On January 26th I
attended Winter Fantasy Con
2013 in Fort
Wayne [my
photoset]. This is my first time to a real gaming convention
other than GenCon. It was a much smaller convention (by a couple orders of
magnitude).
Fort Wayne has built themselves a shiny new convention center. So the location was very nice. I arrived late on Friday and stayed in the adjoining hotel connected by skywalk. Unfortunately it was too late and registration was closed. So I woke up early Saturday to get registered.
The low-tech event ticketing system was effective and I was easily able to buy my way into all three gaming slots on Saturday. The choice of games was limited to mainstream titles including D&D 4, D&D Next, and Pathfinder. Those are the big crowd pleasers and only weird indie/small press RPG weirdos like myself would want other choices in the line-up.
I played two sessions of D&D Next which is a game that I wanted to try out last year at GenCon. It is interesting and definitely brings some simplicity and an old-school RPG feel back to D&D.
Near the end of my Pathfinder game I received a text message from Tony indicating that GenCon was having a promotional give-away of a free pass to GenCon 2013 at the convention. So as soon as my game concluded I snuck away and defeated the guy in a roll-off of d20s and won the pass.
All in all a good convention. The timing is particularly nice since it provides a gaming opportunity in the boring winter months and is separated from GenCon by about half a year.
Fort Wayne has built themselves a shiny new convention center. So the location was very nice. I arrived late on Friday and stayed in the adjoining hotel connected by skywalk. Unfortunately it was too late and registration was closed. So I woke up early Saturday to get registered.
The low-tech event ticketing system was effective and I was easily able to buy my way into all three gaming slots on Saturday. The choice of games was limited to mainstream titles including D&D 4, D&D Next, and Pathfinder. Those are the big crowd pleasers and only weird indie/small press RPG weirdos like myself would want other choices in the line-up.
I played two sessions of D&D Next which is a game that I wanted to try out last year at GenCon. It is interesting and definitely brings some simplicity and an old-school RPG feel back to D&D.
Near the end of my Pathfinder game I received a text message from Tony indicating that GenCon was having a promotional give-away of a free pass to GenCon 2013 at the convention. So as soon as my game concluded I snuck away and defeated the guy in a roll-off of d20s and won the pass.
All in all a good convention. The timing is particularly nice since it provides a gaming opportunity in the boring winter months and is separated from GenCon by about half a year.