going so nicely, and we had been having fun. Luckily for me, this time it wasn't my fault that the game session ended early.

I am going to make it up to Bentley since I'll to type up the manuscript that I have for my quick introductory adventure ("The Big Melee at Tokyo Bay") and send to him. He was very interested in seeing that in a completed and printable form. Though I will attend his own con tomorrow, he cannot be in my OVA game due to all of his official function at that event (Celtic Con).

I slept at the convention hall while other games were in progress, woke up at about 9 AM on Sunday, and spent most of that day reading comicbooks and gathering promotional flyers. I was too tired to run anything that day, but I had Dreamscape demoed to me, which has cool miniatures.

Like I said, I am off to another, even bigger con, but this time with much less of an anime influence. This morning I realized that I basically could have left my travelling bag packed all week, since I am taking the exact same things with me to another town this weekend.

Take care,
Have a great weekend
(and wish me luck!).

[Niko]

I later learned that there were actually a few people running pen & paper RPGs, but almost all of them (I think all of them except mine) were "sanctioned" company demos for the respective line ... There was one for D&D, one for Vampire, one for a German fantasy game.

Was it Das Schwarze Auge? It's been over a decade since I last played that, but it's what got me into RPGs (which led to illustration later on) at the tender age of 12 or so. Ah, the memories...

[Clay]

Thanks for the recap, Jandar! I appreciate you taking the time to write it out. Was a fun read, and best of luck on your next con venture! Hopefully there will be more gamers and less 14 year old girls! ;D

I see that the whole "collectible miniature" thing has taken Germany over as well. I guess gaming fads are a universal language.

[Jandar]

I later learned that there were actually a few people running pen & paper RPGs, but almost all of them (I think all of them except mine) were "sanctioned" company demos for the respective line ... There was one for D&D, one for Vampire, one for a German fantasy game.

Was it Das Schwarze Auge? It's been over a decade since I last played that, but it's what got me into RPGs (which led to illustration later on) at the tender age of 12 or so. Ah, the memories...

No, it was Mondagor, actually.
Mondagor is somebody's homebrew system that is now starting to gain recognition. I picked up a free copy of it only yesterday.

I know DSA is still a likely pick, but I've noticed it's played much less at cons recently, or at least at the cons that I have been to.

Nice to hear (read) from you, by the way, Niko!

[Jandar]

Thanks for the recap, Jandar! I appreciate you taking the time to write it out. Was a fun read, and best of luck on your next con venture! Hopefully there will be more gamers and less 14 year old girls! ;D

It was a long recap ... and there will be more material about my impressions of both Shiroi Con and Celtic Con in my podcast ... yes, finally, later this week, when I am done editing.

I see that the whole "collectible miniature" thing has taken Germany over as well. I guess gaming fads are a universal language.

It's hard to tell with the collectible minis ... most of these games get imported and translated almost immediately. While there are only a handful of regular, organized players of those, they have an obvious presence at cons, so you'd think there is more of them. HeroClix became much bigger than MageKnight, the game on which it was first based. Now there is also a new Mechwarrior game that uses the same "change the dial at the base" mechanism from WizKids' games.

[JuddG]

Was it Das Schwarze Auge? It's been over a decade since I last played that, but it's what got me into RPGs (which led to illustration later on) at the tender age of 12 or so. Ah, the memories...

The English Language version of this is "The Dark Eye" (of course, "Black Eye" is more literal, but has a connotation they wanted to avoid) is very cool! I love the art in the book, it really sells it as well as establishes the tone of the game for me. Without those images in the text, the game would be just another fantasy game, but the cool realism of the images finds a niche for the game in the mind, for me at least.

No surprise that got you into illustration. Of course, you have learned well because your art also dresses up a game for the reader.

[Jandar]

Was it Das Schwarze Auge? It's been over a decade since I last played that, but it's what got me into RPGs (which led to illustration later on) at the tender age of 12 or so. Ah, the memories...

