The Wargamer

I Love the Smell of Conventions in the Morning

Ah, convention season. Origins marks the start of the summer gaming convention season, the time when gamers set aside a week (or weeks) of hard-earned vacation time earned at work to spend it with friends and similar spirited strangers to game away their days and nights.

I arrived in Columbus a day and a half early in order to beat the crowds. The singularly most noticeable item on Tuesday afternoon were the suits. Oh, yes. Those strangely anachronistic uniforms that some poor souls still are forced into (n.b. the author's bias: suit, dress shirt, and cravat are anachronistic - chainmail is noble and romantic and sometimes sexy, but more on that later). Sure enough, there were multiple conventions happening on Tuesday and Wednesday; as best I could tell some kind of polling convention to educate poll workers about the miracles of modern science that can defeat the evils of hanging chads and other assorted blights on Democracy. In addition it appeared as though one of the mega banks was having a micro managers shindig. "Welcome Branch Managers" boasted one sign. No kidding. Everyone there appeared to look like they were doing their level best to appear In Charge Of Things and Sophisticated in their Suits. Then there was the tip of the iceberg - a few of us at first dressed in jeans and polo or linen shirts. Casually robed we might be, we were but the mildest of harbingers of changes to come. Changes where being a bank branch manager would be a distant memory.

First we navigated through the sea of suits receiving only mild looks of surprise that we were bold enough to move through their hallways without a suit. But by Tuesday night the trickle had become a steady stream. By Wednesday at mid day the unsettled looks started to border on alarm as the jeans and polo shirts morphed into all black garb with folks carrying large bags of esoteric items like rulebooks on the laws of magic, miniature ancient armies and 20th Century Panzers, then the guy with the backpack dual loaded with maps that appeared almost like swords protruding from his backpack. It was clear by then that the suits were going to shortly be replaced by honest-to-God chainmail in short order. As they retreated on to their buses bound for branches that needed managing, the suits looked almost relieved. In truth, I was, too. Give me chainmail over a tie any day of the week. Wednesday evening found the hotel next to the convention center already sprouting formerly attractive women with makeup dressed up as the living dead. The uptight suits were gone, and the relaxed atmosphere of multiple alternate realities, ranging from zombies to Star Wars to epic replications of the tank mauling at Kursk…for the next four days gamers were taking over no reality was safe...or so I would have thought.

It's Not Nice To Fool Mother Nature…

Gamers do a lot of things when they create or play games, but perhaps one of the most significant things they do is make and change rules. Some of those rules are attempts to replicate reality - the traverse rate of a Panzer's turret, for instance. Other rules are meant to bend reality - say a wizard's spell to stop time or change the weather. Games are well and good, as is the chance to thumb your nose at the poor folks who still have to wear a coat and tie to work every day. But some things are beyond Man's ability to control, and the evening before Origins started, Mother Nature herself made an appearance to remind us that, powerful, imaginative, and creative as we may be, once in a while some things are simply beyond our ability to control.

After a long day of helping some friends set up their booth and a too-short evening of gaming over a couple glasses of dark red wine, I was ready for bed. Just about the time I was feeling like the bed that wasn't my own still felt pretty good I heard the faint whine of a siren. And again. I let it sing out about five times before I decided that, being in the Midwest, it was probably prudent to see if the thunderstorms we had experienced earlier in the day had grown into something worse at the stroke of midnight. Sure enough, a tornado was off to the west of Columbus and taking aim directly at the city. Now, I grew up in tornado alley, and like anyone else who has, I've been through literally dozens of exercises where the sirens have gone off and the weatherman gravely instructs everyone in the county to take shelter - all without personal injury to me or my family. None of that is to say that tornadoes aren't capable of massive amounts of destruction and death, but it is to say that you can live several decades undergoing this exercise without direct harm.

In short, I'm pretty casual about it. But many of my friends and their children are from the East Coast. They aren't familiar with this kind of drill, so I obligingly called them on their phones and advised them of the alert. "What are you going to do?" one asked. I hesitated. I'd rather have just stayed in the room and forgotten about it. But I suggested the next best thing: "Let's head to the bar downstairs, they have a basement and we can at least drink while this is going on." My friend isn't much of a drinker, so we ended up in the hotel's basement instead of the bar. The end result was almost the same: nothing came of it, and while I was more sober than I cared to be at that point, in the end it was late enough I had no trouble falling asleep anyway. Still, the round went to Mother Nature, who on the eve of the con, was pleased enough to remind us all that though we might replicate, bend, and break reality to our hearts' content as we gamed the con away, sometimes she can still trump the many natural 20's we happen to roll.