Re: GZG East Coast Con Report

>Ok guys, you have said great things about the convention now how about
a 
>status report on the games?  How many were played (and what time)? 
WHat 
>were the number of ships etc for each game?  Some idea of how things
were 
>set up.

<whew!> You want a full-blown con report, don't'cha!  ;-)

Well, I can't speak for anyone else as to the details of their games.
Only for the ones I ran or participated in. And I'll leave the details
of the games I participated in up to Jon (since they were his ;).

I ran 1 EarthForce Sourcebook game (essentially FT in the B5 universe),
one
StarGrunt II game (another B5 universe-oriented game), and a couple of
FTIII
demo games (the rules which are still in *DRAFT* form and are still
undergoing
changes and tweakings; this was just an advanced looksee at things and
to get
some feedback from some of the populace at large for Jon).

The EFSB and SGII games I ran on saturday, the FTIII demos I ran sunday,
and
friday evening I played con admin-dude-at-the-door, but since everyone
who was
there had done the preregistered thing, I got to actually *play*, too!
:)  So
I got to do a live play in the Estrell Cruiser Duel Tournament (details
of
which should come from Jon Davis, as this was his baby). THat ended
quickly
(I died first; for *some* reason JP had it out for me ;), so we tested
out
Jon's next incarnation of the Estrell duels: battleship dueling.
Essentially
the same thing as the cruiser duels, but with larger ships. EG, I lasted
a
leetle longer on the board (in fact, I think I was in about 4th place or
so,
and still on the board at the end of the tourny! 'course 2/3s of my
weapons
were gone, as were 2 of my 3 FireCons, and I was having a devil of a
time
bringing the two weaps left to bear on a target - but it was fun!). On
saturday
afternoon I played in Jon Davis' Empress' Revenge scenario, in which the
Empress Ariana sent a fleet in to the Draval(sp?) Hegemony to take over
a
base on a Draval moon.

In *that* game my damage rolls were just under average, but my rolls for
initiative won *every* time! Heh. There were two of us on the Empress'
side,
3 on the Draval side. Ships were split accordingly. For details of the
set-up,
and how things progressed, Jon would prolly be better at describing (I
was
getting distracted towards the end dealing with con details for the next
events, and kinda lost track of a few things; looked up and the
situation
changed a lot - "hey, where'd my ship go??" ;). Ultimately the Empress
lost
that scenario, but it was a close, close thing (it went down to boarding
party action on the base; 8 Empress troops vs 11 Hegemony troops; the
Hegemony
got the edge early on and the Empress' troops, as valiant as they were,
could
not take the base). The Empress can be somewhat satisfied in the amount
of
damage her forces did to the Draval fleet, but the cost was hideously
high.

The EFSB game I ran you can find details on the scenario set-up
currently at:

     http://scivax.stsci.edu/~kochte/scenario19.html

This is subject to move in the near future. Also, the scenario has been
slightly modified since the weekend, as the original scenario (which had
only 1 Centauri Battlecruiser with the Cent Vorchan light cruisers) was
heavily unbalanced in favor of the Minbari (the Minbari essentially
swept
the table of Centauri ships; it wasn't even a contest). This was my
worst
balanced scenario of the entire affair. It *might* be prudent to add yet
a third BC to the Centauri forces; don't know yet.

The SGII game I posted the details of the forces in an earlier msg. But
basically there were two different objectives going on. For the Minbari
power-armored monsters, it was easy: see humans, kill. For the Humans
they had to seek out a wrecked recon vehicle, retrieve valuable recon
data still in the onboard computer, and get out. They had a much harder
time of it. As it turned out, again, this was an unbalanced scenario,
primarily due to my lack of knowledge on how devastating powered armor
troops can be (like I mentioned earlier, the times I've seen them used
they either were major targets for fire and were suppressed the entire
game, or they were just beefed-up armored troops; close-assaults were
never done to/by them). In hindsight I would give the Humans 2-3 more
squads of troops. Prolly another full armor troop and a partial armor
troop. I am toying with 'powering down' the powered-armor stuff a bit
(eg, taking away all the big bonuses they get in close-assaulst, for
example), but I need to play more SGII to get a better feel for that.