The English Language version of this is "The Dark Eye" (of course, "Black Eye" is more literal, but has a connotation they wanted to avoid) is very cool! I love the art in the book, it really sells it as well as establishes the tone of the game for me. Without those images in the text, the game would be just another fantasy game, but the cool realism of the images finds a niche for the game in the mind, for me at least.

No surprise that got you into illustration. Of course, you have learned well because your art also dresses up a game for the reader.

Hi JuddG,

While I can't say you're wrong, the illustrations you know from The Dark Eye (English edition) may be very different from the ones that Nico grew up with. Nico is kind of approximately the same generation as me, and the first and second editions of DSA / The Dark Eye from the 80s had different illustrations by different artists, pretty influential to roleplaying game books in Germany in that era, of course. As with most RPGs that go through multiple editions, the style of DSA gradually changed over the years. It was always pretty realistic and Renaissance-styled, though, not cartoony or superheroic.

I don't know for sure, but I'd guess that the English edition is a translation of DSA Fourth Edition. Is that correct? It's even possible that The Dark Eye includes several pictures that were made specifically for it.

[JuddG]

I don't know for sure, but I'd guess that the English edition is a translation of DSA Fourth Edition. Is that correct?

It is indeed 4th Edition, which I understand to be the only edition to make it into a commercial English translation. True enough that art in games is often very different between editions, but it sounds like DSA has always been well represented.

In the 80's RPG art in the US was somewhat hit and miss. Actually, usually more miss (for a satirical example see the S. John Ross classic "ENCOUNTER Critical!"). Good game art helps me get settled into a game. Sometimes that is well crafted art, sometimes it is very thematically appropriate art (also see EC's art...Manion Devil!), but art serves as a good anchor.

Having seen a gorgeous German edition of Call of Cthulhu, I suppose I now assume German games have great art.

One question about German Cons (and I suppose any Con held abroad), how much gaming goes on in English? My German is childishly simple, but I have always wanted to go to a Con abroad. It would be sad to sit in game and say only "Hallo! Wo is die Hause von Petra?"

[Jandar]

I don't know for sure, but I'd guess that the English edition is a translation of DSA Fourth Edition. Is that correct?

It is indeed 4th Edition, which I understand to be the only edition to make it into a commercial English translation. True enough that art in games is often very different between editions, but it sounds like DSA has always been well represented.

In the 80's RPG art in the US was somewhat hit and miss. Actually, usually more miss (for a satirical example see the S. John Ross classic "ENCOUNTER Critical!") [...]

Having seen a gorgeous German edition of Call of Cthulhu, I suppose I now assume German games have great art.

One question about German Cons (and I suppose any Con held abroad), how much gaming goes on in English? My German is childishly simple, but I have always wanted to go to a Con abroad. It would be sad to sit in game and say only "Hallo! Wo is die Hause von Petra?"

Petra? I don't know who this Petra is. Hmm, I used to know someone called Petra, but ... uh, anyway ...

That is a hard call. While the majority of German gamers have a really good grasp on the English language and read RPG books in English most of the time, actual gaming sessions played in English are a rarity. Even when a native speaker is present who has been living in the country for some time, the game is likely to take place in German.

This is true for most cons, and I have been to a good few. But I'll tell you what: Tentacles Convention is excellent, because it has many people coming over from England, Ireland, and the USA. It's an exception in that for the whole convention weekend, more English is spoken than German (or another language for that matter). Tentacles Con is an annual get-together for the RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu fan club members, with only RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Elric, Pendragon and the other Glorantha- and Eternal Champion-related games being allowed. It's held on the Stahleck castle on the river Rhine, in Bacharach near Mainz. You might want to check out www.tentacles-convention.de

Apart from that, NordCon in Hamburg, held every year in May, also has a rather international status and a large audience, so you might find English-speaking players there.

Or, you coud also travel to a con in Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ulm, or Munich, and promise me you'll play in one of my games. I can GM in English and would love to do that again soon.