So now that Gen Con is over, I’m happy to share the campaign that I had prepped for the con! The goal was to have a 3 session experience, each with 2 games, and to award prizes at the end of session 3 to the player with the most kills, one to the most rep, one to the most wealth, and one to the coolest gang (as decided by a panel of 3 GM’s).

Time ended up being a serious constraint. 4 hours per session meant that even if each game only took 2 hours, there was basically no time for setup, map moves, shopping, or just chatting with your fellow players.

Another serious barrier was that even though this was an event intended for players who were already comfortable with the rules, we consistently had players showing up having never played, either assuming they’d be taught or assuming their teammate would be able to carry them rules-wise not knowing that they wouldn’t actually be fighting alongside their teammate. Part of that was a technical issue, GenCon copy-pasted parts of my other events and ended up messing up the experience requirement of that event, and the descriptions of the 2nd and 3rd sessions. Part of that was my own hubris, I shouldn’t have assumed that players would always read 100% of the event description.

Another snafu that came up was that because I was so busy prepping the physical components of the events (terrain, models, cards, printouts) I was not able to test-set the battlefields or properly playtest the scenarios. Though the first time I tested the Traffic Jam scenario led to the car getting off the board with zero crates stolen, every single time a player tried to defend the car in the event, they expressed serious concerns with how hard it was as the defender. Similarly, the drill pod scenario was either a breeze for the attacker if they happened to have a high strength-and-damage gun, or near impossible if they relied on toxin or some other special weapon to deal damage. Literally nobody was able to kill the Ambull or even get it to spawn: either the game went to time, or one gang got trounced before either of the babies could be killed.

That being said everybody had a blast and it went pretty well. Next year I’m going to try to dial-down the complexity a bit. Instead of trying to work in performance-based character progression, there will be progression allowances from session-to-session. Instead of 2 game 4 hour events, I’m going to try to structure it so that each event is one really good game with time to do pre-game spending (after players had a chance to study the prompt), post-game activity, and socializing. I am SO EXCITED for next year! for now, enjoy!

For anyone who wants to look through the campaign materials you can find the PDF here!