The set up here was a random woods/hills set up, trashed building at
one end, 4 'unknown' markers that the Humans had to investigate to
determine whether or not that was the downed recon vehicle (the 'dummy'
markers were trashed tanks, jeeps, whatnot; all vehicles of some sort,
but not the one they were looking for). The Humans came in from the
far corner, the Minbari from 2/3s the way up the other side.

      --------------------------
      |    ww	s	    ww |       ***  = river, passable only by
bridge
Humans| ww www s hhh	bbb  w |	><  = bridge   ;-)
      |   hhh w hhhhhh	  b    |	 h  = hill area
      |    hhh w hhhh	  b    |	 b  = building
      |        ******><**      |	 w  = woods not on hills
      |       * 	 *     |	   (the main hill in middle had
some
      --------------------------	    woods on it, along with a
couple
		  Minbari		    large boulders)
					 s  = sandbag 'wall'

On sunday I ran 2 FTIII demo games, one based in Superior's Starfleet
Wars
universe (Ents vs Terrans), and one in the 'official' FT universe
(NAC/ESU).
The NAC/ESU game used the Cinematic movement rules, while the Bug/Terran
game used the vector movement rules (you can find these in the archives
somewhere I believe).

The NAC/ESU game ended early, partially due to the positioning of the
ships (the two sides set up on the wide-side of the table instead of
the far sides of the table, so they were starting at a max range of
60" - and before the scenario started I told them they could set up
within 12" of the edge, so they were starting potentially 36" apart!).
I did not monitor rigorously their set-ups, trusting the players to
behave as they had been all weekend (like has been mentioned before,
this was a refreshingly mature group of players, all of 'em), which
allowed me to get the other game set up (which, unfrotunately for me,
was in the other corner of the room; I did a lot of hopping back an'
forth ;-).

The Bug/Terran game was set up on a far, far larger table, something on
the order of 6'x10' or so, with the forces starting 12" from the table
edge, at the far ends of the table. The Terran end of the table was a
planet, but the Terrans misheard me on this during the scenario set-up,
and thought they were in open space. This was important as in both games
I allowed each side to randomly pick it's Mission. What I did was take
the Attack/Defense Mission table that some kind soul has on a web
somewhere
(I forget who, and forget the web addr; I printed it out a long time
ago),
enhanced it with a few more attack/defense options, and made 2 index
cards
of each mission option, shuffled 'em, then let each side pick (first I
had
each side choose if they were the attackers or defenders). I think the
ESU
were the defenders in their game, the Terrans in their game.

As I said before, the NAC/ESU game ended pretty quickly, pretty much a
NAC victory (the ESU wasn't fully prepared for the die rolls of Jerry
Han, being some of the better he saw during the con - he rolled quite
well friday evening, pretty poorly saturday, reasonably well sunday).

The Terran/Bug game was called after turn 5 (I think it was turn 5 they
were on; maybe turn 6), unfinished. However, due to the vector movement
system, and the objectives of the Bugs and Terrans, I ruled it a Bug
victory (the Bugs had to go to the planet and hit it for a couple turns
with B-battery or greater weapons fire; the Terrans were just out to
exterminate bugs and passed them by, couldn't get turned around quick
enough to prevent the Bugs from bombarding the planet).

After that a few of us stayed behind to clean up what little mess there
was (again, the players involved were not a sloppy mess; they kept the
place pretty well straightened, even between games; having worked in
housekeeping during college, I grew to appreciate groups which kept
their
own areas policed properly during and after their events; the OSU
Miniatures
And Gaming Association was considerate in that lo so many years ago).
After
that, a quick run through the place to make sure nothing was left behind
(however, something was left behind; if someone is missing something and
they suspect it was left behind, contact me with a description of said
item
and I'll get it shipped to you).

Thus endeth the con. Other players/gamemasters will have to fill in
their
two bits worth.  :-)

Mk
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
"I taught you how to deal with snow, how to survive in a blizzard, how
to
deal with men. But women? Nobody knows what's on a woman's mind!"